★  Two Senators · One Bill · $3,500 · The Feature  ★

BURN THE PLAYBOOK

A receipts-first daily on the architecture of legalized self-dealing.

The Stock-Trade Issue · Day 44

Day 44.

She wrote the ban. Her account bought the pharma. Same week.

By Michael Starr Hopkins · 6:00 A.M. E.T.

She wrote the bill.
Her fund owned the stock.

Washington — On January 21, 2025, Sen. Ashley Moody of Florida — appointed, not elected, to fill Marco Rubio’s vacated Senate seat — took the oath of office. She walked from the chamber to a room down the hall where the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee was finishing its first organizational meeting of the new Congress. The committee that, alongside Senate Finance, sets the federal terms on which the country’s prescription drugs are priced.

Forty-four days later, on March 6, 2025, her own brokerage account — not a spouse’s, not a joint trust, the “Self” field on her Senate Periodic Transaction Report — purchased between $100,000 and $250,000 of Eli Lilly. The pharmaceutical company that had spent the previous fiscal quarter lobbying her committee on Medicare drug-pricing rules.

This is a pattern, not an event. In the first ninety days of her tenure, Sen. Moody’s self-account executed 57 trades and moved $2.2 million in volume. Eighteen of those were directional options contracts — eleven different companies, four consecutive trading days in late February. One was a $100K–$250K position in NVIDIA, opened on Day 2 of NVIDIA’s biggest annual investor keynote, the single market-moving event NVDA shareholders position around every spring.

Ten months later, Sen. Moody introduced S.3649, the Restore Trust in Congress Act. A bill that bans senators, spouses, and dependent children from owning or trading individual stocks. A bill with a 90-day new-senator divestiture window. Run that 90-day window against her own oath. Every trade described above is a federal violation under her own legislation.

She wrote the rule that would have made her own conduct illegal. She broke it first. Then she put her name on it.

The ban was the press release. The portfolio was the plan. You were the cover.

Day 44 is the system.

I have spent a long time in Washington watching the architecture of legalized self-dealing get built, brick by brick, by the people sworn to tear it down.

Day 44 is not the scandal. Day 44 is a normal day. The scandal is that this is normal. The math is older than the law because the law was written by the people the math was supposed to handcuff.

Pick one. Either the Senator knew what was clearing in her own account while she sat on the Health Committee — and the bill she later introduced is theater. Or she did not know — and a senator who cannot keep tabs on her own brokerage cannot be trusted to police anyone else’s. The third-party-advisor defense is not a denial. It is the admission. The advisor is in the next room. The phone is on speaker. The senator does not have to give the order. The senator only has to be in the building when the room is talking. That is how the swamp does it. They built the loophole. They wrote the cover. They ran the play. Now they want you to clap for the bill.

That is not a clever trap. That is the rotted timber inside every “it was a third-party advisor” defense every senator of both parties has rolled out for the last eighteen months. Same script. Different mouths.

A blind trust does not time the keynote.

Every March, NVIDIA’s keynote is the single most market-moving day of the year for NVDA stock. CEO Jensen Huang announces every major chip, every AI platform, every customer win. The keynote routinely moves NVDA 5–10% in 48 hours. Hedge funds position around it. Active traders ride the announcement bounce.

The system is working exactly as it was built to.

Sen. Moody is, by Senate seniority, a freshman. She has chaired no hearings. She has shaped no major bill. The single most consequential thing she has done with the seat the people of Florida did not give her is move $2.2 million through a brokerage account while sitting on the committee whose work she was trading.

The bill is the alibi. The portfolio is the policy. Both come from the same person. Both are correct.

Number of the Day

Forty-four days from the moment Ashley Moody swore an oath to the United States, to the moment her own brokerage moved up to $250,000 into the pharmaceutical company her committee helps price.

Small number. Big indictment.

Loser of the Week

Today’s Loser of the Week.

Goes to Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA).

The hoodie is the marketing. The $370,000 from AIPAC is the receipt.

There is a senator in the United States chamber whose entire personal brand is “I am the working-class guy you elected to break things.” The hoodie. The cargo shorts. The Sheetz hat in the airport. The 6-foot-8 silhouette in the press scrum looking like he just clocked out of a steel mill. The branding is the most successful piece of theater the Democratic Party has financed in twenty years.

It is also a costume.

Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) grew up in York, Pennsylvania, in what he himself has called a “cushy, sheltered” upper-middle-class home. His father was an insurance executive who rose to own his own firm. His parents paid his Albright College tuition, his University of Connecticut MBA, and his Harvard Kennedy School master’s in public policy. He left graduate school with zero student debt. Per the Philadelphia Inquirer’s 2022 reporting, his parents continued to financially support him through nearly all thirteen years he served as mayor of Braddock — into his late forties.

That is not a working-class biography. That is a trust-fund biography in a hoodie.

In 2022, Fetterman ran as the heir to Bernie Sanders. The progressive populist. The man whose own campaign said “not the guy you bought.” He attacked the Senate’s donor capture, its self-dealing, its cable-vs-floor double-speak. Pennsylvania elected him.

What Pennsylvania got was a senator who:

— Told NBC News, on the record, “I’m not a progressive.”

— Has accepted more than $370,000 from AIPAC and the pro-Israel lobbying network across his Senate career (per AIPAC Tracker).

— Visited Israel in June 2024 and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wearing his trademark hoodie.

— Met with Netanyahu again on Capitol Hill, February 6, 2025.

— In December 2025, wrote a private letter to Israel’s president asking him to pardon Netanyahu. Common Dreams broke the story. Fetterman’s office did not deny it.

— Said on the record: “If you have to make a choice, Hamas or the democratically elected leader, I’m always going to stand with Israel through this.” Always. Not “I’ll evaluate the conduct.” Always.

