Blake Moore was sworn into Congress in January 2021. Within six months he had broken a federal transparency law more than 70 times.

The law is the STOCK Act, passed in 2012 after a national scandal over members of Congress trading on what they learn at work. It is not complicated. If you buy or sell stock, you disclose it within 45 days. That is the whole obligation.

Moore didn't file for about six months.

What was in the trades

TownLift, the Park City outlet that first reported it, found Moore was "weeks or months late in reporting more than 70 trades" worth as much as $1.1 million across the first half of 2021.

Two of them stand out.

Raytheon. Moore bought up to $60,000 of stock in one of the largest defense contractors in the United States — while sitting on the House Armed Services Committee, the committee that authorizes what the Pentagon buys and from whom. That trade was among the ones he did not disclose on time.

Alibaba. He made seven separate transactions in the Chinese e-commerce giant. During the same period, Moore was publicly describing the Chinese Communist Party as a "strategic adversary."

Neither of those is illegal on its own. Members of Congress can own defense stocks while writing defense policy, and they can own Chinese stocks while giving speeches about China. That is the American system, for now. The STOCK Act's entire premise is that if they are going to do it, the public gets to see it in real time and draw its own conclusions.

Moore's trades were the exact category the disclosure rule exists for, and those are the ones the public didn't get to see.

The watchdog complaint

On July 29, 2021, the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the Office of Congressional Ethics over "70 separate stock and stock-option trades" worth "at least $70,000 and as much as $1.1 million."

CLC made the point that matters. Every member of Congress receives mandatory STOCK Act training. When members say they didn't know about their own transactions, that is "not an exception under the law." And without real enforcement, members can simply wait for the annual disclosure and pay a nominal fee — which defeats the purpose of the statute entirely.

That is not a hypothetical. It is a description of what happened next.

The $200

The House Ethics Committee fined him $200 for more than 70 late disclosures covering up to $1.1 million in trades.

Not $200 per violation. $200.

If you take the top of the range, that is a fee of roughly two hundredths of one percent of the value involved. It is less than a parking ticket in some cities. It is the cheapest possible price for six months of invisibility, and it is why the law does not work.

Moore's office said at the time that he had transferred 401(k) funds to a Utah financial firm managing his investments, that he had since established a compliance process with the firm and the Ethics Committee, and that he paid the late fee in full.

And here is the part that deserves credit, because it is more than most members do. His spokesperson said in 2022 that "without any requirement to do so, Blake has since put all his assets in a qualified blind trust," and that he cosponsored the TRUST in Congress Act to make blind trusts mandatory for every member. He still holds his investments that way. That is the right answer, and he got there.

He is not alone, which is the point

This is not a one-off. We have written up the same law being broken by Susan Collins, who helped pass it, and by Byron Donalds, who went on television demanding sanctions for members who do it before disclosing 108 late trades of his own.

Three members, three parties' worth of embarrassment, one common feature: nothing happened to any of them.

What he does now

Since 2023, Moore has sat on the Ways and Means Committee — the committee that writes the tax code for every industry in the country. He is also the House Republican Conference Vice Chair, the fifth-ranking Republican in the chamber, and by his own account he helped author the tax portion of the 2025 budget law.

His words about landing that seat: "House Republican Leadership placed me on the Ways and Means Committee my sophomore term, and I used this runway to prepare for this very moment."

A member with that job has advance knowledge of tax changes that move entire sectors of the market. The disclosure rule is the only thing standing between that knowledge and the public's ability to check what he does with it.

The first time he was tested on it, he went dark for six months across 70 trades. The bill came to $200.

Source

• Park City Congressman Blake Moore violated federal law by not disclosing stock trades — TownLift, July 27, 2021
• Three Members of Congress Face STOCK Act Violation Complaints — Campaign Legal Center, July 29, 2021