https://www-m.cnn.com/2019/09/30/po...guilty-plea/index.html?r=https://www.cnn.com/
People who call themselves Republicans are no more moral than anyone else.
People who call themselves Republicans are no more moral than anyone else.
Those Republicans (SMH) -- nothing but the best family values
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I do not know if it is fair to accuse Republicans who oppose poor children receiving healthcare or food as murderers. Good thing I am here to stand up for Republicans.
13th biggest witchhunt in the history of America fuelled by 3 ANGRY Democrats and 1 flaccid Independent.
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Matt Levine's original take was a good one:
Oh Chris Collins.
If it weren’t for the fact that he is a prominent pro-Trump congressman, the civil and criminal insider trading cases brought by the SEC and federal prosecutors yesterday against Representative Chris Collins, his son, and his son’s girlfriend’s father, would be pretty run-of-the-mill. Collins was a director of a publicly traded Australian (but also U.S.-traded) biotech company called Innate Immunotherapeutics Ltd., and the company’s CEO emailed him bad news about the results of clinical trials. Collins didn’t trade himself after getting this bad news, and lost money when it was announced and the stock went down. But he did allegedly tip his son, who was also a shareholder, and who sold stock after the alleged tip but before the results of the trials were announced. The son also allegedly tipped a bunch of other people laid out on a handy flow chart, including his girlfriend and various of her family members.
But Collins is a prominent pro-Trump congressman, and one who pitched a bunch of his congressional colleagues on Innate, so every aspect of this is just a little dumber and more brazen than you’d expect in an ordinary insider trading case. For instance, from the criminal case:
At the time CHRISTOPHER COLLINS received this email [reporting the drug trial results], he was attending the Congressional Picnic at the White House. At 7:10 p.m., CHRISTOPHER COLLINS replied to the email, stating, in part, “Wow. Makes no sense. How are these results even possible???” After responding to the Innate CEO’s email, CHRISTOPHER COLLINS called his son, CAMERON COLLINS. They traded six missed calls between 7:11 p.m. and 7:15 p.m.. At 7:16 p.m., CHRISTOPHER COLLINS and CAMERON COLLINS spoke for more than six minutes. During that six-minute phone call, CHRISTOPHER COLLINS told CAMERON COLLINS, in sum and substance, that MIS416 had failed the Drug Trial.
CHRISTOPHER COLLINS did not trade himself, and his Innate stock ultimately declined by millions of dollars in value when the Drug Trial results were made public on June 26, 2017. As CHRISTOPHER COLLINS well knew, however, he was virtually precluded from trading his own shares for practical and technical reasons. For example, CHRISTOPHER COLLINS was already under investigation by the Office of Congressional Ethics (“OCE”) in connection with his holdings in, and promotion of, Innate. Indeed, he had been interviewed by OCE personnel on or about June 5, 2017, just 17 days earlier. Accordingly, he did not trade his own stock and instead tipped CAMERON COLLINS.
Ehh. Do we need a Ninth Law of Insider Trading, “if you’re already under a federal ethics investigation for promoting a stock, don’t insider trade that stock”? It seems pretty niche. On the other hand, we are not even two years into the Trump Administration, and it does kind of seem like it could come up again. Really you can sort of think of the Wilbur Ross situation as a variant on this rule. So, sure, yes:
The Ninth Law of Insider Trading is that if you are already under a federal ethics investigation about your ownership or promotion of a stock, don’t insider trade that stock.
There you go. Especially not at a congressional picnic! As always, the Laws of Insider Trading are not legal advice.
Here’s the point in the SEC complaint—well before the alleged insider trading—where I had to stop reading:
The year before, Cameron Collins’s girlfriend’s parents also invested in Innate after she told her mother by text message in August 2016, “I think we all need to consider investing in innate therapeutics. I might put in $15k and that has a greater than 50% chance of going up to $250k…….that is actually unheard of and cams dad almost guarantees it within the next 1 to 2 years. . . .” The next day she added, “And we’ll always keep in touch with cams dad who I’m guessing would know how things are looking as we get closer to the end of the trial.” A few days later, she told her mother, “I’ll make sure cams dad keeps us in the loop.”
