WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Republican leaders Tuesday defended the secretive process used in that chamber to investigate allegations of wrongdoing, though they did confirm referring a complaint made against Arizona Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego to the Ethics Committee.

“At the beginning, we always start very, very privately to protect members because we don’t want to facilitate frivolous accusations,” said Senate Ethics Committee Chairman James Lankford, R-Okla. “We want to facilitate accurate accusations. And actually work through to be able to hold each other to account.”

The comments came just a few hours after Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said he would lead the effort on that side of the Capitol to improve the process for filing an ethics complaint, especially those that have to do with sexual harassment.  

“You may know this, I have two daughters who work on Capitol Hill on committee staff. (This is) very serious to me. I’m a father. I’m not just the speaker of the House,” he said. “For that very reason we have to protect women and anyone who feels like there is any inappropriate behavior whatsoever. So if there are ways to tighten the rules, suggestions, we’re seeking that from all members. We’re open to that.”

Johnson said he hoped that any votes to change House rules would be bipartisan, if not unanimously adopted. He also reflected on a long history of misconduct by members of Congress. 

“There’s always been untoward activity among political figures. I mean going back to time immemorial. There’s always been marital infidelity. There’s always been despicable behaviors,” he said. “It occurs to us that it may not have been exposed and as transparent as it is today because of the very active press corps and 24-hour news cycle and smartphones and everything being recorded.”

Discussions around whether to keep ethics rules and investigations as they are now or overhaul the process began last week after California Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell and Texas Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales both resigned amid sexual misconduct allegations. 

Florida Democratic Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick then resigned Tuesday just before the House Ethics Committee could recommend what repercussions she should face after the panel found her guilty on more than two dozen violations. 

GOP accusation on social media

Swalwell’s resignation may not be the end of that scandal, however. 

Florida Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna wrote in a social media post on April 15 that it “seems like the Senate has its own trash to take out. @LeaderJohnThune You need to look into the allegations against one of your Senators, it’s very disturbing. My chief will be contacting your chief.”

Her comments apparently referred to Arizona’s Gallego, who was friends with Swalwell, but has sought to distance himself from the former congressman since news of the allegations by multiple women broke earlier this month. 

Thune said during Tuesday’s press conference that “specific matter” has been referred to the Senate Ethics Committee and that he didn’t “know the particulars of the allegation.”

“The Ethics Committee in the Senate is designed to ensure that this institution and its members conduct themselves in a way befitting of the office and that we’re doing things in an ethical manner,” Thune said.  

Gallego’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

‘A quiet manner’

Lankford said Senate Ethics Committee members are “extremely serious about taking on allegations, especially allegations like sexual harassment, all the different things that are out there … But we do function in a quiet manner.”

The committee, he said, gets “hundreds of different allegations” that its members then work through to determine if they should proceed. 

“As you know, in the political world that we live in, a lot of allegations come to us that they’re unfounded at the end of it,” Lankford said. 

The Senate Ethics Committee, he said, is unlikely to move to a model similar to that of the House Ethics Committee, which releases statements when it begins investigations into members, sometimes detailing the allegations. 

“There’s a lot more public that comes out on it and they find out at the end of it that it becomes the theater of the allegation,” Lankford said. “So it facilitates more allegations because it creates more theater.”

The Senate panel hasn’t published a press release since August 2024 and its two-page report for 2025 disclosed the committee dismissed 160 of 181 alleged violations due to “lack of subject matter jurisdiction” or because “they failed to provide sufficient facts as to any material violation of the Senate rules beyond mere allegation or assertion.”

The annual report adds the Senate panel issued zero “private or public letters of admonition” and had no “matters resulting in a disciplinary sanction.”

The last time the committee issued a public letter was in March 2023, after South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham solicited “campaign contributions in a federal building” for Georgia senatorial candidate Herschel Walker. 

Lankford later expanded during the afternoon press conference on his belief that some ethics allegations are more political than genuine. 

“Our focus is all folks have to be heard on this but we live in a political world. In a political world if every ethics charge goes out there, everyone then grabs that ethics charge, uses it in a campaign and says ‘There’s been an ethics charge out there, the Ethics Committee is talking about it.’ And suddenly it becomes drama and facilitates more things coming at us,” he said. “We want to take seriously every victim, every accusation. But we also understand the environment that we work in.”

Most Americans support banning members of Congress and their families from trading stocks in individual companies.

So says a 2023 University of Maryland study that surveyed about 3,000 registered voters.

Lawmakers in Washington are privy to information the general public may not be and can use it to make advantageous stock trades.

