Jason Lewis Highlights Tina Smith’s Potential Insider Trading During Pandemic

“Tina Smith should be ashamed of herself in the way she’s mishandled the COVID crisis—from holding up relief for partisan purposes to how her role as Senator may have factored into this stock sale. Minnesotans deserve better from our elected officials.”

May 16, 2020

During his campaign, this spring, U.S. Senate candidate Jason Lewis has been running as a populist, who has been critical of the Government response to the Coronavirus pandemic. 

Lewis points out that from the start of the coronavirus pandemic, “Minnesotans have been told to sacrifice their own needs for the betterment of all. Unfortunately, Senator Tina Smith, like so many ‘leaders,’ hasn’t been following her own advice—attempting to personally profit amid the economic turmoil surrounding the Coronavirus pandemic.”

He released the following statement addressing the need for accountability from Minnesota Senator Tina Smith for selling stocks amid the coronavirus pandemic. Financial disclosures demonstrate that Senator Smith and her husband sold up to $1,000,000 in stock holdings at the cusp of the stock market crash due to pandemic concerns.

Based on her financial disclosures, Lewis notes that “as the stock market started to crash in reaction to the Coronavirus pandemic, Smith’s first thought was how to protect her own financial interests.” Tina Smith “dumped between $500,000 and $1,000,000 worth of personal stock holdings.” Shortly following this period, Senator Smith voted twice to block the much-needed coronavirus economic relief bill. 

Lewis contends that this sort of action raises serious questions about sensitive financial information Tina Smith may have received in her role as Senator which “precipitated her decision to sell so many of her holdings. Voters deserve to know what Tina Smith knew, and when she knew it.”

“It is unbelievable,” says Jason Lewis, “that a sitting Senator would put her own financial well-being above those she is supposed to serve. Minnesotans put their lives on hold and hunkered down in order to save lives knowing their sacrifice would come with financial difficulties. The extended lockdown has cost them even more than they thought. But not Senator Smith—she was busy looking out for her own financial interests.”

“Tina Smith should be ashamed of herself in the way she’s mishandled the COVID crisis—from holding up relief for partisan purposes to how her role as Senator may have factored into this stock sale. Minnesotans deserve better from our elected officials.”

###

Rival Jason Lewis criticizes Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith over March stock sales

A Smith campaign spokesman said it was her husband, Archie Smith, who owned the stocks and decided to sell them. 

May 16, 2020

Jason Lewis, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, is taking a page from national politics to blast Democratic incumbent Sen. Tina Smith over two March stock sales.

His criticism comes as Sen. Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, faces an FBI probe over a large sale of stock in mid-February as he was receiving classified briefings about the coronavirus threat.

In financial disclosure forms required by the Senate, Smith disclosed March 17 the sale of stock her husband owned in two companies. The amounts in both transactions were listed in ranges of $250,001 to $500,000. The two firms, Dexcom Inc. and Insulet Corp., manufacture devices or systems for diabetes management.

Lewis questioned “what sensitive information Smith may have received in her role as senator.”

Smith campaign spokesman Ed Shelleby said it was her husband, Archie Smith, who owned the stocks and decided to sell them. Smith owns no stocks, he said; her husband is a medical device firms investor.

Calling the sales a “simple business decision,” Shelleby noted that by March 17, the stock market had hit days of historic lows, and wide swaths of society were already closing down due to the pandemic.

Shelleby also noted that Lewis himself, in a March 8 radio interview, predicted widespread stock sell-offs in response to the pandemic.

###

Lewis Says Any Politician Who Purports to Represent the People Can’t ‘Deny Them Their God-Given Right to Earn a Living’

May 15, 2020

That’s the same argument U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr made in an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt.

“We have three branches of government, and allowing the unitary executive to do this, especially making a pandemic exception to the Bill of Rights, seems to me to be, and to Attorney General Bill Barr, to be overstepping their bounds. Now states, to be perfectly objective about it, states do have plenary police powers, but that assumes the state will make a law in the normal order – introduced in the legislative branch and signed by the governors. That’s not what’s happening here,” Lewis told The Minnesota Sun.

