Sen. Josh Hawley is explaining why President Donald Trump went nuclear and attacked him for his bill that would ban elected officials from trading stocks.
On Wednesday, Trump attacked Hawley, a Republican ally from Missouri, calling him a “second-tier” senator after the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee passed his legislation to ban members of Congress and other federal elected officials as well as their spouses from trading stocks.
Hawley spoke to Business Insider’s Bryan Metzger and The New York Sun’s Matt Rice and said that other Republican senators told Trump that the president would need to sell his Mar-a-Lago property under the legislation.
“What he said is that he had a number of people call him and say that the bill had been changed at the last minute to force him to sell Mar-a-Lago and his assets, which is, of course, totally false,” Hawley said, adding: “It exempts them.”
The legislation would only require members to sell their stocks when their next term began, which Chairman Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) criticized during deliberation of the bill, since he said it should also apply to Trump.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) also criticized the legislation and tried to include a stipulation to investigate former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s stock trading.
That meant that the legislation passed through committee with Hawley being the only Republican who supported the legislation.
“When we walked through the text of the bill, he was like ‘oh, okay,’” Hawley said. “And I said ‘your assets are all protected. I mean, it doesn’t apply. It applies to the next president.’ So, yeah. He finished by saying ‘you’re exonerated Josh, we love you.’”
Members of both parties ardently support legislation banning members from trading stocks. Sens. Elisabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) and Steve Daines (R-Mont.) all support some version of it. In the House of Representatives, Reps. Chip Roy (R-Texas), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) support similar legislation.
But it has failed to get off the ground for many years. Hawley had sought to entice Republicans to support his bill by calling it the PELOSI Act. It was later renamed the HONEST Act and Pelosi, who still serves in the House of Representatives, later came out in favor of it.
“The HONEST Act, as amended, rightly applies its stock trading ban not only to Members of Congress, but now to the President and Vice President as well,” she said. “I strongly support this legislation and look forward to voting for it on the Floor of the House.
Despite the fact the bill made it out of committee, it will likely not make it to the floor of the Senate any time soon. The Senate will break for recess after this week. And when Congress returns, it will have to pass spending bills to avoid a shutdown. In addition, the Senate is going into overtime to move through Trump’s nominations.
