Congressman charged with insider trading
Collins a key early Trump supporter
NEW YORK – Federal prosecutors arrested Rep. Chris Collins, President Donald Trump’s first congressional supporter, for insider trading on Wednesday, alleging the New York Republican schemed with his son to avoid significant losses on a biotechnology investment.
Collins was at a congressional picnic at the White House last year when he learned that Innate Immunotherapeutics, an Australian biotechnology company, had received bad news about an important drug trial. Collins frantically attempted to reach his son, Cameron Collins, whom he tipped off to the confidential corporate information days before it would be made public, according to prosecutors. Cameron Collins and several others used the information to avoid more than $700,000 in losses, they said.
Collins “helps write the laws of this country,” said Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. But Collins “acted as if the law did not apply to him.”
Collins turned himself in to the FBI at 7 a.m. Wednesday morning and then appeared in a Manhattan federal court in the afternoon wearing a dark suit and white button-down shirt open at the collar. He spoke only briefly during the nearly 20-minute hearing, telling the judge: “I plead not guilty.”
Collins’ attorneys said they would “mount a vigorous defense to clear his good name. . . . We are confident he will be completely vindicated and exonerated.”
The charges could turn into a headache for several House Republicans who invested in Innate Immunotherapeutics at Collins’ encouragement. Prosecutors did not allege in the indictment that Collins tipped off any of his colleagues in Congress about the failed drug trial before it was made public, but Democrats pounced on the charges and said those lawmakers would have to answer tough questions about their investments in Innate.
“The American people deserve better than the GOP’s corruption, cronyism and incompetence,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., removed Collins from the House Energy and Commerce Committee and called for a “prompt and thorough” investigation by the House Ethics Committee.
“His guilt or innocence is a question for the courts to settle,” Ryan said.
The charges against Collins gave new fodder to Democrats, who are seeking to run against congressional Republicans in part on an anti-corruption platform ahead of November’s midterm elections. Collins, 68, was an early backer of Trump and has been one of the president’s most ardent and outspoken supporters in the House, sometimes boasting of his ties to Trump.
He has represented New York’s 27th Congressional District, which encompasses suburban and rural areas stretching east of the Buffalo metropolitan area, since 2013.
In November, Collins faces Democrat Nate McMurray, a local official in the Buffalo suburb of Grand Island, in his re-election campaign. McMurray’s campaign had just under $82,000 in the bank at the end of June, compared with Collins’s $1.3 million war chest, and few congressional forecasters had put the race on the national radar before Wednesday. But after news of Collins’ arrest broke, the Cook Political Report shifted the race from solid Republican to likely Republican.
McMurray told reporters that his campaign “probably raised more this morning than we have in the whole race” before Collins’ arrest.
“If this wouldn’t have come out, he may have well just coasted in,” McMurray said at a news conference. “Now it’s time for us to ask ourselves: Is this the type of leadership we want?”
But it is far from certain that Democrats will be able to capitalize on the charges by unseating Collins – his district is a Republican stronghold that supported Trump by a wide margin in the presidential election.