Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) is asking President Joe Biden’s Energy Department Secretary, Jennifer Granholm, why she seemingly lied to Congress when she claimed, in April, that she did not hold individual stocks when in fact, she did.
This week, as Breitbart News reported, Granholm told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in a letter that she and her husband had, in fact, held individual stocks in companies that her department oversees – as recently as May of this year.
The bombshell admission came more than a month after Granholm falsely testified before the committee that she did not hold individual stocks and only held mutual funds.
“Do you own individual stocks, Madam Secretary?” Hawley asked, to which Granholm responded, “No, I’m invested in mutual funds.”
In a letter sent to Granholm on Tuesday, Hawley asks her directly why she seemingly lied about holding stocks, why she did not immediately notify the committee to correct the record, why it took her four weeks to sell her stocks, why it took her three weeks to notify the committee in regards to the sale of those stocks, and why she did not voluntarily sell her stocks when she became head of the Department of Energy.
“Three times you told me, and this committee, that you did not own individual stocks,” Hawley writes:
But we now know that was false. Last Friday, you informed the committee that you did own stocks at the time of your testimony on April 20, 2023. In fact, you still held stocks in six companies. You then divested from these holdings on May 18, 2023. But you chose not to notify the committee until last Friday — over seven weeks after the hearing and at least three weeks after you sold these stocks. So I want to know: why? [Emphasis added]
Hawley is also asking Granholm, within 30 days, to hand over “a complete list of all of your individual stock transactions over the past 10 years for an evaluation of any additional conflicts of interest.”
Granholm’s admission to holding stocks came after the Wall Street Journal detailed how “one-third of the Energy Department’s senior officials … owned stocks related to the agency’s work,” prompting federal ethics officials to warn them about federal conflict of interest laws.
The Journal reported:
The more than 300 agency officials who received such warnings include nearly six dozen who held stocks of major energy companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp. [Emphasis added]
More than 130 officials in the Energy Department collectively reported about 2,700 trades of shares, bonds and options in companies that ethics officers labeled as related to their agency’s work, according to the Journal’s analysis, which examined only disclosures by officials who filed annual reports in that period. [Emphasis added]
…
In a series of articles last fall, the Journal reported that across 50 federal agencies, more than 2,600 government officials reported investments that stood to rise or fall with the decisions made by their agencies. [Emphasis added]
Granholm, in 2021, reportedly violated the STOCK Act when she failed to properly report nine stock trades, including her selling shares of Uber, Redfin, and Gilead Sciences Inc., which enjoys lucrative government contracts.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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