Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) is asking the Energy Department’s Inspector General (IG) to investigate Secretary Jennifer Granholm after she seemingly lied to Congress when she claimed she did not hold individual stocks, when in fact she did.
In June, 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.”
Now, Hawley is asking the Energy Department IG to investigate Granholm over her holding stocks “as well as her repeated violations of federal ethics rules.”
“I write to formally request you open an investigation into Secretary Granholm’s misleading testimony … I also request you conduct an audit of the Department’s compliance with existing ethics laws to determine whether senior officials own shares in companies they regulate,” Hawley writes:
Secretary Granholm’s most recent violation of federal stock trading laws is just the latest in a series of ethics indiscretions. Prior to her false testimony before the Committee, Secretary Granholm had already violated federal stock disclosure laws nine times. Then, during her testimony before the Committee on April 20, 2023, Secretary Granholm testified three times, in response to my questions, that she no longer held any stocks. This was not true. At the time, she held stocks in six separate companies. [Emphasis added]
Instead of being forthright about either her continued stock holdings or her misleading testimony, Secretary Granholm waited until May 18, 2023, to sell the remaining stocks she held. Then, she waited several more weeks to inform the Energy Committee that her testimony to us was untrue. [Emphasis added]
Secretary Granholm is not the only official at the Energy Department who has traded stocks while in office. As we learned in February of this year, federal employees throughout the Energy Department hold energy-related stocks. I likewise request that, in addition to investigating Secretary Granholm, you conduct an audit of Department of Energy employees to determine whether they are in compliance with ethics rules concerning individual stock ownership. [Emphasis added]
Senior officials have no business trading stocks, especially stocks in the industries they regulate. The repeated ethics violations by Energy Department officials undermine the public’s trust in our government and the rule of law. [Emphasis added]
Granholm’s admission that she held 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]
As Hawley notes, in 2021, Granholm 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 enjoy 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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