Correction, September 3, 2026. An earlier version of this article, published March 1, said 296 members of Congress were "sanctioned by foreign governments" and built its argument on trading figures that are now six months stale. The 296 came from a database flag that folds Russia's retaliatory entry-ban list together with automated name matches against United States debarment and exclusion registers, and "sanctioned" was the wrong word for both. The article has been rewritten from the records. What the old number was made of is set out under "Where 296 came from" below.
Who is on the list
Two hundred and ninety-two members of Congress in the CapitolExposed database appear on a foreign government's counter-sanctions list. Two hundred and eighty-eight of them are sitting: 221 of the 434 House members in the database and 67 of the 98 senators. Four have since left office.
All 292 are on the same list, published by Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Sixteen of them also appear on an Iranian list and two on a Chinese one. There is no fourth country.
The Russian designation is an entry ban. It bars the named person from Russia and freezes whatever they hold in Russian institutions, which for a member of Congress is generally nothing. Moscow issues these lists in response to United States sanctions and to American policy on Ukraine, and it issues them in bulk: the version in this database covers half the House and two thirds of the Senate. Being on it says something about what the Russian foreign ministry thinks of Congress. It says nothing about the individual member.
What the list is not
It is not a Treasury designation. Nobody on it appears on the Office of Foreign Assets Control's Specially Designated Nationals list, the register that shuts a person out of the American financial system. None of the 538 members CapitolExposed has cross-referenced against OpenSanctions match that list, or the European Union, United Nations or United Kingdom sanctions registers. Not one.
The distinction is the whole point. An OFAC designation follows a finding: a Treasury determination, a documented basis, a legal consequence, and a process for contesting it. A Russian entry ban follows a press release. The two share a vocabulary and nothing else, and this site collapsed them into a single column headed "Sanctioned".
What the listed members trade
Because the list covers most of Congress, the trading of members on it is close to the trading of Congress. That is worth saying before any of the figures below are read as a pattern.
Of the 292, 128 have filed at least one stock transaction. Together they account for 13,340 of the 38,410 disclosed transactions in the database, reporting a combined value of between $652.9 million and $2.2 billion. STOCK Act filings report a band rather than a figure, so both ends are the edges of ranges members checked on a form, not amounts they moved. That is 35% of the transactions in the database, from members who make up 54% of the sitting Congress.
Of those 13,340 transactions, 2,704 score above 0.3 on CapitolExposed's conflict measure, which weighs committee jurisdiction, proximity to related legislative action, lobbying on the same issues, donations from the same interests, and how far a trade departs from that member's own pattern. The measure is the site's own and is not an official one.
Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) has filed the most, 1,703 transactions, 305 of them above 0.3. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has filed 1,017, Susan Collins (R-ME) 787, and Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) 660, of which 199 are above 0.3. The largest reported band totals belong to Darrell Issa (R-CA), whose 20 transactions report up to $405 million, and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), whose 274 report up to $162.1 million.
None of that follows from the entry ban. It is what those members have filed, and it would read the same if Moscow had never published a list.
Where 296 came from
CapitolExposed stores a flag on each member marking them as sanctioned. It is true for 296 members. Until now the site rendered it as a red "Yes" under a column headed Sanctioned, let it raise a member's composite risk score, and used it as the headline number for the March version of this article.
Two hundred and ninety-two of those 296 are the entry-ban list described above. The other four are Brad Sherman (D-CA), Joe Wilson (R-SC), Angie Craig (D-MN) and Thom Tillis (R-NC), who carry the flag with no counter-sanction record behind it at all.
Separately, 64 members carry a match to a United States exclusion or debarment register: the General Services Administration's contractor exclusion list, the Department of Health and Human Services list of individuals barred from billing Medicare and Medicaid, seven state medical boards, and two federal trade-control registers. These are domestic administrative lists. They have nothing to do with foreign policy, and appearing on one is not being sanctioned in any sense the word usually carries.
They are also, on inspection, mostly the wrong people. The matcher works on names, and the names it matched are in the record:
- Andy Harris (R-MD) matched an entry reading KANDY A HARRIS.
- Bernie Moreno (R-OH) matched FERNIE MORENO.
- Austin Scott (R-GA) matched Justin Scott Gangloff.
- Ann Wagner (R-MO) matched two entries, DEA ANN WAGNER and KIM ANN WAGNER.
- Christopher Murphy (D-CT) matched BRIAN CHRISTOPHER MURPHY and CHRISTOPHER G MURPHY.
The exclusion records carry a case number and a city and no other identifying detail. Nothing in them ties the entry to the member whose page it appeared on. The site should not have shown them, and the March article should not have counted them.
What the records do not show
Every match described here is automated, made on name similarity and scored by an algorithm. There is no manual review step and there never was. The March version of this article said matches were manually verified, and that was not true. Scores at or above 0.9 are stored as "confirmed" and those above 0.7 as "probable"; both are threshold labels, not judgments. Of the 292 entry-ban matches, 229 clear 0.9 and 63 sit below it.
Being on Russia's list is not evidence of anything a member did. Being absent from it is not evidence either. The list is a foreign ministry's choice, made in bulk and revised without notice.
Trades counted here include those filed for a spouse or a dependent child, because that is how the STOCK Act requires them to be filed. Amounts are ranges. Timing is not causation. A conflict score is a reason to open a filing, not a conclusion about it.
Methodology
Counter-sanction and exclusion matches come from OpenSanctions, an aggregator of official sanctions, watchlist and debarment sources, cross-referenced against the member roster by name similarity. That match set was built on March 1, 2026 and has not been refreshed since, so it reflects the lists as they stood then. Trade counts and reported values come from House and Senate periodic transaction reports as ingested by CapitolExposed. Every figure in this article was pulled on September 3, 2026.