It was 10 days before Christmas in 2021, and Representative Nancy Pelosi, then the speaker of the House, was asked at her weekly news conference about an issue to which she had not given much thought.
“Should members of Congress and their spouses be banned from trading individual stocks while serving in Congress?” asked Bryan Metzger, a reporter for Business Insider.
The question caught Ms. Pelosi off guard at the tail end of a busy year, during which she had shepherded through the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package, a landmark bill to expand federal voting rights and sweeping legislation to protect gay and transgender rights, among other things.
“We are a free-market economy,” she responded brusquely. “They should be able to participate in that.”
It was an answer that Ms. Pelosi would come to regret, and a response that fueled Republican efforts to portray her as the chief impediment to doing away with a practice that has helped to sour voters on their representatives in Washington and erode their trust in government.
Ms. Pelosi will leave Washington next year as a political figure widely viewed as one of the most effective speakers in memory, her place in history assured as the first woman to hold the post.
But the widespread perception that she was on the wrong side of the debate over congressional stock trading, and personally benefited from the practice, has put an asterisk on that legacy.
Today, an overwhelming majority of voters in both parties want to ban lawmakers and their family members from trading stock, and view the practice with great suspicion.
As Ms. Pelosi prepares to leave Congress, a bipartisan bill to ban stock trading by lawmakers appears to be slowly making its way to the House floor with enthusiastic support from the far right and the far left. President Trump has said he would support it. Ms. Pelosi now says she would vote for it, too.
But people close to the former speaker, who insisted on anonymity to discuss her handling of the issue, concede that it was among the only issues that reflected poorly on Ms. Pelosi during her tenure, placing an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise remarkable legacy.
Her main reason for resisting the idea, the people close to her said, was that Republicans targeted Ms. Pelosi personally in their efforts to address the matter, and she did not want to cede any ground to attacks that implied she was corrupt.
They also said that for much of the time that the issue was percolating, Ms. Pelosi simply had bigger national policy issues on her plate. And they conceded that when the issue bubbled up in 2021, Ms. Pelosi misread the depth of public antipathy for stock trading by members of Congress.
Born into a politically connected family in Baltimore, Ms. Pelosi has been wealthy for decades. As a first-term member of Congress, she reported more than $600,000 in stock holdings, according to her financial disclosure at the time.
But she became exponentially wealthier during the years when her power grew. And the stock trades made by her husband, the venture capitalist Paul Pelosi, were so lucrative that they spawned a cottage industry of copycats. The “Pelosi Tracker” app for years has clocked all of his investments and allowed its users to follow and mimic his trades.
Over the past three years, Ms. Pelosi has reported a trade volume of $56.9 million, according to Capitol Trades, a site that monitors the stock market activity of lawmakers. In January of this year, she reported that her husband traded between $8.8 million and $38.6 million in stock holdings.
A large portion of the Pelosis’ wealth comes from real estate investments, including buildings in downtown San Francisco that Mr. Pelosi inherited.
But whenever any of Mr. Pelosi’s stock trades raised eyebrows, Ms. Pelosi’s spokesman would issue the same one-sentence statement: “Speaker Pelosi does not own any stocks, and she has no prior knowledge or subsequent involvement in any transactions.”
It did little to quell the impression, which Republicans amplified at every opportunity, that Ms. Pelosi was potentially benefiting from information that regular Americans did not have access to.
“You can’t argue with the return on Nancy Pelosi’s time in Congress,” Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, said in a statement. “She outperformed the S&P 500 by more than double in 2024.”
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Insider trading is illegal for members of Congress, just like everybody else, and there has never been any concrete evidence that Ms. Pelosi profited from her position. But as the issue has gained more attention, there has been more scrutiny of potential conflicts.
A recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that analyzed lawmakers’ stock trades found that congressional leaders outperformed rank-and file lawmakers in investment gains by as much as 47 percentage points, in part because of their influence on and knowledge of what legislation is likely to come to the floor and pass. It cited as an example how Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, then the majority leader, declined to bring up a pair of bipartisan antitrust bills in 2021 that would have slapped restrictions on large technology companies, noting that Mr. Pelosi had “coincidentally” invested heavily in Apple and Alphabet in the months before that decision.
“Pelosi shouldn’t just be investigated, she should be prosecuted,” Mr. Hawley said on Fox News earlier this year. “You shouldn’t be able to go up to Congress and get rich by trading on information that only you have and not members of the public.”
