Is MD Senator Ben Cardin involved in the insider trading racket?

A news account last week on ABC News 13 suggests he might be, here.  Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger might also be in the get-rich racket, according to that same news story.  (I’ve always wondered how someone making $174,000, or thereabouts as a Congressman could become a millionaire in a few short years.)

If I were a Republican running for office in Maryland, I would be digging feverishly, just as Schweitzer did.

Who?

Peter Schweitzer whose name should become a household name for all Tea Partiers who want to see the rats cleaned out in Washington (and they all aren’t Democrat rats!).

From the Daily Beast (emphasis mine):

In the Spring of 2010, a bespectacled, middle-aged policy wonk named Peter Schweizer fired up his laptop and began a months-long odyssey into a forbidding maze of public databases, hunting for the financial secrets of Washington’s most powerful politicians. Schweizer had been struck by the fact that members of Congress are free to buy and sell stocks in companies whose fate can be profoundly influenced, or even determined, by Washington policy, and he wondered, do these ultimate insiders act on what they know? Yes, Schweizer found, they certainly seem to. Schweizer’s research revealed that some of Congress’s most prominent members are in a position to routinely engage in what amounts to a legal form of insider trading, profiting from investment activity that, he says, “would send the rest of us to prison.”

Schweizer, who is 47, lives in Tallahassee with his wife and children (“New York or D.C. would be too distracting—I’d never get any writing done”) and commutes regularly to Stanford, where he is the William J. Casey research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His circle of friends includes some bare-knuckle combatants in the partisan frays (such as conservative media impresario Andrew Breitbart), but Schweizer himself comes across more as a bookish researcher than the right-wing hit man liberal critics see. Indeed, he sounds somewhat surprised, if gratified, to have attracted attention with his findings. “To me, it’s troubling that a fellow at Stanford who lives in Florida had to dig this up.”

It was in his Tallahassee office that Schweizer began what he thought was a promising research project: combing through congressional financial-disclosure records dating back to 2000 to see what kinds of investments legislators were making. He quickly learned that Capitol Hill has quite a few market players. He narrowed his search to a dozen or so members—the leaders of both houses, as well as members of key committees—and focused on trades that coincided with big policy initiatives of the sort that could move markets.

While examining trades made around the time of the 2003 Medicare overhaul, Schweizer experienced what he calls his “Holy crap!” moment.

Read on to learn more about his “Holy crap!” moment.

Schweitzer at the Heritage Foundation

If you want to meet the “bespeckled policy wonk” you can at the Heritage Foundation on December 7th in Washington DC.

Date: Wednesday, December 07, 2011

Time: 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM

Location: The Heritage Foundation’s Lehrman Auditorium

For more information, call: 202-675-1752

Maybe he can teach all of us how to do that research!

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