Sen. Josh Hawley didn’t set out to antagonize the president.
Yet that’s what happened on Wednesday, when President Donald Trump savaged the Missouri senator as “second-tier” hours after his bill to ban lawmakers, the president, and the vice president from trading stocks cleared a Senate committee.
Hawley told BI that he smoothed things over with Trump during a phone call later that evening. “He finished by saying, ‘You’re totally exonerated, Josh,'” Hawley said.
But the dust-up threatens to complicate efforts to ban stock trading in Congress, which have gained steam over the last several years but have yet to reach a floor vote in either the House or the Senate.
In this case, Democrats and Republicans in the Senate are at odds over whether the ethics requirements should extend to the executive branch.
“Ethics should apply to the president as well as the Congress,” Democratic Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan said. “So that’s what’s in the bill.”
“There’s already ethics laws that he has to follow,” Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio said, referring to Trump. “I fully support transparency. President Trump does that.”
The irony is that Hawley’s original bill, the cheekily-named PELOSI Act, didn’t apply to the president or vice president at all.
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However, several Republicans were opposed to a stock trading ban on principle, so he had to turn to Democrats for support. They insisted that he modify the bill to be similar to a different bipartisan bill that passed the same committee last summer, which does include the executive branch.
“My side wouldn’t vote for the PELOSI Act,” Hawley said. “And I want to pass a bill.”
‘He told me he wants a stock trading ban’
The bill that passed out of committee would prevent the president, the vice president, and members of Congress from trading stocks immediately upon enactment. Then, by the beginning of their next term, they would have to sell off their stock holdings, along with some other assets.
That means the bill would not require Trump to divest from any of his assets, given that he only has one term left. But he would be banned from buying stocks.
Trump has long said that he would sign a stock trading ban into law, and earlier on Wednesday, he said he was “conceptually” a fan of Hawley’s bill.
Then, Hawley said, some of his Republican colleagues in the Senate got to the president.
“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 divest all of his assets, which is, of course, totally false,” Hawley said.
“I said that is absolutely not true at all,” Hawley said. “And when we walked through the text of the bill, he was like, ‘Oh, OK.'”
Hawley also said that Trump didn’t mention the fact that the bill would bar him from trading stocks.
A White House official declined to comment on Hawley’s account of the call, saying they “don’t comment on private meetings.”
“He told me he wants a stock trading ban,” Hawley said. “He remains committed to getting a stock trading ban, so we’ll work with him to do that.”
Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, an opponent of the bill who argued that it would “target” Trump, confirmed to BI that he spoke with Trump on Wednesday. But when asked about Hawley’s claims, he declined to comment.
“I’m not going to talk about a private conversation I had with the president,” Scott said. “That’s inappropriate.”
It remains unclear exactly how Trump feels about a stock trading ban that would apply to him, and the White House offered no clarification. Hawley indicated a willingness to change how the bill impacts Trump, saying he just wants to get something passed.
But the inclusion of the president remains an issue for Moreno and Scott, who say that they otherwise support a stock trading ban for Congress in principle.
“Let’s deal with the issue that people are worried about,” Scott said. “We don’t want people using inside information in Congress to make a profit on stocks like Nancy Pelosi. Why don’t we focus on that?”
“Instead of actually exposing the corruption, all we’re doing is giving the Democrats a weapon to target Trump with,” Moreno said. “That’s ridiculous.”
