CNN published a widely shared investigation in February 2026 naming 10 U.S. senators whose stock trades overlapped with their committee responsibilities. The story generated headlines, cable news segments, and a fresh round of demands for a trading ban.
But CNN's list missed the worst offenders.
CapitolExposed's conflict-scoring model, which analyzes 3,759 disclosed trades across five weighted dimensions (committee overlap at 30 percent, timing proximity at 25 percent, lobbying connections at 20 percent, campaign donation links at 15 percent, and trade size at 10 percent), identifies 14 additional senators whose trading patterns score higher than most of CNN's list. These members operate in near-total media silence.
Jerry Moran: The Most Conflicted Trader in Congress
Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS) holds the single highest conflict score in the CapitolExposed database: 0.650, flagged on a Disney stock purchase dated December 6, 2018. Fourteen of the 25 highest-conflict trades in the entire database belong to Moran.
His average conflict score is 0.2305 on spouse trades, more than 11 times the congressional average of 0.058.
Moran sits on 17 committees and subcommittees, including Commerce, Science, and Transportation; Appropriations; and the Select Committee on Intelligence. That committee footprint is one of the largest in the Senate, and it means nearly every major sector of the economy falls within his oversight jurisdiction.
On the same day as a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on artificial intelligence policy, Moran purchased shares of Alphabet. While serving on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, he held up to $50,000 in Boeing stock. He previously violated the STOCK Act in connection with Costco trades that were not disclosed on time.
Moran is not a co-sponsor of any pending congressional trading ban legislation. He has not spoken publicly about his trading record. He has received virtually no media coverage of his conflict scores.
Compare that to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who attracts roughly 100 times more media coverage for trading activity with lower conflict scores. The most dangerous conflicts of interest are the ones nobody watches.
Angus King: Energy Trades From the Energy Committee
Sen. Angus King (I-ME), who caucuses with Democrats, sits on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Public STOCK Act filings show multiple trades in Schlumberger (SLB), ConocoPhillips (COP), and ExxonMobil (XOM), all flagged at a 0.444 conflict score.
King votes on energy policy, pipeline approvals, and federal land leasing. He trades stocks in companies that appear before his committee. His portfolio intersects directly with his legislative authority, yet his name appears in zero major investigative reports on congressional trading.
Sheldon Whitehouse: 621 Trades and the Independent Account Defense
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has disclosed 621 trades in public filings. MarketBeat's tracker counts 737 when including partial-year data and amendments. The total volume exceeds $10.46 million.
Whitehouse sits on the Finance Committee, the Judiciary Committee, and the Budget Committee. His trades include Visa (V), American Express (AXP), Bank of America (BAC), Goldman Sachs (GS), and JPMorgan Chase (JPM), a portfolio that reads like a Finance Committee witness list.
On January 9, 2026, Whitehouse sold shares of Nvidia (NVDA), the dominant AI chipmaker, weeks before a series of Senate hearings on AI regulation. The New York Times previously reported that Whitehouse's trades overlapped with companies under his committee jurisdiction. Whitehouse has said he uses a contractually independent account manager who makes all trading decisions without his input.
The data does not distinguish between a trade made by a senator and a trade made by a senator's financial adviser. Both show up in the same disclosure filings. Both carry the same conflict scores. The STOCK Act does not audit whether an account manager is truly operating independently.
Bill Cassidy: Finance Committee, Financial Stocks
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) sits on the Finance Committee and has traded BlackRock (BLK) and JPMorgan Chase (JPM). These are companies that regularly lobby the Finance Committee on tax policy, retirement regulation, and financial services oversight.
Cassidy's trades do not generate headlines. He does not appear on watchdog lists. His conflict scores are elevated precisely because of committee overlap, the factor that contributes 30 percent of the total score. The trades are modest in size, which keeps them below the dollar thresholds that attract press attention. But the structural conflict is identical to the one that makes Pelosi's trades controversial.
The NBER Paper Nobody Read
A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper published in December 2025 found that congressional leaders (committee chairs, ranking members, and party leadership) outperform backbenchers in the stock market by up to 47 percent per year. The effect grows stronger when the leader's party controls the chamber, giving them greater influence over legislation.
The paper did not name specific members. But the finding maps directly onto the pattern visible in CapitolExposed data: the senators with the highest conflict scores are overwhelmingly committee leaders, not junior members. Power and trading advantage are correlated in the data.
The Attention Economy of Congressional Scandal
Media coverage of congressional trading follows a power law. A handful of famous names absorb almost all the oxygen. Nancy Pelosi's NVDA calls, Tommy Tuberville's defense-sector trades, and the COVID-era Burr scandal together account for more column inches than the rest of Congress combined.
That distortion creates a blind spot. Journalists cover the names that generate clicks, not the names that generate the highest conflict scores. A senator who trades modestly in dollar terms but trades directly in the sector his committee regulates is, from an ethics standpoint, a bigger problem than a former Speaker whose large trades happen in sectors she no longer oversees. But the former Speaker sells newspapers.
CapitolExposed's conflict model is agnostic about fame. The algorithm does not know who has a Wikipedia page and who does not. The scores reflect committee assignments, trade timing, lobbying connections, donation patterns, and trade size. When the model flags 14 senators that CNN missed, the explanation is not that CNN's journalists were lazy. The explanation is that the media selection process and the conflict-scoring process optimize for different things.
Who Else?
The full list of 14 under-scrutinized senators includes members across both parties, from swing-state moderates to safe-seat conservatives. Their common features: they sit on committees with broad economic jurisdiction, they trade in sectors those committees regulate, and they have never been the subject of a major investigative report on trading conflicts.
CapitolExposed is not publishing a ranked list of names as a gotcha exercise. The conflict scores are derived from public data using a transparent methodology. Every senator's score is available on their individual profile page. Readers can compare scores, review the trades, and draw their own conclusions.
The point is not that these 14 senators are corrupt. The point is that the media's attention budget has been almost entirely consumed by a handful of famous names while members with objectively higher conflict scores operate without scrutiny. CNN's investigation was valuable. But naming 10 senators and missing the 14 worst offenders illustrates exactly how much of this problem remains invisible.
The real risk to democratic accountability is not the politician who trades in the spotlight. The real risk is the committee chair who trades in the dark, scores 11 times the congressional average on conflict metrics, and has never once been asked about it by a reporter.
What Would Fix This
A trading ban that applies to all members, spouses, and senior staff would eliminate the structural conflict entirely. Blind trusts managed by independent fiduciaries, with no communication back to the member, are the gold standard that ethics experts recommend.
Short of a ban, mandatory pre-clearance of all trades through an independent ethics body, similar to what the SEC requires of its own employees, would create a meaningful check. SEC employees cannot trade stocks of companies they oversee. Members of Congress can.
The current system relies on disclosure alone. Disclosure works only if someone reads the filings. For 14 senators in the CapitolExposed database, nobody has.