By Greg Morcroft - Federal prosecutors are investigating whether Congressional staffers helped tip Wall Street traders about a change in health care policy and a report says that they have subpoenaed the powerful Ways and Means Committee and a Congressional health-care aid.
The Wall Street Journal wrote on Thursday, citing public documents, that the prosecutor subpoenaed Brian Sutter, the staff director for the House Ways And Means Committee’s staff director for a health-care subpanel as well as the Committee itself, seeing both records and testimony.
Sutter has also received a separate subpoena to compel Sutter to appear before a federal grand jury sitting in Manhattan, according to the congressional record, which the paper said House rules required. However, neither the Committee nor Sutter would comment for the report, the Journal said.
The subpoenas are part of civil and criminal probes to determine if any government workers illegally shared information about pending health-care legislation that found its way to traders.
The Journal said its own reporting from 2013 about the health-care stock trading activity around the time the government unveiled policy that was good for certain companies, sparked the probes.
According to the report such subpoenas of Congress members and staffers are rare and these are the first formal requests related to insider trading in almost 10 years.