Mikie Sherrill, once comfortably ahead in the New Jersey governor’s race, has been getting plenty of attention over her stock trading lately, and not in a good way. Her fellow lawmakers should take note if they also have aspirations for higher office.
The Democratic New Jersey congresswoman seemed like a shoo-in to succeed Phil Murphy as her state’s governor, an office that trended blue in recent years. Yet she is now neck-and-neck with Republican Jack Ciattarelli, a successful businessman before entering politics. Her problem: disclosures that she spent some considerable time day-trading stocks while she was in office, possibly — if her critics are right — profiting off nonpublic information to make profitable trades.
Rising public disgust over her alleged insider trading could cost her the Nov. 4 election.
Yes, to hear critics tell it, Sherrill’s acumen at timing the market — buying and selling stock armed with nonpublic information during the COVID pandemic a few years back — puts her in league with some of the best insider traders in the business.
Ivan Boesky watch out!
The truth is that Sherrill’s stock trades might look bad, but they’re not illegal or unusual. In fact, they are in line with other lawmakers who have gotten caught in this periodic scandal, which amounts to allegations that they used their access to nonpublic information to profit on stock trades.
Based on my reporting, much of that information wasn’t even nonpublic, which is why no one ever went to jail over this stuff or has even been charged despite all the hoopla. Insider trading is notoriously difficult to prove because information is so fungible; warnings about the spread of COVID were all over the internet while Congress was being “privately” briefed in the matter.
A ‘something’ burger?
Which makes this “scandal” seem like a nothing burger for Sherrill, right?
Not quite. On the campaign trail, Sherrill has been oddly dissembling when asked for the details of the timing of her trades — particularly when the markets were freaking out over COVID back in 2020 — other than to point out she no longer trades stocks after being called out a few years ago.
That’s why I did a deeper dive in the controversy by reviewing the timing of her trades, disclosed through various publicly available sources such as a website that tracks this stuff, known as “Quiver Quantitative.”
I came across something odd: In April 2020, the New Jersey Globe ran a story stating that Sherrill and her husband “decided to convert to ETFs last December and instructed a financial adviser to begin the process during the first week of January, before receiving any briefings on COVID-19.”
Odd, because her congressional disclosures show she bought lots of stocks in January 2020, the same month President Trump first downplayed the severity of the virus. Unless I’m missing something, she really didn’t start unloading shares until Feb. 20, 2020, when “Trump 1” began warning about COVID and the stock markets began crashing.
Significant trading
Another oddity; Sherrill was hardly a piker at trading stocks in 2019 and 2020 when she first got to Congress. True, she’s no Nancy Pelosi; Sherrill’s trading activity reached a high of around $2.4 million in 2020, dwarfed by the $39 million in trades for the former House speaker last year.
But what she did was not nothing. So the question remains: Why even go there when you have so much else on your plate?
Sherrill and her husband, Jason Hedberg, are hardly the fattest cats in government, though they are comfortably well off. Disclosure forms show they’re worth as much as $14 million. They own homes and property.
Hedberg, whom she met at the Naval Academy, is a Wall Street banker who pulls in an estimated $3 million a year. (It was his late filing of stock trades that led to a small disclosure fine for Sherrill back in 2021. Through a rep he declined to comment.)
Sherrill herself is no slouch; she was a helicopter pilot in the Navy, went on to become an accomplished private attorney at the firm Kirkland & Ellis before working as an assistant US attorney and then entering Congress.
A spokesman for Sherrill’s campaign says “Mikie does not own or trade individual stocks, and has gone ‘above and beyond’ releasing the exact values of her finances to the dollar and while New Jerseyans have zero insight into Jack Ciattarelli’s net worth.”
Again, she certainly isn’t the worst — or the first — lawmaker to be caught flat-footed trying to explain weirdness involving stock trading and whether they used the perks of their office to make money.
Yet she does provide a cautionary tale; if you enter Congress, try focusing your time on working for the people back home and not being a day-trader. Put your dough in a simple mutual fund like the one that tracks the S&P 500. It’s been up around 168% since 2019, and it won’t cost you an election.
