Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., drew scrutiny last month when an investigation revealed that his wife, Margaret Cheney, had sold stock in ExxonMobil weeks before Welch questioned the company’s CEO in a high-profile House hearing on “Big Oil.”
The disclosure, first reported by Insider, was notable not only because of the Exxon connection, but also because Welch himself had pledged to VTDigger in 2020 that he would no longer purchase individual stocks. He has since become a vocal critic of the practice within the halls of Congress, and has signed onto legislation banning the practice altogether.
Cheney’s divestment came just months before Welch launched a campaign for the U.S. Senate on a platform that includes support for the Green New Deal.
Now, Welch spokesperson Emily Becker says Cheney has pledged to avoid owning individual stocks. She and Welch have not bought new shares since 2020, according to financial disclosures.
And, according to Welch’s office, he is close to selling the last individual stocks in his portfolio acquired prior to his 2020 pledge — at which point, Welch’s staff says, he will no longer hold any individual shares.
Exxon stock and Big Oil hearing
According to a mandatory disclosure Welch filed with the Clerk of the House in November, Cheney inherited the Exxon stock from her mother. As Insider first reported, she sold the 113 shares, worth $6,238 at the time, on Sept. 17, roughly six weeks before the Big Oil hearing. Cheney’s mother died five years ago, according to an obituary.
Cheney, a former state representative, serves as one of three members of Vermont’s Public Utility Commission, which regulates utilities in the state. According to the PUC’s general counsel, Kyle Landis-Marinello, the commission’s conflict-of-interest policy bars commissioners from holding financial interests in the companies they regulate. Exxon, he said, is not one of them.
Cheney declined to be interviewed for this article.
Welch’s office said staffers learned of the sale from Cheney’s financial advisers three days before the hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. By that point, the road map of the highly anticipated hearing, which drew comparisons to Congress’s Big Tobacco hearing of 1994, was drawn and Welch’s line of questioning planned, according to his office.
Welch went ahead. On Oct. 28, before he began interrogating Exxon CEO Darren Woods, Welch said, “The issue here is credibility.”
“The oil companies, when they began producing oil, discovering oil, did not know about climate change. But they were the first to learn about it, and then learning about it, concealed it and denied it,” he said at the hearing.
In a January interview with VTDigger, Welch said he did not regret his role in the hearing in spite of Cheney’s stock sale earlier that month. He said Exxon is “one of the biggest, most egregious carbon polluters in the world,” and anytime he has an “opportunity to try to hold them to account,” he takes it.
“I have a one-time, three-day technical delay for that report of the sale of the stock my wife inherited, and (critics) want to compare that to decades of misinformation and denial about the impact of the billions of tons of carbon emissions that they put in the atmosphere,” Welch said. “They don’t equate.”
Disclosure of the sale
Twelve days after the hearing, on Nov. 9, Welch reported the sale to the Clerk of the House. He was late; the STOCK Act mandates that members of Congress report such transactions exceeding $1,000 within 30 to 45 days. It had been 53.
Kedric Payne is the senior director for ethics at the Campaign Legal Center and previously was an investigator with the Office of Congressional Ethics. He told VTDigger that even if a member’s individual stock transaction did not violate the law or constitute insider trading, it can raise eyebrows and erode public trust in their officials.
“It’s extremely important to realize that anything that takes away from the public’s confidence in their elected officials damages our democracy overall, one bit at a time, and voters have a right to know that their public officials are looking out for the public interest and not their own personal interests,” Payne said. “When you have these situations where questions arise … that diminishes public confidence, whether or not the member actually did anything wrong.”
On Dec. 21, a politically conservative watchdog group, Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, filed an ethics complaint against Welch to the Office of Congressional Ethics.
“This case exemplifies how a member has access to nonpublic information, or can take action that can affect a stock’s price. This type of conflict is one the ethics rules specifically address,” the group wrote in its complaint. “Moreover, Welch had knowledge of the stock transaction and the deadline to report it, but simply did not do so even when he was directly questioning the CEO of the company.”
Welch has faced scrutiny in the past for his investment decisions.
A March 2020 VTDigger investigation found that he had purchased more than $7,500 worth of stock in Qiagen, a German diagnostics company that produces Covid-19 tests, a month earlier, as the threat of the pandemic was becoming clear to Congress. That April, he told VTDigger that he had directed his financial managers to cease buying individual stocks and invest only in group funds.
“I have made a decision that the clearest way to avoid even the appearance of a conflict is to simply stop making purchases” of individual stocks, Welch said at the time.
Since then, according to his office and evidenced by his regular financial disclosures, Welch has been working on divesting. Once he’s rid of his final stock — a Chase Bank stock, still in its paper form, given to him by his parents when he was young — that will be the end of all individual trading for Welch.
After that, Welch told VTDigger, “there’s just no question whether anything that I do is affected by how it will impact individual stock.”
Welch said he hopes his congressional colleagues follow suit. He has cosponsored H.R. 1579, or the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, which would prohibit members of Congress from owning individual stocks. Several such bills have been introduced in both the House and Senate with bipartisan support, and have been picking up steam in recent weeks.
“I do hope more of my colleagues will take that pledge,” Welch told VTDigger. “We have a big challenge in this country and it’s public trust in government, and anything that you do to try to help enhance trust, I want to do.”
Clarification: This story has been edited to clarify that Cheney has pledged to avoid not just buying but owning individual stocks.
