Congresswoman Lisa McClain dismissed any suggestion that she or her family were engaged in insider trading by saying that if they had been, they'd have gone all-in.
The chair of the House Republican conference, who is a three-term Michigan congresswoman, appeared on NewsNation on Wednesday and was asked to respond to a Sludge report revealing that her husband bought xAI shares just days before the Department of Defense announced it was partnering with the artificial intelligence company.
“There are reports your husband bought stock in Elon Musk’s AI company which is not publicly traded, xAI, just days before a report surfaced that the Pentagon was expanding xAI’s role in military systems," NewsNation host Connell McShane asked. "Can you assure us this purchase wasn’t based on inside info?”
She said she could "100 percent" assure the public she was not trading based on insider information.
“Because if it was, we wouldn’t have bought 100,000 shares. We would’ve bought a heck of a lot more," she said.
The Sludge report, citing financial transaction disclosures, suggested that McClain's husband purchased between $100,001 and $250,000 in private shares of xAI before the announcement.
xAI is Elon Musk's AI company. On Tuesday, the Department of Defense announced that it plans to integrate its systems with Musk's AI, Grok, and to provide the chatbot access to the military's classified networks.
“Very soon we will have the world’s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department," Hegseth said on Tuesday.
Under the STOCK Act, congressional members and their families are barred from using any nonpublic information to inform their stock market investments. If they do make stock transactions, they have to disclose them to regulators within 45 days of the purchase. There is no evidence to suggest McClain received any nonpublic information related to the announcement.
McClain told NewsNation that she couldn't have passed any information on to her husband because the Pentagon keeps information like that secret.
“You know the Pentagon doesn’t release that information,” McClain said. “I can 100 percent assure you that we didn’t have the insider information.”
Sludge's own report notes that there is no evidence that McClain provided her husband with insider trading info.
Musk’s AI has been at the center of several controversies.
Grok once proclaimed itself to be "MechaHitler" and more recently had to be tweaked after users spent days prompting it to create nonconsensual, often sexual images of women and children. The issue became an international controversy with foreign governments threatening to ban Grok unless the loophole was fixed.
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