Congressman Pleads With Congress to Stop Him Before He Trades Stocks Again

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

In 2023, Rep. Ro Khanna, the most active stock trader in Congress, demanded that some sort of law be passed to urgently stop members like him from trading stocks.

“All I want for Christmas is to clean up the corruption in Congress,” Rep. Khanna, who is Hindu, declared. “Our political system should not be for sale.”

That year, Rep. Khanna made 4,253 trades making him by far the House’s most active trader.

The completely useless resolution that Khanna knew had no chance of passing urged banning “members of Congress from holding and trading individual stocks”, imposed term limits, a ban on PAC contributions, a “binding code of ethics” and term limits for Supreme Court justices.

In 2024, Rep. Khanna traded $450,000 worth of stocks and was once again named the “most active trader” in Congress. The 200 transactions by Silicon Valley’s congressman included significant investments in tech companies, including major federal cybersecurity contractors like CrowdStrike and AOC, even while Rep. Khanna sits on the House Cybersecurity, Information Technology Oversight Subcommittee.

Rep. Khanna’s trades also “spanned all of the top five military contractors” while serving as a ranking member of the House Armed Services subcommittee on cybersecurity.

The 4th richest Californian in Congress with a net worth at least in the tens of millions, claims that most of these investments are a private trust held for his wife, Ritu Khanna, a 46-year-old woman, courtesy of her father, Monte Ahuja, an Indian immigrant who owns an investment company, Mura Holdings, and that it’s managed by independent money managers who keep going back to defense stocks even after he promised to divest from them back in 2021.

Despite introducing multiple proposals to get members of Congress out of the stock market, Rep. Khanna couldn’t even get his family out of trading stocks from industries he oversees.

But Rep. Khanna’s “political reform resolution” conveniently called for banning “members of Congress” from trading stocks. Not their spouses. Or the money managers of their spouses.

Silicon Valley’s congressman is certainly far from the only politician with sizable financial interests in companies that intersect with his congressional oversight areas, but he’s the sleaziest when it comes to loudly virtue signaling, calling for urgent reforms, condemning his colleagues and promising major reforms while doing all the things that he’s denouncing.

Now he’s at it again.

Rep. Khanna announced a ‘Drain the Swamp Act’ to fight corruption by people like him.

“Anti-corruption has to be core to rebuilding the Democratic brand,” Rep. Khanna announced. “Democrats need to be seen as owning the mantle of reform.”

Rep. Khanna, whose regular announcements about how much he hates the type of behavior he engages in constantly pop up in media headlines and Twitter feeds, knows all about “owning the mantle of reform”, he just doesn’t know anything about actually wearing the mantle of reform.

“This is what enrages the working class in this country, that you have big donors that are influencing these decisions,” Khanna fumed in an article about Gov. Newsom’s aides having dinner with self-driving vehicle lobbyists, stymying his efforts to stop those vehicles.

Last year, Rep. Khanna took over hosting duties from Rep. Pelosi for the Innovation Leadership Circle Retreat in Napa Valley that featured members of Congress and tech executives, including the chief legal officer of Coinbase, a crypto company, and investors. And some, like Ron Klain, Biden’s former chief of staff, who now works for Airbnb, spanned both worlds.

Other attendees included Indian billionaire Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist with holdings in DoorDash, Instacart, and a critic of self-driving vehicles who backs rival Glydways. Khosla is also a donor and endorser of Khanna. And Khanna supports public transit ‘pod cars’ like those of Glydways while trying to restrict competition from self-driving cars..

So much for the rage of the working class, which can’t afford to set foot in Rep. Khanna’s neighborhood unless they’re there to drop off a delivery, about big donors buying influence.

Other Khanna donors include Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Google’s CEOs and millions from high-dollar personnel at tech firms. And the only reason Khanna made it to Congress was backing from top executives at Facebook and Google.

How did Rep. Khanna do it?

In 2009, Obama picked Khanna to serve as the deputy assistant secretary of the Department of Commerce and then the White House Business Council which brought him into contact with top executives. Gov. Jerry Brown planted him on the state’s Workforce Investment Board. He wrote a book, ‘Entrepreneurial Nation’, “profiling” some of the “business leaders” he met under Obama accompanied by pull quotes from Elon Musk and other CEOs. Then it was on to Wilson Sonsini, a law firm that represents tech companies and venture capitalists, with extensive connections to the Obama administration. Before he even decided to run for congress, Khanna had a $1.2 million war chest despite being a complete unknown outside big government and big tech.

Rep. Ro Khanna’s entire political career is a tribute to the influence of money in politics.

But Rep. Ro Khanna also wanted to have it both ways. He wanted to rub shoulders and take money from tech company CEOs and then pound the pulpit about the evils of big money.

And so he co-chaired Sen. Bernie Sanders’s socialist presidential campaign while playing a “progressive capitalist”. He endorsed Rep. Barbara Lee for Senate while knowing she had no chance to build cred with leftist radicals. This contradiction in terms seeps through Khanna’s entire brand as a leftist who built his entire career on his business contacts, who fulminates about big money in politics while bringing money into politics, who castigates Congress for being in thrall to the people he hosts luxurious retreats in Napa to wine and dine.

“Congress must pass my 5-point anti-corruption plan. It’s time to unrig Washington,” Rep. Khanna demanded. Several months earlier, he had been forced to return thousands of dollars to members of the Duong family caught up in one of the state’s largest corruption investigations.

A photo of Khanna however still appears arm in arm with Andy Duong who has been accused of laundering political donations through a karaoke club that also sold cocaine and trafficked prostitutes. Anti-corruption agendas don’t come any more corrupt than this.

“Getting money and lobbyists out of politics, that should be our mantle,” Rep. Khanna claimed less than a year after his Napa event and having to return money from an alleged crime family.

But how will Rep. Ro Khanna get himself out of politics?

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.