The low ethical standards of Rep. Nick Begich

The U.S. Capitol. (National Park Service photo by Mike Litterst)

By Rich Moniak

Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Stop Insider Trading Act that would ban members of Congress from purchasing new individual stocks. Rep. Nick Begich was one of its 93 co-sponsors.

“Americans deserve to know their elected officials are working for them — not their own stock portfolios," he said via a text message sent from his campaign on Wednesday. “I believe public service is a public trust, and those of us elected to serve should be held to a higher standard.”

That should apply to the presidency as well. But when it comes to stock trading and everything else, Begich and most Republicans hold President Donald Trump to a standard so low it makes former New York Rep. George Santos look like a man of honor.

Trump’s financial disclosures show he earned $858 million last year from 21,000 trades involving holdings in approximately 1,600 companies. Two months ago, he made hundreds of trades in technology and defense companies that have business dealings with the federal government.

That would be illegal under a Senate bill co-sponsored by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.). Which is why Trump opposes it.

“I don’t think real Republicans want to see their President, who has had unprecedented success, TARGETED, because of the ‘whims’ of a second-tier Senator named Josh Hawley!” he wrote last summer.

But Hawley wasn’t targeting Trump. The bill is a compromise he reached with Democrats while Joe Biden was president. During the four years he was in office, he made only 13 trades.

A spokesperson for the Trump Organization would have us believe all of his stocks are “independently managed by third-party financial ​institutions with sole and exclusive authority over all investment decisions.” But a few years ago, while defending allegations that he and his sons committed financial fraud, Trump repeatedly stated  under oath the Trump Organization was shorthand “for business and branding purposes” and that “no entity as such exists for legal purposes.”

The other reason Trump supports the Stop Insider Trading Act is the unrelated requirement that photo identification be presented before casting a vote in a federal election. According to the official White House statement supporting it, that provision would ensure our elections are “unmarred by instances and accusations of unlawful voting that undermine faith in the system.”

As I’ve been arguing for years, Trump’s false claims of election fraud following the 2020 election did more to undermine voter trust than anything else in U.S. history.

In 2024, Begich lent credibility to his conspiracy theories by arguing the “techniques that were used” to get Biden elected weren’t legitimate. Among them were spurious allegations that Google suppressed searches of the Hunter Biden laptop story three weeks before the election.

Trump went further by accusing the FBI of directing Facebook and the news media not to reveal anything about it. And said eight in 10 Americans believe it impacted the outcome of the election.

That’s certainly not the “plenty of proof” of voter and state election fraud he claimed to have the day after the election. Indeed, such speculation is no different than arguing Hillary Clinton would have won in 2016 if Trump hadn’t paid a porn star off to keep her story out of the news.

Trump also believed he found a smoking gun from investigative work done by True the Vote. He said cell phone tracking and video evidence they compiled at drop box locations showed ballot stuffing that indicated “as many as 7% of all mail-in ballots cast could have been ineligible — approximately 4.8 million votes, an Election-changing number many times over.” However, after Georgia election officials sued True the Vote for not turning over their evidence, they admitted it didn’t exist.

But Trump’s merry-go-round of election falsehoods never stops.

Last month, his prime-time suggestion that China interfered with it was a bust even for Fox News.

Now he claims a new Census Bureau report that analyzed 128 million votes from 2020 “proves that over 24,000 Noncitizens voted illegally.” He added that after they analyze the remaining votes “this number will explode. I WON THE ELECTION!!”

Set aside the numerous flaws that make the report’s findings suspect. Estimates aren’t proof of anything. But even if they were accurate, the non-citizen votes in all six swing states combined would be less than 5,000.

Trump lost in 2020. If Begich was serious about holding himself to a higher standard, he’d tell voters that simple truth. And hold Trump accountable for lying about it.

• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.