Lewis said he’s been campaigning all over the state for the past two weeks because his team decided “enough was enough.” Going through “a second Great Depression” won’t do “anything to stop a virus,” he said.

“The lockdown was meant to give hospital capacity a head start – we’ve accomplished that by anybody’s standard. Any official who purports to represent the people of Minnesota cannot deny them their God-given right to earn a living,” Lewis added.

Lewis predicts that the state will continue to see cases of civil disobedience in response to shelter-in-place mandates, such as the case of a St. Paul barber who reopened in defiance of the governor’s orders.

“And I think people are looking at this and they’re saying, ‘never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d have to fight for the right to put food on the table,’” he continued.

The lesson to be learned from the coronavirus pandemic, according to Lewis, is “to be very wary of a mob mentality.”

“You have a capriciousness to this that belies any seriousness. That’s why people are starting to get very, very skeptical of all of this,” said Lewis. For example, abortion clinics are “essential,” but churches must close. Walmart can sell gardening supplies “but the general store in Good Thunder” can’t, he noted.

“And they’re moving the goalposts. First it was to make certain that hospital capacity got caught up, now it’s to eradicate any and all virus. Well, you’re never going to do that so in that case the lockdown would last in perpetuity, which would be the end of America and Minnesota as we know it,” Lewis said.

The scientific community’s coronavirus models, which have estimated a vast range of possible outcomes, have been a source of debate and controversy throughout the pandemic. By Lewis’s estimation, these models have been “anything but science.”

“You cannot have a divergence of epidemiological deaths of 20,000 people in one state, as we have between the University of Washington model and the U of M model, and expect people to believe it,” he said.

The former radio host has picked up on a trend in the Democratic Party’s response to the virus, which has included calls for everything from rent moratoriums and mail-in voting to a universal basic income and the release of all ICE detainees.

“Why are all the solutions to corona basically a liberal wish list? All of that added up means there’s a whole lot more skepticism out there than a Star Tribune poll would have you believe,” he said. “I will say it just goes to show you the Democrats will never let a crisis go to waste. To politicize this thing when you’re bankrupting American families and small businessmen and women is the height of hypocrisy.”

Lewis said Gov. Tim Walz’s biggest mistake has been his refusal to reopen the state on a county by county basis, which he has the authority to do.

“Now we’ve got six counties with zero cases and over 30 with three or less,” he said last week. “There’s no reason for the governor not to be opening these counties, even if he wants to keep Minneapolis shut or Hennepin.”

###

U.S. Senate candidate Jason Lewis brings campaign tour through closed St. Cloud business

May 15, 2020

ST. CLOUD — Reopening Alpha Salon Lux Suites during the COVID-19 pandemic poses a catch-22 for owner Sandra Svihel. 

“It would be nice to be earning money,” Svihel said Friday.

On the other hand: “I don’t want to be exposed to the virus. And I don’t want to expose my clients,” she said.

Svihel started preparing to reopen since she saw her last client on March 17 and has a plan ready. She already cleared out the furniture from the lobby of her shop off St. Germain Street and will sanitize after every client. 

U.S. Senate candidate Jason Lewis met with Svihel Friday afternoon as part of his “Reopen Minnesota for Business” RV tour. He also stopped at the Rolling Ridge event center in St. Joseph.

“We’ve been all over the state last couple of weeks talking to businesses like yours and many of whom may not come back,” Lewis said to Svihel. “But you could function in a safe manner.”

Gov. Tim Walz announced this week that retailers could open on Monday, but salons, restaurants and gyms must stay closed. 

Salons may be allowed to reopen on June 1. The reopen date has been postponed before. 

“The economic carnage that has been induced is going to have health consequences too,” Lewis said. “People are putting off visits. People are getting depressed. And the economic desperation — we’re not looking at that side of the ledger.”

Lewis served in the U.S. House from 2017 to 2019 and is now running for U.S. Senate against incumbent Democrat Sen. Tina Smith. 

Decisions about closing Minnesota businesses have fallen to the governor with state government oversight, but Lewis said the “Reopen Minnesota” tour is informing his federal campaign.