And “the problem is getting worse,” said Kedric Payne, director of the ethics program for the Campaign Legal Center, a government watchdog in Washington. His team focuses on enforcing existing ethics laws and advocating for tougher ones.

Payne believes the public should know “their elected officials are protecting the public interest and not their own personal interest.”

The STOCK Act, a federal law passed in 2012, requires members of Congress to disclose their trades within about 30 days of the purchase or sale. But the penalty for filing a disclosure report late is a meager $200.

Payne said his organization used to file ethics complaints for congressional stock trading. It’s rare that they file those complaints now since the most common violation is a late report, and the legal penalty for filing late is so insignificant.

While disclosure requirements can help reveal actual or perceived conflicts of interest, Payne said, disclosing conflicts of interest also lessens the public’s trust in government. In effect, the increased transparency doesn’t alleviate whether the trade looks corrupt or is corrupt.

U.S. Rep. Tony Wied, a freshman congressman elected to the Wisconsin 8th in 2024, is no stranger to stock trading. The Republican represents the northeastern portion of the state, and his investment activity consistently outpaces Wisconsin’s other congressional representatives.

A businessman from De Pere who was elected to his seat by a wide margin in 2024, Wied formerly owned a gas station chain in the Green Bay area. His district encompasses parts of Door County, Green Bay and Appleton. Like every other member of Congress, his seat will be up for grabs this year in the midterm elections. Wied has said publicly he plans to seek reelection.

Wied recently reported buying between $760,000 and $1.6 million in stock between Feb. 3 and Feb. 19, according to The Badger Project’s analysis of Wied’s periodic transaction report. The disclosure laws only require that members report ranges and not exact values. In the same time period, Wied also wholly or partially sold stock valued between about $600,000 and $1.5 million.

Members of Congress are required to file periodic reports with the Clerk of the House about 45 days after they, their spouse or their dependent children buy or sell a financial asset worth more than $1,000. Wied’s most recent report, filed in March, is five pages long and lists 25 separate transactions. His largest single transaction was a purchase of between $500,000 and $1 million in U.S. treasury bills, a low-risk, low-reward investment.

In comparison, no other representative among Wisconsin’s U.S. House members — Reps Mark Pocan, Gwen Moore, Scott Fitzgerald, Derrick Van Orden, Glenn Grothman, Brian Steil and Tom Tiffany — have filed periodic transaction reports in the last year.

Members must also submit yearly financial disclosures, which list their assets and liabilities.

The sum of Wied’s assets disclosed in his latest annual disclosure ranges from about $6 million to $13 million, according to a review by The Badger Project. U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, who has millions in commercial real estate and stocks, is the only member of Wisconsin’s delegation in Washington to top that. Johnson reported assets ranging from about $17 million to $81 million in 2025.

Wied’s staff wrote in an email to The Badger Project in January that the congressman’s trades are solely managed by an independent financial advisor and that Wied complies with all ethics laws and guidelines.

Wied’s office did not respond to The Badger Project’s request for comment for this story.

Payne told The Badger Project that Wied isn’t on his group’s radar.

“We haven’t seen anything that would draw this congressman to our attention,” Payne said.

But a congressman’s trades can be aboveboard and still raise suspicion because lawmakers who trade at a high volume will eventually make a transaction that either overlaps with their professional duties or appears to, Payne said.

“It’s only a matter of time for him to have trades over his career that are gonna raise questions whether or not he did anything wrong,” Payne said about Wied. “And when people question if their elected official is prioritizing their interest or prioritizing the official’s personal interest, you have a problem.”

That’s why Payne and his organization have endorsed the bipartisan Restore Trust in Congress Act. The bill was introduced last September and has been stuck in committee since. Among the bill’s 131 co-sponsors are Van Orden and Pocan. If it passes, the proposed legislation would bar members of Congress as well as their spouses and dependent children from both owning and trading individual stocks. Further, members would be required to either divest their current holdings or place them into a blind trust.

“It is a real legislative solution to the problem,” Payne said.

The bill is facing competition as Democrats and Republicans have since introduced their own, “watered down” versions, Payne said. The Stop Insider Trading in Congress Act, introduced by Steil, a Republican, and mentioned by President Donald Trump in his State of the Union address, would prohibit members of Congress from buying individual stocks. But members could continue to own their stocks and sell them. The Restore Trust in Government Act, the Democratic version, would include the president and vice president in the members included in a stock trading ban.

Payne said he has faith that the original bill will pass eventually, but that it will take another scandal to get the public to pay attention and demand Congress to take action.

Tony Wied’s trades in February 2026

This article first appeared on The Badger Project, an independent, reader-supported news nonprofit in Wisconsin. It is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.