(Boulder, CO) – Eric Weissmann, candidate for Congress in Colorado’s 2nd Congressional District, Wednesday called on Congressman Jared Polis to return to the U.S. Treasury profits he made by insider trading.

"Colorado voters and American taxpayers are the victims of Jared Polis’ insider trading,” stated Weissmann. “To use his position of trust in the Congress to obtain inside information about legislation, and perhaps even to influence that legislation, right before his stock trades benefited from specific legislative provisions calls into question the integrity of everything Congressman Polis has done in Congress. In this case, there are technical provisions of Obamacare, enacted by the narrowest of margins, which may be law solely to benefit Polis’ massive portfolio."

"Who was Congressman Polis looking out for? Was he trying to recoup some of the nearly six million dollars of his own money that Polis spent on his first Congressional campaign?

"Congressman Polis should return his insider trading profits to the U.S. Treasury. Doing so will not put to rest questions about why he supported these specific provisions in the first place. But it will at least give Colorado voters the peace of mind that in the end he was not financially rewarded for tweaking Obamacare for his own personal benefit," concluded Weissmann. Polis is the wealthiest Democrat in the House of Representatives.

On Monday, Eric Weissmann called on Jared Polis to pledge to the voters of Colorado that he will never again engage in congressional insider trading, while legislation, known as the STOCK Act, aimed at preventing such behavior, slogs through the Congress.

Polis added his support to the STOCK Act (H.R. 1148) just days after Stanford University’s Hoover Institute fellow Peter Schweitzer revealed in his book, "Throw Them All Out," that Polis had abused his position to obtain information unavailable to the general public, and to trade on that information. According to the book, Polis used the inside information to make multi-million dollar investments in a private medical tourism company and in biotech ETF shares, each positioned to profit from legislative action.

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