“People that want to reopen responsibly weren’t getting a voice,” Lewis said outside the salon. “I grew up in a family business and people don’t understand how thin the margins are for a lot of these places.”

###

Jason Lewis, candidate for Senate in MN, responds to a question from a protester outside the Governor’s mansion. And, is the shutdown causing irreparable harm to businesses, ranchers and ag producers?

May 15, 2020

###

Jason Lewis Stops In Moorhead As Part Of His Open Minnesota Tour

May 14, 2020

MOORHEAD, Minn. – Former Republican Congressman Jason Lewis, who’s running for Senator Tina Smith’s seat, launched a statewide tour to visit cities all across Minnesota to talk to local business owners about the impact that COVID-19 has had on them.

He says governments should not be quarantining everyone, only those who have been affected the most like the elderly and those with underlying health conditions.

“First time in my life we’ve quarantined the healthy. When there’s been a problem like this in the past, I mention 58, 57 and 1718, you quarantine the sick or those about to get sick,” Former Representative Jason Lewis says.

After stopping in Moorhead, Lewis headed to Norman County to meet with sugar beet farmers.

###

Lewis sounds off on Smith, hot topics in Minnesota

May 14, 2020

Minnesota Senate candidate Jason Lewis says people in the state of Minnesota “want an economy that puts labor and capital together.” Lewis, appearing on What’s On Your Mind, says there are many free-enterprise advocates in Minnesota at the current time.

Running against Tina Smith, he called out Smith on several different items that have been hot topics across the country.

One of those has to do with stocks. As of early Thursday afternoon, Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr had stepped down from that post amid the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s probe into the allegation Burr, a Republican Senator from North Carolina, took part in stock trades ahead of the market’s downturn, which happened due to Coronavirus.

Lewis claims that, in March, his opponent, the incumbent Smith, dumped one million dollars worth of stock. Because of this, he’s asking for more information.

“We need to know what she did and when she did it,” he said.

When asked what he would bring to the table, one of his first concerns had to do with abortion.

“I certainly wouldn’t be endorsing post-birth abortion,” he said. “Tina Smith went onto the floor of the Senate and said she agreed with post-birth and to provide that baby with medical treatment would be inappropriate.”

Lewis also is concerned with judges and how they deal with the law in Minnesota.

“I want judges who adjudicate based on the law, not creating the law,” he said.

Lewis is also looking into the governor’s order, saying prior to the latest changes in his orders, Lewis’ team had a lawsuit ready.

“We are studying them,” he said. “My inclination is nothing will change.”

Lewis brought his “Reopen Minnesota RV Tour” to Moorhead.

###

Minnesota GOP leaders turn election focus to state’s pandemic response

May 14, 2020

Even as Minnesota Republicans bow to social distancing at an online state convention, a growing number of the party’s leaders are galvanizing supporters and ratcheting up rhetoric against the economic restrictions driven by COVID-19.

On Saturday, the Republican Party of Minnesota meets for a virtual 2020 convention that will look very different from past party gatherings. What was to be a two-day affair at Rochester’s Mayo Civic Center, with speeches and balloons and loud music and lots of in-person politicking, will instead play out in the form of an online conference call with several thousand participants.

This year, the pandemic is both upending many of the customs and methods of a traditional campaign, and setting up what’s likely to be an election cycle defined by opposition to DFL Gov. Tim Walz’s response to the virus.

“You’ve got a lot of liberals using a public health challenge to try to expand power,” said Jason Lewis, a former congressman and radio host who Republicans are expected to endorse for this year’s U.S. Senate race against DFL incumbent Tina Smith.

Lewis has been one of Minnesota’s most vocal critics of COVID restrictions to date. But he’s not alone. U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer, the state’s most prominent Republican officeholder, blasted Walz on Thursday for continuing to enforce restrictions that will keep a swath of Minnesota businesses closed at least through June 1, and possibly longer.

Walz “continues to pick winners and losers,” Emmer said. “I don’t fault him for trying to get this thing under control.” But in a phone call with the governor on Tuesday, Emmer said, he urged Walz instead to release tailored safety guidelines and let business owners and customers make their own decisions.

