U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2nd District, and Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, reacted Tuesday to a New York Times story saying they or their families bought or sold stock that could represent a conflict of interest for them.

Blumenthal and Courtney, along with 95 other members of Congress, were named in the Times report. The investments in question were not made or held by Courtney and Blumenthal, but by their wives, according to the politicians’ offices.

While it is not illegal for members of Congress to invest in companies, even if the companies are related to their legislative work, the Times story comes on the heels of recent efforts to bar Congress members from trading stock.

A bill is currently pending in Congress that would bar members and their families from trading stocks while in office. It is unclear if members will vote on the bill before they recess on Sept. 30.

The Times looked at the financial transactions of members of Congress made between 2019 and 2021. They compared that information to members’ committee assignments. The Times reported that Blumenthal’s family has reported trades in 103 companies with two possible conflicts of interest. Blumenthal’s wife has a family trust that purchased between $1.5 million and $3.1 million in shares of a “wireless communications site owner” while the senator sat on a Senate Commerce subcommittee pertaining to overseas communications, media and broadband.

A spokesperson for Blumenthal said that Blumenthal’s wife does not make the investment decisions; they are made independently by an investment manager of her family’s trust.

“Senator Blumenthal owns no individual stocks. An accountant error misattributed assets to the Senator incorrectly in a previous filing, but that mistake has been corrected in an amended disclosure, which is publicly available on the Senate website,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “Senator Blumenthal supports a ban on Members of Congress holding individual stocks, voted in favor of the STOCK Act, and supports more stringent measures to further eliminate conflicts of interest. His wife is one of multiple beneficiaries of several family investment funds.“

The spokesperson said the investment funds’ financial advisors make decisions independent of Blumenthal’s wife.

“She doesn’t have any ability to direct transactions or the purchase of stocks, including these stocks,” the spokesperson said.

Her family’s investment fund still owns stock in Radius Global Infrastructure, but not in Pinterest, which are the two stocks that could be seen as conflicts of interest.

In December of last year. Business Insider conducted a similar investigation to the Times, going over almost “9,000 financial-disclosure reports for every sitting lawmaker and their top-ranking staffers” and conducting hundreds of interviews. Members of Congress were given green, yellow and red ratings — green meaning “their financial compliance is solid,” yellow meaning “caution — their actions are borderline and deserve greater scrutiny,” and red meaning “danger — that a member has multiple issues that could expose them to ethical problems.”

Blumenthal was rated “yellow” because of two staffer violations of the “STOCK Act,” which was enacted in 2012 to stop insider trading. Of the 182 high-level staffers identified by Insider to have violated financial disclosure regulations, only five responded by disclosing their waivers and answering questions from the publication, including Maria McElwain, a Blumenthal staffer, who disclosed, too late, 18 trades that took place during four months in 2019.

“McElwain attributed the gaffe to miscommunication with her financial advisor about federal reporting requirements. The Senate Select Committee on Ethics waived her late fee after she fessed up, she said,” Insider wrote at the time.

Blumenthal’s Republican opponent for Senate, Leora Levy, issued a statement to The Day Tuesday.

"The New York Times investigation into Dick Blumenthal's insider trading is deeply troubling. Dick Blumenthal gets even richer while in public office … while the rest of us suffer through higher prices and lower wages,” Levy said. “Blumenthal cares more about his investments than his constituents. This November, We the People will remove him from the public office he has clearly abused, allowing him to spend more time on his investments without the benefit of inside information."

Asked whether Levy would stop investing in stocks if elected, she wrote in a statement, “All public officials, including bureaucrats and members of Congress, must abide by the same laws as every other American citizen: NO INSIDER TRADING.”

“Leora does not run/trade her family’s portfolio, and will consider a blind trust if elected. Something they already would have done had she been confirmed as Ambassador (to Chile),” a Levy campaign spokeswoman answered in a statement.

The 65-year-old Greenwich philanthropist worked as a trader at Phibro-Salomon, Inc. during some of the commodity trading house’s most successful years. Former President Donald Trump nominated Levy to be ambassador to Chile when he was president, but her nomination was blocked.

Courtney was labeled as “green,” or financially sound, by the Insider report, with no violations to speak of. In a related story, Insider highlighted 15 legislators “who shape U.S. defense policy” and have invested in military contractors, including Courtney. He reported “briefly owning defense-related stocks during 2020.” Courtney is the chair of the House panel’s Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee. Courtney told Insider that he’d since divested of the individual stock holdings.

According to the Times, Courtney’s family traded in 48 companies with five potential conflicts of interest, including Alphabet, Amazon, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin and Microsoft. While on the House Armed Services Committee, Courtney’s wife “bought shares of Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft, which wrangled over a multibillion-dollar cloud-computing contract with the Pentagon.” She sold her stake in those companies as well as Lockheed Martin and Honeywell in 2020.

Courtney spokesperson Patrick Cassidy wrote in an email Tuesday that neither Courtney nor his spouse made the purchases in question themselves.

“These securities were part of a rollover from his wife’s 401K plan from St. Francis Hospital, where she worked for more than 20 years as a nurse practitioner, to an IRA account after she changed jobs and was hired at Connecticut Children’s Hospital,” Cassidy wrote. “This took place in 2019. The IRA account was managed by an investment advisor, who solely selected the specific assets in the account.”

Courtney and his wife discovered, while preparing in 2020 for Courtney’s 2019 financial disclosure, that the IRA had individual stocks chosen by the financial advisor “and not, as they had intended, mutual funds and ETFs. On learning of this, the Congressman publicly reported the unintended stock purchases in multiple, voluntarily filed PTRs.” PTRs are “periodic transaction reports” where, according to the House Ethics Committee, members of Congress must report “each purchase, sale, or exchange involving stocks, bonds, commodities, futures, or other securities.”

The investment advisor then sold the stocks, reinvesting them into joint mutual funds and ETFs in August of 2020.

Cassidy argued that the companies that could be conflicts of interest “are engaged in a massive array of business activities around the globe,” so, “it would be difficult to find a Congressional Committee whose work did not somehow relate to their business activities.”

Cassidy said Courtney and his wife do not buy or hold individual stocks.

“This instance represents a deviation from that longstanding practice,” Cassidy wrote.

Courtney is on the record opposing members of Congress and their families owning individual stocks.

“Courtney does not believe that members of Congress should hold and trade individual stocks—no matter what party they are from, or what their background was before coming to Congress,” Cassidy wrote. “He is supportive of several measures in the House that would ban members of Congress, their spouses, and their senior staff from actively trading stocks while in office.”

“It’s important to note that this inadvertent purchase was a mistake because it went against Rep. Courtney’s own longstanding practice of not purchasing or holding individual stocks—not because it is against the law for Members of Congress to make such purchases,” Cassidy added.

Courtney’s opponent for Congress, state Rep. Mike France, R-Ledyard, did not return a request for comment. Green Party candidate Kevin Blacker commented on the Times report.

“Joe Courtney is a good guy, and he deserves the benefit of the doubt in terms of getting to explain it, but I think he needs to explain it in person, not through a spokesman, it needs to be explained where the public, the press, can see his face, see his body language, listen to his tone of voice, and judge if it was an honest mistake,” Blacker said Tuesday.

Asked whether he would buy and/or sell individual stocks if elected, Blacker said, “I don’t trust the stock market.”

“I think it’s a sham. I think it’s set up to screw the little guy. I don’t have any investments in the stock market,” he said.

s.spinella@theday.com