WASHINGTON — When Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) sold a chunk of his personal stock holdings two days before President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcements in April, the transaction appeared to be yet another routine financial move for someone Congress itself once investigated for his often opaque trading habits.
But Suozzi’s March 31 sale of up to $50,000 worth of Global Industrial Co. stock is notable for what it’s not: The congressman has never publicly disclosed owning the stock, prompting the question of how a federal lawmaker can sell a security he doesn’t appear to own in the first place.
The answer? Suozzi simply didn’t disclose his Global Industrial Co. stock, which he obtained more than two years ago, because of an apparent loophole in federal law—a loophole recently closed by Congress to address stock situations precisely like Suozzi’s, according to a Fortune review of federal documents and interviews with government officials.
Suozzi’s mysterious stock trade comes at a time when a bipartisan coalition in Congress are agitating to ban federal lawmakers from trading stocks altogether. They cite what they regard as abuses of a financial disclosure law known as the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act. Suozzi has violated the STOCK Act’s disclosure provision on four different occasions earlier this decade, according to media reports.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and even President Donald Trump have offered support, in principle, for a congressional stock-trade ban.
Suozzi’s congressional office told Fortune the congressman has done nothing wrong by not yet reporting his Global Industrial Co. stock ownership, arguing that he followed congressional rules that applied to him when he last filed mandatory personal financial disclosures in 2024.
“Congressman Suozzi has complied completely with the rules of House Ethics,” Suozzi Chief of Staff Matt Fried told Fortune.
Suozzi’s latest stock saga began in June 2023.
That month, according to Securities and Exchange Commission records, Suozzi received $50,000 worth of restricted, unvested stock in Global Industrial Co., while serving as a “non-management director” of the company after leaving Congress earlier that year following a failed campaign for governor of New York.
Later that year, Suozzi decided to run in a special election for New York’s 3rd Congressional District seat, which Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) vacated after the House of Representatives expelled him amid a swathe of federal criminal charges on which he was later csentenced to more than seven years in prisononvicted.
When Suozzi filed a mandatory candidate financial disclosure report on January 12, 2024, he did not disclose his stock in Global Industries Co. The company markets industrial and repair products through various e-commerce websites. Nor did he disclose it in two subsequent financial disclosures, in August and September of 2024, after he won his congressional seat in February 2024. The three financial disclosures applied to Suozzi’s personal financial activity during 2023.
Fried explained that Suozzi’s Global Industries Co. stock “had not vested and had no value” when Suozzi filed his personal financial disclosure in January 2024. Because House Committee on Ethics financial disclosure rules at the time did not specifically address unvested stock holdings, Suozzi did not disclose his Global Industries Co. stock holding, Fried said.
However, Suozzi’s Global Industries Co. stock did vest at some point between Suozzi’s financial disclosure on Jan. 12, 2024, and his swearing-in to Congress on Feb. 28, 2024, Fried said.
The Global Industries Co. stock “will be reflected” when Suozzi discloses his 2024 personal financial activity in a document that must be filed by August 2025, Fried said. In May, Suozzi requested, and received, a 90-day extension to file it., Fried said.
When the House Committee on Ethics released updated disclosure rules earlier this year, it included new language directly addressing the kind of situation Suozzi finds himself in, although it doesn’t appear to apply to members of Congress retroactively.
“You are required to disclose for yourself, your spouse, or dependent children your participation in a restricted stock plan if the value of stock was more than $1,000 at the end of the reporting period or earned more than $200 in income during the reporting period,” the House guidance reads. “Provide the name of the unvested stock (vested stock should be disclosed on a separate line item), value, type of income and amount.”
Tom Rust, chief counsel for the House Committee on Ethics, declined to comment.
“These disclosure requirements are important because they’re the only sort of ethical obligation members of Congress have been willing to impose on themselves,” said Walter Shaub, a former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. “If they’d finally pass the long-languishing stock trading ban to uphold the bedrock ethical principle of avoiding conflicts of interest, they wouldn’t have to worry about these disclosures.”
In 2021, NPR reported — citing research from the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group — that Suozzi failed to properly disclose about 300 financial transactions.
Separately, Business Insider reported that Suozzi — on three different occasions in March, May and December of 2022 — violated the STOCK Act by waiting months or years past a federal deadline to disclose dozens of additional stock trades.
“Quite frankly, we have a lot going on in Congress. I have a lot of other stuff going on. And it’s just not—ethics is a big priority for me. But the—some of the formalities are not necessarily something I make a priority of,” Suozzi told the independent Office of Congressional Ethics in 2022 during its investigation of his stock trading practices, while noting a financial adviser directed his trades.
The Office of Congressional Ethics’s board unanimously referred Suozzi to the House Committee on Ethics, writing that there was “substantial reason to believe” Suozzi had failed to properly disclose hundreds of personal stock trades.
But the House Committee on Ethics, which members of Congress themselves constitute, unanimously concluded in July 2022 that there “was not clear evidence” that Suozzi committed a “knowing or willful” violation of the STOCK Act. The committee declined to penalize him.
In his second stint as a congressman, Suozzi is a member of the House Committee on Ways and Means, which is responsible for tax-writing, revenue-raising and other core government financial functions. He sits on the committee’s oversight and tax subcommittees, as well.
Fried, Suozzi’s chief of staff, said Suozzi backs the Bipartisan Restoring Faith in Government Act of 2025, one of several pending bills that, if passed, would ban or otherwise limit members of Congress from trading individual stocks.
On May 5, Suozzi became a co-sponsor of the bill, which is also sponsored by 10 other ideologically diverse lawmakers ranging from Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
When Suozzi sold his Global Industrial Co. stock on March 31, it was trading around $22 per share — down from about $27 a share when he obtained it in June 2023.
It’s the only stock trade Suozzi has reported making this year after reporting making just a handful last year.
“The congressman has made a point of not buying or selling stock since his new term began in January,” Fried said. “This was his only trade. It was done to raise money to pay fees to his financial adviser. This stock was sold because it was the only stock in which he had no capital gains.”
Dave Levinthal is a Washington, D.C.-based investigative journalist. Dave previously worked as editor-in-chief of Raw Story, deputy editor at Business Insider and as an editor or reporter at the Center for Public Integrity, Politico, OpenSecrets and the Dallas Morning News. He has also written for The Atlantic, TIME, Rolling Stone, Columbia Journalism Review, the Daily Beast, NOTUS and The Ankler.
Politics8 years ago