For decades, the Pelosis have lived in a stately brick mansion in the city’s tony Pacific Heights neighborhood. The home, valued at $8.5 million, is near the stretch known as Billionaire’s Row, where the city’s old money, including the Gettys, and its new money, including Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang and David Sacks, Mr. Trump’s artificial intelligence czar, own mansions.
The Pelosis also own a 16-acre property with a vineyard and home on Zinfandel Lane in Napa Valley.
They have done little to play down their vast personal wealth. Mr. Pelosi long drove a Porsche 911. Ms. Pelosi stands out in the badly-dressed Capitol in her collection of Armani suits. They are regulars on the black-tie gala scene in San Francisco, and last fall, they were honored at a gala dinner with the Crescendo Award for their contributions to the San Francisco Opera.
Republicans have long sought to use Ms. Pelosi’s wealth against her. When the issue of members of Congress trading stocks was debated in Congress in 2012, Republicans made a special effort to target Ms. Pelosi.
That year, when the Republican-led House passed a bill to ban insider trading by lawmakers, they included what they named the “Pelosi Provision,” which prohibited members of Congress and executive branch officials from receiving special access to initial public stock offerings because of their positions.
The provision, they said, was inspired by an investment in the initial public offering by Visa in 2008 by Mr. Pelosi, when Ms. Pelosi was in her first term as speaker.
Republicans have continued to brand any legislation related to the subject with Ms. Pelosi’s name. In 2023, Mr. Hawley introduced the “PELOSI Act,” which stood for “Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments.”
“She has the highest return of anybody, practically, in the history of Wall Street,” Mr. Trump said earlier this year when discussing his support for a ban on stock trading for members of Congress. He claimed, without evidence, that “Nancy Pelosi became rich by having inside information.” (On CNN, Ms. Pelosi responded, “The president has his own exposure, so he’s always projecting.”)
After her curt dismissal of the issue in late 2021, which made many Democrats livid, Ms. Pelosi pivoted. When Congress reconvened after the new year, she said that she would support a ban, with a caveat: It must also apply to the Supreme Court and the judicial branch of government. Ms. Pelosi assembled a working group to study the issue and come up with the best proposal that could move forward.
Proponents of a prohibition saw it as a stalling tactic and called the idea of expanding it to include the judicial branch a red herring. A bill to address stock trading by members of Congress was never brought up for a vote that year, Ms. Pelosi’s last as speaker. Some Democratic staff members who worked on the issue at the time said the holdup was due, in part, to vehement opposition from Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, who served as majority leader at the time.
But the issue has gained prominence with more trades by lawmakers drawing scrutiny following key votes. Representative Rob Bresnahan Jr., Republican of Pennsylvania, has made more than 600 trades since taking office in January. Those include selling holdings in health-related companies that took a hit as a result of the large health care cuts in Mr. Trump’s sweeping tax bill, which the congressman supported.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, purchased between tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of stock on April 8 and 9, the day before and the day of Mr. Trump’s announcement that he was pausing a sweeping set of global tariffs.
Mr. Pelosi, too, has remained an active stock trader. Ms. Pelosi’s defenders contend that her spouse’s market moves have never changed her focus on affordability.
“This focus has often put her at odds with special interests and even required votes against her husband’s financial interests, a step she has never hesitated to take,” said Drew Hamill, who served as a top adviser to Ms. Pelosi.
These days, Ms. Pelosi has fully embraced a measure she once shrugged off.
“If legislation is advanced to help restore trust in government and ensure that those in power are held to the highest ethical standards, then I am proud to support it — no matter what they decide to name it,” she said in a statement in July. This time, she made no mention of extending a stock-trading ban to include the courts.
In Congress, Representative Seth Magaziner, Democrat of Rhode Island, has worked with Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, to reconcile several different congressional stock trading ban proposals into one bill that has a chance of passage.
Their measure would bar members of Congress, spouses, dependent children, and trustees from owning, buying or selling individual stocks, securities, commodities, futures, and other comparable assets.
It has gained sufficient momentum that a hard-right Republican, Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, is currently circulating a discharge petition to fast-track the legislation to the floor.
“When this gets to the floor, it is going to pass overwhelmingly,” Mr. Magaziner said in an interview. “Clearly, the bill and the issue have more support now than they ever have before.”
As for Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Magaziner said he was willing to forgive her for not championing the issue years ago when Democrats could have brought it to the floor, saying she was occupied with bigger things such as helping to enact the Affordable Care Act.
“About 40 million people have health insurance because of her,” he said. “That is going to be her legacy. And I will note she has come out and said she supports the stock trading ban, so good on her.”
Heather Knight contributed reporting from San Francisco. Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times.
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