Emmer’s criticism did not soften after the governor’s decision on Wednesday to allow stores to reopen and let Minnesotans leave the house more, while leaving in place for now restrictions for bars, restaurants, theaters, hair salons and other businesses where people must be in close contact.

“Instead it’s this piecemeal thing, where every two or three weeks it’s, ‘You won the golden ticket — you get to reopen Monday!’ ” Emmer said. Minnesota’s other two Republicans in Congress, Reps. Jim Hagedorn and Pete Stauber, echoed that sentiment. They noted that Minnesota’s COVID-19 cases have been mostly concentrated in long-term care facilities, and suggested that preventive efforts could be more squarely focused in that direction.

Hagedorn’s wife, Minnesota GOP Chairwoman Jennifer Carnahan, took to Twitter last month to call Minneapolis’ decision to close its beaches for the summer “an excuse for extreme communist control.”

Ken Martin, chairman of the Minnesota DFL, said Democrats “are working hard to keep Minnesotans safe during this unprecedented public health crisis.” Minnesota Republicans, he said, “are busy promoting conspiracy theories, spreading disinformation and attacking public health experts.”

Polls both nationwide and in Minnesota have shown widespread support for restrictions on public movement even at the expense of economic activity.

But some recent polls have shown sentiment among Republicans shifting. President Donald Trump has been calling on states to move more quickly toward reopening, and many Republican governors have been responding in kind. A series of protests in states led by Democrats, including Minnesota, have been organized by conservative gun-rights activists.

Minnesotans who live near state lines are positioned to see alternative approaches. Iowa and the Dakotas, all governed by Republicans, have pursued looser restrictions. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that the state’s counties could set their own policies, making a wave of business reopenings seemingly imminent.

“People in South Dakota are selling their wares and making money,” said Hagedorn, whose southern Minnesota district borders Wisconsin, Iowa and South Dakota. “And 20 miles east in Luverne, businesses are shut down and going bankrupt.”

National polling released this week by Politico/Morning Consult found a 13-point drop in the last month among GOP voters who said they were more worried about public health than the economy.

The same poll shows continued possible pitfalls for Republicans: A majority of Americans, 56%, said they’re more concerned about public health than the economy. And if spikes in infection rates follow in the wake of greater economic activity, the politics of the issue could scramble again.

But for many of the Republican activists preparing to gather virtually on Saturday, the issues being raised go to the heart of their conservative principles.

“We feel we’ve been put under house arrest,” said Sheri Auclair, a conservative activist from Wayzata who is running this weekend for deputy chair of the Minnesota Republican Party. “I’d never put someone else at risk, but you know, we feel we are all adults. If car crashes increase, do you make us all stop driving cars?”

###

Jason Lewis Running for ‘Forgotten Man and Woman,’ Calls Opponent ‘Poster Child’ of the Elite

May 12, 2020

Republican Jason Lewis, a former conservative radio host turned congressman, said his campaign for the U.S. Senate will be about the “forgotten man and woman in Minnesota.”

His opponent, Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN), on the other hand, has become “the poster child for how the DFL has left behind the working man and woman of Minnesota.”

“This is not Hubert Humphrey’s party anymore. This is the party of Jacob Frey, Ilhan Omar, and Tina Smith. And that is a total, radical departure from at least the Farmer-Labor part of the DFL. She sort of represents the elite one percent of Democrat orthodoxy,” Lewis told The Minnesota Sun in a recent interview.

According to Lewis, Smith can “spit all over” Minnesota’s working class so long as she says “the right things on a couple of hot button issues.”

“And that’s where the Democratic Party is, which is why they’re losing, losing the forgotten man and woman of Greater Minnesota in droves,” Lewis said.

Before entering politics, Smith worked as an executive for the abortion giant Planned Parenthood while her husband, Archie, was a venture capitalist. According to financial disclosure forms from 2018, the two have a net worth of at least $5 million and up to as much as $12 million.

Her husband is now an independent investor in medical-device companies who had up to $1 million invested in a Bermuda hedge fund in 2018. A report from the Campaign Legal Center indicates that the Smiths made two stock transactions valued between $500,000 and $1 million sometime between February 2 and April 8 of this year – right around the time the coronavirus was reaching the country’s shores.

