Ex-Rep. Chris Collins Pleads Guilty to Insider Trading Charges – The New York Times

The congressman called his son several times in quick succession before they finally connected on the seventh try, according to call logs.

The tip helped Cameron Collins avoid more than $570,000 in losses when the company’s stock price later plummeted, prosecutors said.

“Collins admitted to, among other things, illegally tipping his son while standing on the White House lawn,” the United States attorney in Manhattan, Geoffrey S. Berman, said in a news conference shortly after the plea.

Cameron Collins, as well as Stephen Zarsky, the father of Cameron Collins’s fiancée, are expected to plead guilty on Thursday. Cameron Collins had advised Mr. Zarsky and Mr. Zarsky’s daughter to sell their shares, prosecutors said, and Mr. Zarsky also passed the tip to others.

The younger Mr. Collins’s fiancée was not charged.

The congressman himself, who was ranked as one of the wealthiest members of Congress, was not accused of making any trades. But just the act of passing along information can, under some circumstances, constitute an insider-trading violation.

Mr. Collins is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 17. Though the maximum sentence for the two charges is 10 years, prosecutors and defense lawyers agreed to seek a sentence between 46 and 57 months.

Mr. Collins’s plea capped a political career that had been remarkable to that point for its resilience. Last year, Mr. Collins, who was first elected in 2012, narrowly won re-election even after being indicted on the insider trading charges to which he pleaded guilty on Tuesday. Until this week, he had offered hints that he planned to run again, despite pleas from fellow Republicans to step aside.