Nancy Pelosi’s Husband Dumps Over $500K in Visa Stock Weeks Before DOJ’s Antitrust Lawsuit

Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, dumped over $500,000 worth of Visa stock just weeks before the Department of Justice slapped the financial giant with an antitrust lawsuit, according to the New York Post.

The timing couldn’t be more suspect. Visa, one of the most dominant players in the debit card market, is now facing charges of monopolizing the industry.

The DOJ’s antitrust unit claims Visa has abused its market power, forcing financial tech companies to work with them while penalizing those who try to go with competitors.

According to the press release:

According to the complaint, more than 60% of debit transactions in the United States run on Visa’s debit network, allowing it to charge over $7 billion in fees each year for processing those transactions.

The complaint further alleges that Visa illegally maintains its monopoly power by insulating itself from competition.

For example, Visa wields its dominance, enormous scale, and centrality to the debit ecosystem to impose a web of exclusionary agreements on merchants and banks. These agreements penalize Visa’s customers who route transactions to a different debit network or alternative payment system.

In so doing, the complaint alleges, Visa locks up debit volume, insulates itself from competition, and smothers smaller, lower-priced competitors.

Visa also induces would-be competitors to become partners instead of entering the market as competitors by offering generous monetary incentives and threatening punitive additional fees.

As the complaint alleges, Visa coopted the competition because it feared losing share, revenues, or being displaced by another debit network altogether.

And what was Paul Pelosi doing while the DOJ built its case? Selling off massive chunks of Visa stock.

On July 3, a disclosure showed that the former Speaker of the House’s spouse unloaded 2,000 shares of Visa, valued somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million. All this, just three months before the federal hammer dropped.

BREAKING :

The DOJ plans to open up a lawsuit against Visa saying they illegally monopolized the US debit card market

Pelosi sold ~$1 Million dollars of Visa $V just 2 months ago

Wild.

— Nancy Pelosi Stock Tracker (@PelosiTracker_) September 24, 2024

BREAKING: Pelosi is back on the Trading Desk

She just bought ~$5M of Broadcom $AVGO and another $1.2M of Nvidia $NVDA

She also sold ~$500K of Tesla and ~$536K of Visa $V pic.twitter.com/RGQoG4oW3F

— Nancy Pelosi Stock Tracker (@PelosiTracker_) July 3, 2024

Nancy Pelosi’s office, of course, was quick to deny any wrongdoing. Her spokesperson claimed that Pelosi has no involvement in any stock transactions.

“Speaker Pelosi does not own any stocks, and she has no prior knowledge or subsequent involvement in any transactions,” the congresswoman’s spokesperson told The Post.

Visa shares plummeted by 5.5% after the news of the lawsuit hit the markets. And yet, the Pelosis dodged that bullet by a matter of weeks. Coincidence? Skeptics are right to ask: How much did Nancy Pelosi know? Did her perch as a top Democratic power player give her insider knowledge that her husband conveniently acted upon?

Public records and filings don’t lie. Even though Paul Pelosi’s stock dump didn’t occur at the height of the market fallout, the timing of the sale—mere weeks before a bombshell antitrust lawsuit—raises a cloud of suspicion.

Last year, Paul Pelosi dumped 20,000 shares of Google stock in December – a month before the Department of Justice and Merrick Garland filed their antitrust lawsuit.

In 2022, Paul Pelosi exercised $1 million to $5 million Alphabet call options before Democrats proposed a congressional stock trading ban. In the same year, Paul Pelosi sold all of his NVIDIA stock just one day before Congress was set to vote on a bill that would boost domestic production of semiconductors.

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