Rich McCormick Corruption & Ethics Georgia

Rich McCormick Sits on Armed Services. He Reported Buying a Defense Contractor's Stock Two and a Half Years Late.

Two dozen stock purchases — L3Harris, UnitedHealth, Johnson & Johnson, NextEra — disclosed almost two and a half years past the legal deadline. Then he did it again in 2026. His office didn't respond either time. In July he voted for a stock-trading ban.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 11, 2026

The law is not complicated. If you are a member of Congress and you buy or sell a stock, you have 45 days to tell the public. That's it. That's the whole requirement.

Rich McCormick took almost two and a half years.

Two dozen stocks, two and a half years

In September 2025, OpenSecrets went through the disclosure records and found that the Georgia congressman had never filed the required periodic transaction reports for two dozen individual stock purchases he made in March 2023. He finally listed them in his annual financial report — the once-a-year summary — the following year.

The 45-day rule exists precisely because a once-a-year summary is useless for catching a conflict while it's happening. OpenSecrets described the periodic reports as a "contemporaneous reporting requirement" designed so the public can quickly tell whether a lawmaker's trades collide with their public duties.

The purchases were worth somewhere between $24,024 and $360,000. (Members only have to disclose broad ranges.) Among the companies:

L3Harris Technologies — a defense contractor
UnitedHealth Group and Johnson & Johnson — health insurance and pharmaceuticals
NextEra Energy — an electric utility holding company
Plus Apple, Cisco, Costco, Emerson Electric, Home Depot, Microsoft, PepsiCo and Walmart

Now put that next to his day job. OpenSecrets noted that McCormick sits on the Armed Services Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Science, Space and Technology Committee — and that some of the transactions involved companies in industries those committees oversee.

A defense contractor's stock, bought by a member of the committee that writes the defense authorization bill, and the public didn't find out for two and a half years.

He also campaigns on being an emergency physician — and he was buying shares of a health insurer and a drug company during a Congress that spent much of its time on health care.

OpenSecrets said McCormick's office acknowledged a phone call and then never answered the follow-up questions.

Then he did it again

Seven months later, in April 2026, NOTUS reported that McCormick had violated the same law a second time: he disclosed buying between $100,000 and $250,000 in U.S. Treasury bills about two months past the deadline.

His office did not respond to NOTUS either.

Two violations. Two rounds of silence.

The penalty is $200, and it is often waived

This is the part that makes the law a formality. The standard fine for a first STOCK Act disclosure violation is $200 — and the House and Senate ethics committees can waive it, and frequently do.

Two hundred dollars, against transactions reported in ranges that top out at $360,000.

Former Rep. Charles Boustany, now with the watchdog group Issue One, told OpenSecrets what that adds up to:

"The public trust in Congress is really low, and the low trust is self-inflicted. With these stock violations, it's a stark indication that new legislation is necessary to restore trust. There also needs to be more disclosure, fines need to be stiffer."

McCormick is not alone in this — not remotely. We've documented 45 Republicans on this site who broke the same law, some of them by years. That's the point. The rule is treated as optional because breaking it costs nothing.

And in July, he voted to ban the practice

On July 22, 2026, the House passed the Stop Insider Trading Act, 232 to 198. Every Republican who voted, all 218 of them, voted yes.

McCormick voted yes.

There is nothing wrong with a lawmaker changing course. But the bill he voted for lets members keep everything they already own, reinvest the dividends and sell later — which is why Rep. Pramila Jayapal called it a "fake stock trading ban." It also carried a package of strict new voter ID rules most people never heard about.

A man who blew the disclosure deadline by two and a half years, then blew it again, voting for a ban with a hole big enough to drive his own portfolio through is not a conversion. It's a press release.

Why any of this matters

None of these trades has been shown to be illegal insider trading. That is not the accusation.

The accusation is simpler and it's the one the STOCK Act was written to prevent: you cannot tell. That's the whole design. Congress required fast disclosure so voters could check, in something close to real time, whether their representative was legislating on an industry he had money in. McCormick's constituents in Georgia's 7th District had no way to check for two and a half years, because he didn't tell them.

And when reporters asked him about it — twice, at two different outlets, seven months apart — he said nothing.

It fits a pattern with him. After his February 2025 town hall in Roswell went viral, with hundreds of constituents booing him over DOGE cuts, House Republican leaders urged their members to stop holding in-person town halls. He took the advice, and didn't hold another major one until May 7, 2026 — RSVP-only, in a hotel ballroom, attendees screened and walked in through a back door.

Filing on time and answering the phone are the two easiest things this job asks of a person.

We deserve better.