Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was heckled as she looked to be having a drink in one of the bars in her home city of San Francisco when she was challenged by a guy who demanded an answer to one major issue.
Pelosi seemed startled in a brief video clip broadcast online when a man questioned her, “Nancy, can you tell us why we have over $150 billion going to Ukraine when we have homeless on the streets in your own city?”
Others interrupted in the man’s discussion with her, but he proceeded to take advantage of the chance to question the former House Speaker, asking, “Nancy, can I get stock tips on how to get semiconductors in Taiwan?”
Pelosi heckled in San Francisco: “Can you tell us why we have over $150 billion going to Ukraine when we have homeless on the streets in your own city”
— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) February 26, 2023
A financial disclosure form issued at the end of the year revealed that Pelosi and her husband, Paul Pelosi, did not have a successful fourth quarter of 2022.
The Pelosis lost a total of $2.5 million worth of stock, mostly in four stocks: $853k on PayPal, $733k on Salesforce options, $500k on Tesla stock, and $235k on Roblox optionsstock.
According to Business Insider, further results include the following:
Paul Pelosi, the husband of then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, lost over half a million dollars selling Tesla stock in December as Elon Musk’s electric vehicle and solar panel manufacturer sank amid broader fears about his focus company after his takeover of Twitter.
An investor and venture capitalist, Pelosi’s husband is one of the most prodigious traders connected to a lawmaker. He’s made tens of millions of dollars in stock trades during the past few years, congressional records indicate.
In total, Pelosi reported losing over $2.5 million in the final weeks of 2022. His trades appear to be an example of harvesting, an investing strategy where traders sell some investments at a loss in order to lower the taxes they will face for more successful parts of their portfolio.
Towards the end of her stint as House speaker, the Pelosis’ stock trades were a major point of concern due to the fact that they were executed promptly and either resulted in profits for the couple or prevented losses, leading to charges that they engaged in insider trading.
Pelosi reportedly sold 25,000 shares of Nvidia in July for around $165.05, resulting in a loss of $341,365.
“One month later, Nvidia revealed that the federal government imposed export restrictions on the company’s A100 and forthcoming H100 circuits. The new regulations will ‘address the risk that the covered products may be used in, or diverted to, a ‘military end use’ or ‘military end user’ in China and Russia,’ Nvidia said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission,” The Daily Wire reported in September.
“Shares in Nvidia fell 7.7% on the news and a total of 16% since Pelosi sold shares on July 26. Pelosi — who was arrested after alleged drunk driving earlier this year — formerly exercised 200 call options on their expiration date of June 17 at a strike price of $100, according to more federal filings,” according to The Daily Wire report.
Drew Hammill, the Speaker’s spokesperson, stated to Fox News that the Speaker was ignorant of her husband’s business dealings.
However, this and other easy stock trades drove Congress to approve laws prohibiting members from trading stocks while in office, despite initial opposition from then-Speaker Pelosi and ensuing anger from Democrats.
“This moment marks a failure of House leadership — and it’s yet another example of why I believe that the Democratic Party needs new leaders in the halls of Capitol Hill, as I have long made known,” Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) said in a since-deleted statement posted to her House website at the time.
“Rather than bring Members of Congress together who are passionate about this issue, leadership chose to ignore these voices, push them aside, and look for new ways they could string the media and the public along — and evade public criticism. As part of their diversionary tactics, the House Administration Committee was tasked with creating a new piece of legislation — and they ultimately introduced a kitchen-sink package that they knew would immediately crash upon arrival, with only days remaining before the end of the legislative session and no time to fix it,” she added.
“It’s apparent that House leadership does not have its heart in this effort, because the package released earlier this week was designed to fail,” she further noted.