On June 29th, 2024, Louisiana Congresswoman Julia Letlow signed an NDA with Laidley LLC, a shell company of Meta, granting her access to private details of the $50 billion investment in the forthcoming Richland Parish Meta data center.
A handful of months later, Letlow invested in Meta and Nvidia (Nvidia being the company that manufactures the chips Meta uses to power its data centers).
Shortly after that, on December 4th, 2024, the state of Louisiana proudly announced its future project in partnership with Meta.
About two months after the announcement, Letlow made further financial moves. According to reports, in late January of 2025, she “partially sold her Nvidia holdings and purchased between $1,001 and $15,000 in additional Meta stock. A week later, she sold part of her Meta holdings, then sold the remainder on July 2, 2025. She did not disclose any of those trades until Aug. 11, 2025, more than a month after selling her last Meta shares.”
Whether insider trading occurred isn’t something I think anyone can say conclusively right now. But I’ve heard this type of tune frequently enough times to know that when you see a lot of smoke, you can’t help but prepare for at least a little fire.
Letlow’s representative spokesperson (Letlow hasn’t responded to criticisms and questions directly) says the sitting congresswoman had nothing to do with these trades. They claim a third party handled all these transactions and there wasn’t any communication about Meta between her and her financial advisors and move-makers. No smoke, no fire, they say. Just plain coincidence.
I doubt there’ll be any thorough investigation that gets to the bottom of this. Letlow is already in obvious violation of the 2012 STOCK Act by failing to disclose certain trades within 45 days of transaction. She didn’t disclose many of these trades for over a year. But the repercussions for violating the STOCK Act are so wimpy it doesn’t even matter. A first-time offense for failure to disclose on time is as little as $200, and many of these fines are immediately tossed out by the officers in charge of handing out penalties.
Hopefully, we can reflect on this mess and learn some lessons to reduce the likelihood of it happening again.
Lesson number one: there's a clear need for reform and greater sanctions on the failure to file trades in a timely, accurate manner. For example, if you file late and made money off the trade, how about you don't get to keep the earnings? Instead, it goes straight into the Social Security trust fund. And if you lost money on the trade, you have to pay an additional 20% on your losses to the Social Security trust fund.
I'm just spit-balling, but if that were the case, how fast do you think we’d start to see compliance? We’d have compliance coming out of our you-know-what.
The second lesson is that, while I understand the necessity for NDAs in these sorts of high-profile projects, do we really need to issue over 100 to state employees (with dozens of these going to elected officials)? Perhaps if we didn't act so trigger-happy with non-disclosures, we wouldn't even be in this situation at all. At some point it becomes ridiculous. Not only does it cause the public to raise its eyebrows, from a purely practical standpoint, but it also reduces the chance of insider trading.
At the end of the day, I do not know what Julia Letlow knew, when, why, and how. But what I do know is that the details carry a very foul odor. And that with some simple adjustments to the approach, rulebook, and reporting requirements, it wouldn’t have to be this way.
I’m eager to find out if other NDA-clad elected officials fall into this same dubious boat. I doubt we will find any of that out because of the backward nature of the system. But I’ll go out on a limb and say I promise you she’s not the only one; that’s a better bet than Secretariat.
