Sen. Susan Collins helped pass a 2012 law that affirmed that members of Congress are not exempt from insider-trading laws and required members to more promptly disclose their trades of stocks and other investments. But an ad from a pro-Democrat group falsely claims that the Republican senator “doesn’t think” that insider trading “should be illegal.”
The TV ad from Majority Forward, an issue advocacy organization, goes on to say that Collins, who is running for reelection in Maine, “is trying to keep it so senators can get rich playing the stock market.” And a spokesperson for the group criticized the effectiveness of the 2012 law, telling us in a statement that Collins is “blocking the only thing that would actually work” to stop Congress from profiting on insider information – “a ban on members trading individual stocks.”
It’s true that Collins does not support a complete ban on stock trading by representatives and senators. A spokesperson for her Senate campaign told us that she believes they should still be able to have a stock portfolio that is “managed by an outside advisor who makes the decisions independently and without consultation with the member.”
But that’s not the same as thinking that insider trading should be legal.
As of July 7, Majority Forward had put more than $628,000 into running the ad, which began airing in Maine and other parts of the New England region on June 27, according to AdImpact. The group is affiliated with Senate Majority PAC, a Democratic super PAC, that is trying to keep Collins from winning a sixth term representing the Pine Tree State.
The ad begins with a man saying that her long Senate career has changed Collins. Then, he says: “Getting rich from insider trading should be illegal, but Susan Collins doesn’t think so. Susan Collins is trying to keep it so senators can get rich playing the stock market.”
The ad ends with a plea for viewers to “tell Susan Collins to stop the congressional stock trading.”
We’ll get to Collins’ position on legislation to ban members of Congress from trading stocks shortly.
But the ad’s other claim about her stance on the illegality of insider trading is wrong.
“Majority Forward is lying,” Blake Kernen, a spokeswoman for the Collins campaign, said in an email about the ad. She told us, with emphasis: “Insider Trading IS illegal — and it should be. In fact, Senator Collins wrote the law signed by President Obama that explicitly ensured that Members of Congress and their staff are not exempt from insider trading laws.”
Indeed, in 2012, six years after it was first introduced and attracted little support, Congress approved the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge, or STOCK, Act, which Obama later signed into law. It passed with overwhelmingly bipartisan support, including from Collins, who helped write parts of the legislation and usher it through the Senate.
Among other things, the STOCK Act clarified that existing laws and rules prohibiting insider trading also applied to members of Congress, congressional staffers and other federal officials. It reiterated that members and their staff are prohibited from using nonpublic information derived from their official positions for personal benefit. And it changed the disclosure rules so that certain stock transactions exceeding $1,000 had to be reported in no less than 45 days — rather than just once a year in an annual report.
The law was intended to address public mistrust over allegations of insider trading by members of Congress, including during the Great Recession in 2008, when some members reportedly made changes to their investment portfolios after learning details about the looming collapse of the U.S. economy in private meetings with the top economic officials.
“This common-sense legislation … makes it crystal clear that members of Congress are forbidden from trading on insider information,” Collins said in a statement at the time.
STOCK Act Criticism
However, critics of the law say that it has largely been ineffective.
“While the STOCK Act has helped expose the extent of potential conflicts of interest and provided the public with transparency into lawmakers’ financial activities, a lack of enforcement has stopped it from achieving the goal of curbing insider trading,” the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center wrote in a September 2025 analysis.
For example, the CLC, which focuses on voting rights and congressional ethics rules, pointed out that the initial penalty for members who don’t file their disclosure reports on time is a $200 fine – “a hardly impactful deterrence from the potential millions to be made off the stock market,” the center said.
Also, a Business Insider report from January 2023 said that the fee for a disclosure violation is sometimes waived by the House and Senate ethics committees responsible for enforcement.
Moreover, the CLC has noted that, “despite credible allegations,” no member of Congress has been prosecuted for insider trading under the law – which it has attributed to “the high standard for insider trading under the STOCK Act and investigatory hurdles.”
Majority Forward emphasized the law’s shortcomings in defense of its ad.
“The 2012 STOCK Act was supposed to stop insider trading in Congress, and it has failed – so badly that Susan Collins, who helped write it, broke it herself and paid no price,” Lauren French, a spokeswoman for Majority Forward, said in a statement emailed to us.
“Now she’s blocking the only thing that would actually work: a ban on members trading individual stocks,” French said. “That puts her against 86% of Americans and 95% of Mainers – and on the side of a loophole she’s personally profited from, which is exactly the point made in this ad. Standing in the way of a widely popular, bipartisan, tougher piece of legislation is, by default, opposing stricter enforcement and allowing for the continued practice of insider trading to occur.” (French linked to polls in recent years that found such high support for a ban on stock trading by lawmakers.)
NOTUS reported in March that Collins violated the law’s disclosure requirement in February, when she disclosed her husband’s purchase of a Pfizer corporate bond five days after the 45-day reporting deadline.
Kernen, the Collins campaign spokeswoman, told the news outlet that investment decisions for Tom Daffron, Collins’ husband, “are made exclusively by a third-party advisor without his consultation.” In addition, she said that Collins “has never bought, sold, or owned any individual shares of stock” during her Senate career – a point that Kernen reiterated in an email to us.
It’s also the case that Collins has opposed proposals that would completely ban members of Congress and other high-ranking federal employees from buying and selling stocks and other securities. She has instead argued for greater enforcement of the STOCK Act.
But the ad goes beyond making those points by inaccurately claiming that Collins “doesn’t think” insider trading “should be illegal.”
“Insider trading is already illegal, and Sen. Collins believes that the law that is already in place, in addition to the robust financial disclosure requirements, provide appropriate safeguards and should be enforced,” Kernen told the Bangor Daily News for an August 2025 story about Collins opposing legislation put forward by Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri.
That bill, which Hawley introduced with a bipartisan group of fellow senators, would ban members of Congress, the president, the vice president, and their spouses and dependent children from holding, buying or selling stocks, according to a press release.
When we asked about Collins’ current position, Kernen said in her email, “She believes that Members of Congress should not be allowed to buy or sell individual stocks unless the stock portfolio is managed by an outside advisor who makes the decisions independently and without consultation with the member.”
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