Paul Pelosi Sold Google Stock Ahead of DOJ Antitrust Lawsuit

Paul Pelosi, the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, sold off 30,000 shares of Google stock last month, just weeks before the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against the company over alleged antitrust violations.

Pelosi sold the shares in three different transactions between December 20 and December 28, according to congressional disclosure files viewed by Fox News Business. Each transaction involved an amount between $500,001 and $1,000,000, according to the report. The trades involved between $1.5 million and $3 million of assets. The total amount of capital gains yielded was unclear.

On Tuesday, the Justice Department and eight states announced a lawsuit against the tech giant, accusing Google of monopolizing the digital advertising market.

“We allege that Google has used anti-competitive, exclusionary and unlawful conduct to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a news conference.

“Google’s anticompetitive behavior has raised barriers to entry to artificially high levels, forced key competitors to abandon the market for ad tech tools, dissuaded potential competitors from joining the market, and left Google’s few remaining competitors marginalized and unfairly disadvantaged,” the lawsuit alleges.

Pelosi, who heads a San Francisco-based investment and venture capital firm, came under fire last year for buying up to $5 million worth of shares in computer chipmaker Nvidia about a month before Congress approved the CHIPS Act, which included a $52 billion subsidy for domestic computer chip production. Facing scrutiny for the purchase, Pelosi sold the stock at a loss just before the bill passed in late July.

Nancy Pelosi has denied that her husband has traded stocks based on information he’s received from her.

Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) introduced the Preventing Elected Leaders from Owning Securities and Investments Act on Tuesday, which would prohibit lawmakers and their spouses from owning and trading stocks while in office.

“People have asked why I named my stock trade ban the PELOSI Act. Now you know,” he said, referring to the news of Pelosi’s Google stock sell-off.

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