Same tune, different verse for some Louisiana leftist media outlets, this time involving Republican Rep. Julia Letlow.
A couple of months ago a media organization that combined forces of three far-left news sites (backed largely by leftist out-of-state foundations) ran a piece on land acquisition and sales that involved GOP state Sen. Jay Morris concerning the Hyperion project in northeast Louisiana. It used what frequently has become a go-to tactic when leftist media wish to disparage a public official: taking disparate actions and events that themselves are perfectly legal and ethical, try to present a misstep, and use that to attempt to connect those even if unrelated as evidence of some kind of corrupt behavior, as a means of discouraging the official from pursuing a goal against the left’s agenda.
In the case of Morris, it was because Morris fronted legislation to right-size various offices around New Orleans held by Democrats, whose government thoroughly is awash in leftist ideas very out of step with the rest of the state and finds itself increasingly leeching off state taxpayers. Now comes a piece from the efforts of regional public radio and National Public Radio doing something similar with Letlow, coming as a desperate attempt to stop her expected big win this fall in the race against a far-left Democrat nominee.
As in the case of Morris, the story begins with a small kernel that in certain circumstances could suggest an ethical breach, and actually was something brought out by her opponents for the GOP Senate nomination that she secured at the end of June. Letlow failed to have filed in timely fashion equity trading activity as a member of the U.S. House. She said this was an oversight by the entity she had hired to manage her finances while in Congress.
The story reveals she signed a nondisclosure agreement with a subsidiary of Meta Platforms in the summer of 2024 that was connected to the Hyperion project, the building of a huge data center in her district in Richland Parish. Meta announced the project formally at year’s end, and since has expanded it significantly in size and potential economic impact.
Between the signing and announcement, Letlow’s account bought shares in Meta and Nvidia, a computer chip maker whose products could be in demand by Meta when the center was built, which as yet still far from complete. When she signed the NDA, Meta’s Class A common stock traded at around $500 a share while Nvidia closed at about $118. On Jan. 31, 2025 when her account sold Nvidia and bought a small amount of Meta, the former was at about $120 and the latter around $689. A week later she sold some Meta at around $715 and the remainder of it on Jul. 2 when it closed around $714. The article also noted that her account had bought into some names that could be related to the subject material of the House committee on which she sits a couple of days after it reviewed budgets on national, foreign affairs, and international finance in July, 2025.
Isolated, the timing of all of this could suggest Letlow trades on inside information. But that argument falls apart because Letlow engages outsiders to do her investing with whom she says she has no contact when it comes to investing. And it doesn’t seem likely, precisely because of the NDA provision, that after signing it she would signal to her brokers that she signed a Meta NDA, wink wink, nod nod something big was going to happen regarding Meta, so buy up..
If that’s the inside information, it sure wasn’t inside. Meta was going to build a data center somewhere so perhaps a number of congressmen signed these during the site selection process. And the general public figured Meta was a good investment in this period, since they were the ones whose buying drove up the price in that period before announcing, who didn’t need any inside information for that.
The article invites readers to be lazy analytically, drawn to the ideological agenda it supports (and there always is with each and every one of these from the left an ideological purpose behind the story selection and its execution), demanding that they think the presence of an NDA by definition must lead to insider information that subsequently proves profitable. None of the assumptions necessarily must be made, given the actual facts. Thinking readers will recognize the flaws in the attributional chain and see the effort for the shilling it is and motive behind it.
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