(Daily Wire) Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) sold a combined 30,000 shares of stock in Google’s parent company, Alphabet, roughly one month before the Justice Department opened an antitrust lawsuit into the technology firm.
Federal regulators claimed in the Tuesday complaint that Google monopolizes the tools website publishers use to sell advertisements and that companies utilize to purchase advertisements. Pelosi, who resigned from her leadership position but remains a member of Congress, sold 10,000 shares of Alphabet Class A stock on December 20, December 21, and December 28, according to federal disclosures, marking a combined transaction value between $1.5 million and $3 million. The disclosures were digitally signed by the lawmaker on January 12.
Although shares for Google have increased roughly 8% over the past month, the company’s stock price declined some 6% this week as news of the antitrust lawsuit became public.
Officials claimed that Google has engaged in a “pattern of acquisitions to obtain control over key digital advertising tools” and has manipulated auctions to “deprive rivals of scale.” Such moves may violate the Sherman Act, which outlaws “monopolization, attempted monopolization, or conspiracy or combination to monopolize” deemed unreasonable by the court system. Google said in a statement that the Justice Department lawsuit attempts to “pick winners and losers” in the “highly competitive” advertising technology space.
Pelosi and her husband, Paul, have been repeatedly accused of leveraging insider knowledge that the veteran lawmaker holds in order to increase earnings in the stock market. The filing also revealed that the top Democrat sold shares of Netflix, PayPal, Salesforce, Tesla, and Disney.