Honestly I want to put them all in jail just for those texts. Never mind the insider-trading part, just the “greater than 50% chance of going up” 1,500 percent, the “almost guarantees it,” it’s all so gross and scammy. This is how people talk in boiler rooms and my vague imagination of the 1920s; it is not what you want to hear from public-company directors, or their sons’ girlfriends.
The whole case has this sort of throwback vibe. “Did Chris Collins Forget the Martha Stewart Trial?,” asks my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Joe Nocera, and indeed the alleged facts here look a lot like the facts there. More than that, though, the whole sensibility of absolute entitlement—the idea that if you are a corporate director then part of your compensation, as it were, is that you get to tip off all your buddies and family members with inside information—feels like a throwback to the days before securities regulation.
This might be how corporate directors operated in the 1920s, but in high finance—and certainly among most directors of most public companies—it mostly went out of fashion with the stepped-up insider-trading enforcement over the past few decades. (Obviously there are exceptions!) The press and politicians love to talk about the culture of impunity in finance, the idea that powerful bankers and executives think that the law does not apply to them and that they can get away with anything. But for the most part that does not seem to be how those bankers and executives experience it. Sure there is a culture of legal creativity and aggressiveness; you hire the best lawyers to make sure that you can get away with as much as possible. But that is sort of the opposite of thinking that the law does not apply to you: Aggressively pushing the boundaries of the law requires knowing what the law is, believing that it applies to you, taking it seriously, engaging with it. Just ignoring the law because laws are for little people does not work especially well, and is not typically what your high-priced lawyers would advise.
But I suspect that, among politicians, the sense of entitlement and impunity might be a bit more robust. “You begin to realize there is a whole class of people in Washington who literally don’t think there are any laws that apply to them,” tweeted Josh Brown about these charges. It makes a kind of sense. Much of the financial industry is about taking the law as a fundamental text, one that must be treated with reverence but also interpreted with creativity and boldness. Much of politics is the grubby work of turning lobbying and compromise into law. Perhaps that would incline you to take it less seriously.
Oh Chris Collins.
If it weren’t for the fact that he is a prominent pro-Trump congressman, the civil and criminal insider trading cases brought by the SEC and federal prosecutors yesterday against Representative Chris Collins, his son, and his son’s girlfriend’s father, would be pretty run-of-the-mill. Collins was a director of a publicly traded Australian (but also U.S.-traded) biotech company called Innate Immunotherapeutics Ltd., and the company’s CEO emailed him bad news about the results of clinical trials. Collins didn’t trade himself after getting this bad news, and lost money when it was announced and the stock went down. But he did allegedly tip his son, who was also a shareholder, and who sold stock after the alleged tip but before the results of the trials were announced. The son also allegedly tipped a bunch of other people laid out on a handy flow chart, including his girlfriend and various of her family members.
But Collins is a prominent pro-Trump congressman, and one who pitched a bunch of his congressional colleagues on Innate, so every aspect of this is just a little dumber and more brazen than you’d expect in an ordinary insider trading case. For instance, from the criminal case:
At the time CHRISTOPHER COLLINS received this email [reporting the drug trial results], he was attending the Congressional Picnic at the White House. At 7:10 p.m., CHRISTOPHER COLLINS replied to the email, stating, in part, “Wow. Makes no sense. How are these results even possible???” After responding to the Innate CEO’s email, CHRISTOPHER COLLINS called his son, CAMERON COLLINS. They traded six missed calls between 7:11 p.m. and 7:15 p.m.. At 7:16 p.m., CHRISTOPHER COLLINS and CAMERON COLLINS spoke for more than six minutes. During that six-minute phone call, CHRISTOPHER COLLINS told CAMERON COLLINS, in sum and substance, that MIS416 had failed the Drug Trial.
