Examples of financial disclosures with potential conflicts highlighted
Examples of financial disclosures with potential conflicts highlighted
Examples of financial disclosures with potential conflicts highlighted
Examples of financial disclosures with potential conflicts highlighted
A portrait of Representative Abigail Spanberger, Democrat of Virginia
Kate Kelly covers money, influence, and policy as a correspondent in the Washington bureau of The Times. Before that, she spent 20 years covering Wall Street deals, key players and their intersection with politics. She is the author of three books, including “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh.” @katekelly
Adam Playford is projects editor for The Upshot, where he works on investigative data projects. He previously worked as an investigative editor at the Tampa Bay Times and a reporter at Newsday and the Palm Beach Post. @adamplayford
Alicia Parlapiano is a graphics editor and reporter covering politics and policy from Washington. She joined The Times in 2011 and previously worked at The Washington Post and the Pew Research Center. @aliciaparlap
Ege Uz is a creative technologist and the 2022 Digital News Design Fellow at The Times.
About the analysis
The Times started with data on financial transactions by members of Congress or their immediate family members between 2019 and 2021. The data was drawn from filings by the senators and representatives, which were digitized and connected to data on the companies’ industries by Capitol Trades, a project of the Frankfurt-based financial data company 2iQ Research. The data was compiled by the company’s team of more than 100 analysts, who reviewed each filing by hand, according to Ahmed Asaad, head of research at Capitol Trades, and Diona Denkovska, 2iQ Research’s head of data strategy.
Times reporters built a database of more than 9,000 examples of how those companies intersected with specific congressional committees and subcommittees. They identified committees that oversee areas of federal policy vital to the companies’ business, and those that oversee or fund federal agencies that gave the companies significant contracts. They also looked at investigations that committees have performed into specific corporations and the company leaders whom those committees called to testify in hearings.
They matched those potential conflicts with data on committee assignments, provided by the ProPublica Congress API, Congressional Quarterly and Charles Stewart III, a professor at M.I.T., to find examples of trades that overlapped with the member’s committee tenure.
The Times did not include trades in municipal bonds, mutual funds or index funds, even those that track a specific sector. It also did not consider trades by members who moved quickly to divest from shares shortly after being appointed to a relevant committee or those whose transactions were all sales, as long as they were entirely divesting themselves of stocks within a 60-day period.
The Times could not account for every committee that affects each company; as a result, the analysis is surely an undercount.