Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) was arrested Wednesday morning on charges of insider trading. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for New York’s Southern District announced that Collins surrendered himself in Manhattan. His son Cameron was also arrested. Their arraignment was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon.
The arrest stems from actions Collins and his family allegedly took last summer. According to NBC, on June 22, 2017, while Collins was attending the annual congressional picnic at the White House, he received an email from Simon Wilkinson, the CEO of Innate Immunotherapeutics Ltd.—an Australian company on whose board Collins was serving even while he was in Congress and in which Collins and his family had invested heavily. The email from Wilkinson informed Collins that a new drug Innate was developing to treat multiple sclerosis had failed a clinical trial.
The indictment states that 16 minutes later, Collins placed the first of several missed calls to his son Cameron from the White House grounds. Father and son soon successfully connected; during their conversation, Rep. Collins informed Collins fils of the failed trial. Over the next few days, before Innate’s bad news was revealed to the public, Cameron, his fiancée, her parents, and another friend identified in the indictment only as “CC-6” sold enough stock in the company to save over $768,000 in losses.
Collins’s attorneys issued a statement this morning in response to the allegations:
Since becoming the first member of Congress to endorse Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy in February 2016, Collins’s profile in Washington has risen. After Trump’s election, Collins was tapped to serve as congressional liaison for Trump’s transition team. And he has been increasingly visible as a talking head on cable news.
Collins, whose 27th district of New York stretches from the eastern suburbs of Buffalo to the westernmost major finger lake of Canandaigua, won 67.2 percent of the vote in 2016. His arrest raises the question of whether he will remain on the ballot as the Republican nominee—and if he does, whether the 68-year-old former businessman (Collins was founder and CEO of the Nutall Gear Corporation) and Erie County Executive could lose what was previously seen as a safe seat for a Republican party fighting to hold on to the House of Representatives.
While the Cook Political Report’s 2017 iteration of the Partisan Voter Index rated Collins’s district as favoring Republicans by 11 points, Tuesday night’s special election for Ohio’s 12th district—a district in which the same index claimed that Republicans hold a 7-point advantage—is still too close call. Considering the energy of the Democratic base, the widespread unpopularity of President Trump, and the possibility of national Democrats targeting Collins’s seat in the wake of today’s news, there is a chance that Collins’s seat could be in jeopardy. His opponent, Nate McMurray, is a 43-year-old town supervisor from Grand Island, whose relative youth and impressive educational background—he has a law degree and was a Fulbright scholar—could make him an attractive candidate in a district that has not elected a Democrat since the last round of redistricting occurred in 2013. That said, the district is, as Richard E. Cohen and James A. Barnes put it in the latest edition of the Almanac of American Politics, “the most Republican district in the state by most measures”—and the district in which Donald Trump performed best in 2016.