— Reversed on fracking on a debate stage by claiming he had “always supported” the industry he had spent a decade running against as Braddock’s mayor.

— Backslid on LGBTQ rights after publicly flying trans-inclusive Pride flags.

— Voted with Senate Republicans on the immigration vote.

— Became the first Senate Democrat to meet with Donald Trump after the 2024 election — the same Donald Trump he had spent the campaign trail describing as a “felon” “obsessed with revenge.”

— In April 2026, per Johnstown Today, was reported to be “mulling” a switch to the Republican Party entirely.

That is not “growth.” That is not “evolution.” That is a man who lied to his voters and is daring them to do something about it.

The Numbers

February 2026 Quinnipiac Pennsylvania poll: 22% approval among Pennsylvania Democrats. 62% disapproval. He is at 79% approval among PA Democrats in June 2023 — a 57-point collapse in 32 months. Net minus 40 points among his own party, in his own state, per Harry Enten’s analysis.

Among Pennsylvania Republicans, the same poll: 73% approval. Sen. Fetterman is more popular with the opposition party than with his own. By a forty-point margin.

The staff exodus: three chiefs of staff and four communications directors in two and a half years. Adam Jentleson out March 2024. Krysta Sinclair Juris out June 2025. Joe Calvello, Carrie Adams, Charlie Hills, all gone. Six senior staffers resigned in February 2025 alone, telling The Intercept on the record they were leaving because the office was “just working on Israel all the time.”

The primary line is forming. The Working Families Party has launched PrimaryFetterman.com — a dedicated site for opposition research, volunteer recruitment, and donation-refund requests. Five named Pennsylvania Democrats are publicly weighing a 2028 primary challenge: U.S. Reps. Brendan Boyle (Philadelphia, who calls Fetterman “Trump’s favorite Democrat” on the record), Chris Deluzio (Beaver), former Reps. Conor Lamb and Susan Wild, and PA State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta. Conor Lamb has been touring the state for a year on what he openly calls an “accountability” campaign.

Some of us — including this newsletter — once gave Fetterman the benefit of the doubt and chalked the rightward turn up to the post-stroke recovery. He has since told reporters, in his own words, that his rightward turn is not the result of his stroke. It is, he says, who he is. We will take him at his word.

If the stroke is not the explanation, then the only remaining explanation is character. He is, as he himself insists, the same man he always was. The hoodie was always the marketing. The trust fund was always the funding. The Israel money was always the destination. The Bernie heir was always the costume.

Pennsylvania voters won’t forget. Some of us will crawl over broken glass to knock doors against him in 2028.

Today’s Loser of the Week — by the unanimous vote of one editor, at one kitchen table, at one Capitol Hill apartment, at midnight — goes to Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA).

Coming Next

Tuesday: Where Is Tom Kean? Day 53. A sitting member of Congress missing every floor vote since March 5 — while personally signing $190,000 in equity-trade disclosures from wherever he is.

Call your House member. Today. Tell them to sign the discharge petition on H.R. 1908 by next Friday. Then reply to this email and tell me you did. I will publish the BTP reader count next Thursday. The cloakroom will not save you. You save you.

The Cheapest Senator In America.

Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH) took $3,500 from Les Wexner. Two months later he voted to keep the Epstein files sealed.

$3,500 from Les Wexner to “Husted for Senate” on July 3, 2025. Wexner is named in FBI documents as a Jeffrey Epstein co-conspirator (his lawyers dispute the characterization). On September 10, 2025, Husted voted to table the Schumer amendment ordering DOJ to publicly release the Epstein documents. Motion to table killed it 51–49.

Read the rest. The $3,500 is the tip.

$116,892 — total Wexner career contributions to Husted, 2001–2025. Twenty-four years. The $3,500 is the most recent installment, not the only one.

$1,000,000 — FirstEnergy dark money routed through the 501(c)(4) Freedom Frontier in 2017, tagged in a 2022 corporate deposition (obtained via public records, reported by Ohio Capital Journal) as “Husted campaign.”

100+ — times Husted’s name appeared in the federal corruption trial of FirstEnergy executives that followed the dark-money disclosure.

$4,300,000 — bribe Sam Randazzo (Husted-supported PUCO chair, federally charged before his death by suicide) accepted from FirstEnergy. Husted’s state calendar shows him on the phone with Randazzo two days before HB6 was introduced in the Ohio legislature.

$20,000/year — salary Husted drew sitting on the board of Heartland Bank while still serving as Lt. Governor of the same Ohio administration regulating that bank. The Ohio Ethics Commission director, asked publicly whether a Lt. Gov could do that, said state law “doesn’t address it.” Husted kept the seat.

$16K–$65K — common stock in German American Bancorp (the bank that absorbed Heartland in a 2024 merger) sitting on Husted’s 2025 Senate financial disclosure.

0 — statewide federal elections Husted has ever won. Gov. Mike DeWine handed him JD Vance’s vacated Senate seat on January 21, 2025. He was handed the Senate the way some men get handed restaurants — by the guy who used to own it.

$79,000,000 — commitment Mitch McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund has now placed on defending the seat in 2026. The largest single-state SLF investment in the super PAC’s history. The cleanup money.

An open letter to every Democrat and Republican in Washington

Black Voters Aren’t Naïve.

We’re Watching.

Black voters are pragmatic. We have had to be. You do not get to be dramatic when the bill is due. You do not get to be purist when the landlord is calling. Black America has been running the most disciplined political calculation in this country for sixty years. We vote for whoever is most likely to make tomorrow less painful than today. That is not cynicism. That is survival math.

But white Democrats keep mistaking our pragmatism for patience. They mistake our discipline for gullibility. They mistake our willingness to show up for an inability to see. We see. We have always seen.

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