Jebadeb

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U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow signed a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) with Laidley LLC — a shell company of Meta Platforms — on June 29, 2024, giving her access to confidential details about the tech giant's plans for a $50 billion data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana, according to the document obtained by the Gulf States Newsroom.

Within months, she began buying stock in Meta and Nvidia, the company whose chips power Meta's data centers. She didn't disclose those trades for more than a year, well past the 45-day deadline required under the STOCK Act, the federal law that bars members of Congress from trading on nonpublic information gained through their official position.

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Letlow’s trading continued after the deal became public and the window of secrecy closed. On Jan. 31, 2025, she partially sold her Nvidia holdings and purchased between $1,001 and $15,000 in additional Meta stock. A week later, she sold part of her Meta holdings, then sold the remainder on July 2, 2025. She did not disclose any of those trades until Aug. 11, 2025, more than a month after selling her last Meta shares.

Letlow would not interview for this story. In a written statement, her spokesperson, Matt Smith, said the congresswoman had no role in directing any of her trades, including the Meta transactions, and that the NDA played no part in them because she was unaware the trades were happening.

Ethics experts say the timeline raises serious questions: whether a sitting member of Congress and the current Republican candidate for U.S. Senate should sign an NDA with a private tech company that spent more than $26 million lobbying the federal government in 2025, and whether she traded stock after gaining access to nonpublic information through the agreement.

The NDA Letlow signed was one of Meta's own — separate from the NDAs at least 54 elected officials in Louisiana have signed related to large-scale industrial projects, including the Meta, Amazon and Applied Digital data centers, since Gov. Jeff Landry took office.

It’s the same agreement Landry personally signed with Meta in April 2024, two months before Letlow.

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quote:

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Letlow’s trading continued after the deal became public and the window of secrecy closed. On Jan. 31, 2025, she partially sold her Nvidia holdings and purchased between $1,001 and $15,000 in additional Meta stock. A week later, she sold part of her Meta holdings, then sold the remainder on July 2, 2025. She did not disclose any of those trades until Aug. 11, 2025, more than a month after selling her last Meta shares.

Letlow would not interview for this story. In a written statement, her spokesperson, Matt Smith, said the congresswoman had no role in directing any of her trades, including the Meta transactions, and that the NDA played no part in them because she was unaware the trades were happening.

Ethics experts say the timeline raises serious questions: whether a sitting member of Congress and the current Republican candidate for U.S. Senate should sign an NDA with a private tech company that spent more than $26 million lobbying the federal government in 2025, and whether she traded stock after gaining access to nonpublic information through the agreement.

The NDA Letlow signed was one of Meta's own — separate from the NDAs at least 54 elected officials in Louisiana have signed related to large-scale industrial projects, including the Meta, Amazon and Applied Digital data centers, since Gov. Jeff Landry took office.

It’s the same agreement Landry personally signed with Meta in April 2024, two months before Letlow.

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