If former Rep. Tom Malinowski wins next April’s special election for the 11th congressional district, he’ll bring some of the seniority he accrued during his two prior terms in Congress with him, an asset that he mentions repeatedly on the campaign trail.
But he may also bring something else back with him to Congress: a House Ethics Committee review of his late stock trading disclosures that was left unresolved when he lost re-election in 2022.
The Ethics Committee has no hard and fast rules regarding past members with pending inquiries who later return to Congress, in part because it may not have ever happened before. That seems to give the committee, a small panel that has historically prided itself on bipartisanship and that has an equal number of Democrats and Republicans regardless of who holds the House majority, a fair bit of discretion over what it will do with the Malinowski matter if he comes back.
Ethics Committee Chair Michael Guest (R-Mississippi) told the New Jersey Globe “can’t speak to [Malinowski’s] case specifically,” but Malinowski himself got a more detailed response when he asked the committee for details. The committee indicated to Malinowski that it would have the ability to continue its inquiry, but the matter would not automatically be renewed.
“The Committee does not currently have an open investigation into the matter involving Representative Malinowski,” committee counsel Tom Rust wrote in an email to Malinowski’s attorney. “If Representative Malinowski is reelected to the House, any further investigation must be authorized by the Committee consistent with House and Committee rules in effect at that time.”
The committee does have a statute of limitations for matters under its jurisdiction, but Malinowski’s late disclosures would still be within that timeframe. The committee can review any matters within the last four congressional sessions; since Malinowski would be returning to Washington in the middle of this Congress, that would mean anything he did from 2019 onwards (when he arrived in the House) is still subject to the committee’s review.
Malinowski, who has maintained for years that the late disclosures were the result of innocent mistakes on his part, dismissed the years-old inquiry as a non-issue in the campaign for the 11th district.
“This was an administrative mistake that I fully corrected, and no one in the process ever accused me of doing anything unethical,” Malinowski said. “But if anyone wants to recycle the same attacks on this issue that Trump and Ciattarelli used against [Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill], be my guest.”
Malinowski’s troubles began in early 2021, when the Office of Congressional Ethics (since renamed the Office of Congressional Conduct) began looking into whether the congressman had failed to properly report his stock trading activity in 2019 and 2020, during his first term in Congress. The OCE released a report in July 2021 alleging that Malinowski violated federal laws regarding congressional stock disclosures in several ways, despite having previously been subject to the same laws as a State Department official, and in fact continued to make errors even as the OCE investigated the matter.
“The evidence collected by the OCE reveals that Rep. Malinowski knowingly failed to enter reportable [Periodic Transaction Report] transactions into the online reporting system in accordance with STOCK Act deadlines, intentionally conflated PTR transactions he did report, did not disclose short sales in a consistent manner (or according to his stated intent), and failed to properly disclose assets and transactions on his 2019 annual financial disclosure statement,” the report stated.
In interviews with the OCE, Malinowski blamed the late disclosures on “carelessness,” and said that he would work to remedy any faults in his reports. He also worked to set up a blind trust to completely separate himself from any stock-trading decisions; the trust was approved by the Ethics Committee in July 2021.
After issuing its report, the OCE sent the matter to the Ethics Committee, which is tasked with investigating OCE allegations and determining appropriate penalties. Upon receiving the Malinowski case, the Ethics Committee said twice – first on September 7, then again on October 21 – that it was continuing its review of the matter.
From there, however, proceedings screeched to a halt; between October 2021 and Malinowski’s re-election defeat in 2022, the Ethics Committee did not comment on the case or mention Malinowski’s name publicly. Part of that may have been due to turmoil in the committee’s leadership: in 2022, Chairman Ted Deutch (D-Florida) resigned from Congress partway through his term and Ranking Member Jackie Walorski (R-Indiana) died in a car crash.
But Malinowski said he was told at the time that politics on the committee had also played a role in delaying an outcome in his case. Former Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pennsylvania), who had a seat on the committee at the time and briefly served as its chairwoman, told the New Jersey Globe that there was indeed an unusual logjam of cases regarding stock trading disclosures that year.
“We were getting, as I recall, a little bit bogged down because of the politics of the committee – the fact that many of these PTRs, or lack of filing PTRs or delayed filings, could affect people’s re-elections,” Wild said. “That particular year, we were just having a lot of trouble moving those.”
Several other matters regarding late disclosures, however, were introduced and resolved within the same timeframe. OCE referrals involving late PTRs from Reps. Pat Fallon (R-Texas), Chris Jacobs (R-New York), Thomas Suozzi (D-New York), and John Rutherford (R-Florida), for example, were all sent to the committee in early 2022 and dismissed later that same year.
The fact that the Malinowski matter remained unresolved meant that, during the congressman’s tough 2022 re-election fight in the 7th district, Republicans could continue saying he was “under investigation” over his stock trades. The inquiry was a recurring theme of attack ads from Republican foe Tom Kean Jr. and from the national Republicans who spent millions to support him; Kean ended up winning by three percentage points.
Once Malinowski left office, the Ethics Committee officially lost jurisdiction, and the inquiry came to an end. In the three years since then, the committee (which regularly rotates through members) has witnessed a near-total makeover in membership, with only two of its ten current members, both Republicans, having served on the committee during the original Malinowski case.
For any of this to matter again, of course, Malinowski will have to win the ongoing race for the 11th district, which is no sure thing. Eleven other Democrats are running for the seat, which has few overlaps with the district Malinowski previously represented for two terms, though an early internal poll from Malinowski’s campaign found him to be the best-known Democratic candidate.