CHRISTOPHER COLLINS did not trade himself, and his Innate stock ultimately declined by millions of dollars in value when the Drug Trial results were made public on June 26, 2017. As CHRISTOPHER COLLINS well knew, however, he was virtually precluded from trading his own shares for practical and technical reasons. For example, CHRISTOPHER COLLINS was already under investigation by the Office of Congressional Ethics (“OCE”) in connection with his holdings in, and promotion of, Innate. Indeed, he had been interviewed by OCE personnel on or about June 5, 2017, just 17 days earlier. Accordingly, he did not trade his own stock and instead tipped CAMERON COLLINS.
Ehh. Do we need a Ninth Law of Insider Trading, “if you’re already under a federal ethics investigation for promoting a stock, don’t insider trade that stock”? It seems pretty niche. On the other hand, we are not even two years into the Trump Administration, and it does kind of seem like it could come up again. Really you can sort of think of the Wilbur Ross situation as a variant on this rule. So, sure, yes:
The Ninth Law of Insider Trading is that if you are already under a federal ethics investigation about your ownership or promotion of a stock, don’t insider trade that stock.
There you go. Especially not at a congressional picnic! As always, the Laws of Insider Trading are not legal advice.
Here’s the point in the SEC complaint—well before the alleged insider trading—where I had to stop reading:
The year before, Cameron Collins’s girlfriend’s parents also invested in Innate after she told her mother by text message in August 2016, “I think we all need to consider investing in innate therapeutics. I might put in $15k and that has a greater than 50% chance of going up to $250k…….that is actually unheard of and cams dad almost guarantees it within the next 1 to 2 years. . . .” The next day she added, “And we’ll always keep in touch with cams dad who I’m guessing would know how things are looking as we get closer to the end of the trial.” A few days later, she told her mother, “I’ll make sure cams dad keeps us in the loop.”
Honestly I want to put them all in jail just for those texts. Never mind the insider-trading part, just the “greater than 50% chance of going up” 1,500 percent, the “almost guarantees it,” it’s all so gross and scammy. This is how people talk in boiler rooms and my vague imagination of the 1920s; it is not what you want to hear from public-company directors, or their sons’ girlfriends.
The whole case has this sort of throwback vibe. “Did Chris Collins Forget the Martha Stewart Trial?,” asks my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Joe Nocera, and indeed the alleged facts here look a lot like the facts there. More than that, though, the whole sensibility of absolute entitlement—the idea that if you are a corporate director then part of your compensation, as it were, is that you get to tip off all your buddies and family members with inside information—feels like a throwback to the days before securities regulation.
This might be how corporate directors operated in the 1920s, but in high finance—and certainly among most directors of most public companies—it mostly went out of fashion with the stepped-up insider-trading enforcement over the past few decades. (Obviously there are exceptions!) The press and politicians love to talk about the culture of impunity in finance, the idea that powerful bankers and executives think that the law does not apply to them and that they can get away with anything. But for the most part that does not seem to be how those bankers and executives experience it. Sure there is a culture of legal creativity and aggressiveness; you hire the best lawyers to make sure that you can get away with as much as possible. But that is sort of the opposite of thinking that the law does not apply to you: Aggressively pushing the boundaries of the law requires knowing what the law is, believing that it applies to you, taking it seriously, engaging with it. Just ignoring the law because laws are for little people does not work especially well, and is not typically what your high-priced lawyers would advise.
But I suspect that, among politicians, the sense of entitlement and impunity might be a bit more robust. “You begin to realize there is a whole class of people in Washington who literally don’t think there are any laws that apply to them,” tweeted Josh Brown about these charges. It makes a kind of sense. Much of the financial industry is about taking the law as a fundamental text, one that must be treated with reverence but also interpreted with creativity and boldness. Much of politics is the grubby work of turning lobbying and compromise into law. Perhaps that would incline you to take it less seriously.
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