Rep. Ro Khanna (D): COME ON DOWN! Corruption Investigation Referral Starts NOW!

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The complaint asserts the following:

Representative Ro Khanna is a Democratic congressman from California's 17th District (basically Silicon Valley). He has been in Congress since January 2017. He is currently in his fifth term.

Khanna has done six different things wrong.

Each one is bad enough to investigate on its own.

Together, they are very bad.

His family's stock trades line up suspiciously with the committees he sits on, the donors who fund him, and the votes he takes.

That's bad.

Khanna's household made between $15 million and $108 million from these trades, with a middle estimate of about $61 million.

The estimate cannot be made any better than this. The disclosure forms provide only disclosure "bands". Precise amounts can only be determined with subpoena power.

But we do have one hard number:

Compared to just buying a basic stock-market index fund, his family beat the market by about $28 million.

$28 million.

The complaint says that Congressman Khanna should pay this money back.

Now, how the trading actually works in this household is important because it helps us to understanding everything else, so I will explain that now.

Khanna himself has filed 114 reports with the House Clerk listing every trade his household has made. Those reports cover 37,238 individual trades. That's a huge amount. Most members of Congress don't trade nearly that much.

But here's the kicker.

Almost none of those trades are in Khanna's own name.

99.997% of them are listed as belonging to either his wife (Ritu Ahuja Khanna) or his dependent child.

That's basically all Khanna trades. A massive volume.

Yet virtually none in his own name.

Curious.

Khanna has publicly said this is fine because the trading is done through what's called a "separately managed account" or "blind trust", meaning a broker or trustee makes the decisions without telling him.

If that were true, he'd be off the hook because he wouldn't know what was being bought or sold.

The complaint says that's not true. When you read his official financial disclosure form (the one he signs every year), it shows:

> No separately managed account
> No blind trust
> No third-party broker handling the actively-traded stocks

Instead, the trades come from about a dozen family trusts (the Ritu Ahuja 1994 Trust, the Ritu Ahuja 1995 Trust, the Ahuja Children's Trust, etc.).

These are family-controlled entities.

Whoever's making the trade decisions is a family member. His wife or his child. (Put another way: his "wife" or his "child".) Not an outside professional.

Uh oh.

The "I didn't know what my spouse was trading" defense doesn't work. Nothing on the official paperwork supports it.

Think about it.

Do you think Khanna and his wife sit around and his wife is just buying Palantir stocks, while, by coincidence, Khanna sits on the defense tech committee?

And they don't talk?

That's the framework. But it gets a whole lot worse.

Because the complaint isn't undergirded merely by this speculation. But by hard evidence.

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