‘Let Them Eat Cake’: Obama Ethics Czar Explains Why He Compared Nancy Pelosi to Marie Antoinette

Walter Shaub, the former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics under President Barack Obama, compared House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to French royal Marie Antoinette Thursday over her comments about lawmakers engaging in potential insider stock trading.

Shaub, while appearing on CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper ripped Pelosi’s comments for coming off as elitist, and complained about the practice of insider trading among lawmakers following an intro from Tapper invoking the 18th Century monarch.

“Walter, you are comparing Pelosi’s remarks to the infamous Marie Antoinette, ‘Let them eat cake’ moment,” Tapper said, asking, “Why?”

Shaub responded:

Nancy Pelosi says it’s a free market. In reality, it’s not exactly a free market when she has inside access to information from government experts that isn’t public, that can affect and influence their trading activity, that the public doesn’t have access to. It’s not exactly free when we’re locked out of the kind of information members of congress get all the time.

Tapper then invoked the 2012 STOCK Act, which was signed into law and is designed to prevent Congress members and their assistants from profiting from non-public information. The CNN host asked Shaub why the act is not being enforced.

Shaub said, “Yeah, well, It’s good to be the king. That is exactly the message Congress is sending because they passed his law and left themselves in charge of enforcing it, and they simply don’t.”

Shaub added:

You don’t see anything like this in the executive branch, where when I was there and — continuing after I left — they enforced this with penalties one year late. The Project on Government Oversight where I work has been working with members of Congress from both sides of the aisle in both chambers to try to make this practice illegal for two reasons: it is not just insider trading but also conflicts of interest. Both are very serious threats.

You have for instance Joe Manchin wielding inordinate power over the president’s initiatives that would affect the environment while he has massive poll interests. We also had members of congress during the pandemic trading in stocks affected by the pandemic that they knew about before the rest of us did. So mere disclosure isn’t going to solve that. In fact, even if you did have people complying with the law, we’d have no way to know what kind of insider briefings they got. So we would have no way to evaluate whether they were committing insider trading and I would just add the mere appearance that they are engaging in insider trading is just as bad as if they are.

Shaub ultimately concluded, “We have a crisis in government right now and the public can’t take their word for it.”

Pelosi was asked about potential ethics concerns with members of the House and Senate trading with insider information on Wednesday. She told reporters, “We are a free-market economy. They should be able to participate in that.”