WASHINGTON – Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) recently embezzled up to $250,000 from telecommunications technology company Qualcomm Inc., a federal defense contractor, while serving on the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services and actively blocking hundreds of military enrollments. Bought stocks of. Promotion, Congress’s new financial disclosures indicate.
Qualcomm and its subsidiaries have been the recipients of several dozen defense and homeland security contracts over the past two decades, according to federal contract records reviewed by Raw Story.
These include a Department of the Army contract with Qualcomm Intelligent Solutions, valued at approximately $11.7 million with the potential to grow to $30.4 million, for a government program exploring “innovative, energy-efficient and reliable computer architectures.” that the intelligence community can address.” “Large-scale data-analytic applications.”
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The Senate Armed Services Committee, on which Tuberville sits, has jurisdiction over “military research and development”, among other responsibilities.
Tuberville spokesman Steven Stafford did not respond to questions about whether it was a conflict of interest for Tuberville to invest in defense contractor stocks while serving on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
He also did not answer a question about whether Tuberville, in principle, supports or opposes any of the several bills introduced this year that would ban or restrict members of Congress and their spouses from personally conducting stock trading. Will limit. Tuberville has previously described the idea as “ridiculous”.
“Senator Tuberville has a longtime financial advisor who actively manages his portfolio without his daily involvement,” Stafford wrote in an email to Raw Story.
When asked for the names of the financial advisors, he did not respond.
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Tuberville’s Qualcomm stock purchase is not the first time the senator has bought or sold defense contractor stock since joining the U.S. Senate in 2021.
Earlier this year, they separately bought and sold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Qualcomm shares. According to his most recent annual personal financial disclosure, Tuberville also has five-figure stock holdings in defense contractors Honeywell International and Lockheed Martin Corp.
More recently, Tuberville made headlines for blocking the nomination or promotion of hundreds of senior members of the US military in protest of a government policy that would have provided funding to military members and their dependent children who cross state lines to obtain abortions. Is.
‘Morally Absurd’
A government ethics watchdog took a neutral stance on Tuberville’s latest stock trade, whose months-long blockade of nominations and promotions for high-level military officers stemmed from his objection to a Biden administration policy that bars military personnel from traveling. Allows charging fees from the government. Related to abortion.
“Senator Tuberville being a member of the Armed Services Committee and investing in defense contractors is morally absurd and a textbook example of a conflict of interest,” said Dylan Heidler, senior government affairs manager at the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan group. -Gaudet said. The raw story, told, exposes conflicts of interest in the government.
“Senators’ personal financial position is directly tied to the financial position of specific companies that receive billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded government contracts,” Heidtler-Gaudet said. “I can’t think of anything more inappropriate and unethical than that, especially given the role that the Armed Services Committee plays in authorizing defense spending top lines and priorities around specific defense projects and programs.”
Tuberville’s personal investments have proven problematic for him in other respects.
In 2021, Insider reported that Tuberville violated the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012 by failing to properly disclose more than 130 stock trades that totaled $3.56 million.
Since then, dozens of other federal lawmakers have similarly violated the STOCK Act with late or otherwise incomplete disclosures.
During 2023 alone, Raw Story has identified 23 members of Congress — Republicans and Democrats alike — who violated the law.
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