Scaramucci Says CLARITY Act’s Crypto Ethics Isn’t Enough, Wants Insider Trading Gone

Anthony Scaramucci says the Clarity Act’s new ban on federal officials sponsoring crypto doesn’t go far enough. The SkyBridge Capital founder argues the same ethics logic should extend to insider trading across the board, not just digital assets.

Speaking on CNBC, Scaramucci pointed to Congress’s own pay structure as the root problem.

The Pelosi Problem

Members of Congress earn $180,000 a year, a salary Scaramucci says pushes some toward trading on information they gather in office. His proposed fix borrows from Singapore, where officials draw multimillion-dollar salaries in exchange for stricter ethics enforcement.

Scaramucci’s argument leans on a data point that’s hard to ignore. Public trading records show former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s portfolio, managed by her husband Paul Pelosi, has consistently beaten both the S&P 500 and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.

Her 2024 disclosures showed a 70.9% gain against the index’s 24.9% return, and cumulative figures since 2014 put her total returns thousands of percentage points ahead of the benchmark. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna has previously accused Pelosi of trading on nonpublic information, though Pelosi has not been charged with any wrongdoing.

A Familiar Playbook

Scaramucci also referenced a past attempt to weaken congressional trading oversight, saying lawmakers once rolled back a transparency measure through a procedural vote designed to avoid public scrutiny.

The comparison tracks a real precedent: Congress passed the STOCK Act in April 2012 to bar members from trading on nonpublic information, then quietly amended it a year later to scrap the requirement for a searchable online database of staff trades, passing the rollback by unanimous consent with no recorded vote.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has since pushed to revive stricter limits on congressional stock trading.

“They can’t afford two houses… they have all these different loopholes, and they have all these junkets, and they have these ways to get them money.”
— Anthony Scaramucci, CNBC

The updated Clarity Act already bars the president and other federal officials from issuing or sponsoring digital assets, a provision Scaramucci previously called this same bill’s ethics compromise dead on arrival. Whether Congress extends that same logic to its own stock trades remains an open question heading into the bill’s tight window before August recess.

If the crypto ban sets a precedent, Scaramucci’s broader ask may be the harder sell in an institution that has resisted it for over a decade.

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