“You’ve got Tina Smith running around pretending to be this do-gooder when the first thing she did is sell all her stock in March,” said Lewis. “We don’t know, and I don’t know, but what kind of information did she have, when did she have it, and what did she know?”

Lewis is confident his populist message will resonate with enough voters in Greater Minnesota and the suburbs to carry him to electoral victory.

“For those who think you can’t win a state without winning all of the Metro, they need to look at the numbers,” he said, noting that President Donald Trump nearly won the state in 2016 despite underperforming in the Metro area.

“It’s a dirty, little secret that nobody wants to talk about but there are as many votes to be had in Greater Minnesota as there are in the Metro if you just focus on them. I still have to hold my own in the suburbs, but I think I can do that. This is going to be a campaign about that forgotten man and woman in Minnesota.”

Lewis doesn’t buy into the common narrative that a pro-Trump Republican can’t win a statewide race in Minnesota.

“I don’t think it’s an ignorance of history. I think it’s a deliberate avoidance of it because it’s so uncomfortable,” he told The Minnesota Sun.

Mitt Romney and John McCain both lost Minnesota to former President Barack Obama by more than 200,000 votes, he pointed out.

“In comes Donald Trump, anathema to the establishment, Republican and Democrat, has no money invested in this state, no endorsements, and no people on the ground and he loses by 44,000 votes. That is called tapping into something. And for the Democrats to whistle past that graveyard – I just hope they keep doing it,” said Lewis.

The former congressman said the coronavirus pandemic has exposed the “Achilles heel of the left,” which is that it is willing to “seek power by any means.”

“And Tina’s all in on that. Holding up the relief until they federalize elections or until she gets a bailout for the state. Refusing to support Tara Reade just for the sake of Joe Biden. All of these sorts of things are just revealing themselves in real time to people who were already starting to grow wary. So it’s a real chance for us,” Lewis continued.

Statewide polling purports to show a significant disparity in the approval ratings of Gov. Tim Walz and President Trump – to the detriment of the latter. Lewis, however, said he doesn’t “believe the numbers for a New-York minute.”

“These are the polls that would have Hillary Clinton in the White House. These are the polls that had me down by five points in 2016 when I won, and had me down by 13 in 2018 when, albeit I lost, I was the last guy standing in the Metro,” he said, suggesting that modern polling is used “to influence people, not to reflect people.”

“I’m just very, very suspicious of these. I can tell you from our travels, we’ve been on the road for 10 days and all over the state, not only the Metro, but also in Brainerd, also in Little Falls, in Cloquet, in Duluth, in Rochester, in Good Thunder, in Mankato, in Owatonna – all over, the people on the ground are fit to be tied. Period.”

###

Lewis hears tales of farm trouble on listening tour

May 8, 2020

BELLECHESTER — Jason Lewis brought his listening tour to farm country in southeast Minnesota on Thursday.

The former Republican congressman from Minnesota’s 2nd District is currently running to unseat U.S. Sen. Tina Smith, D-MN, who is finishing the final two years for former Sen. Al Franken’s term, in the November election.

Lewis started the day at a hog farm near Bellechester owned by the Kohlnhofer family where he discussed the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the hog industry.

Jeff Kohlnhofer told Lewis that the family business has started shipping only 50 percent of its hogs to processors as the hog processing capacity drops across the country. That means mature hogs that are market-ready grow beyond the weight where they can be accepted at the processors.

The Kohlnhofers shared data that shows the weekly number of hogs slaughtered in the U.S. has dropped from an average of about 2.3 million to about 1.7 million. The same report from agriculture research firm Pipestone shows about 3.8 million fewer hogs have been slaughtered this year as processing plant capacity has dropped about 40 percent.

While they have not taken that step yet, Yon Kohlnhofer said it’s only a matter of time before the family farm will need to start euthanizing animals. Because production capacity is projected to be short for several months, the plan is to euthanize hogs across age and weight ranges so the capacity on the farm at any given time matches capacity of the processors who buy from the Kohlnhofers.

“Out here, the hardest thing to do is euthanize healthy animals,” Yon Kohlnhofer said.

At Buck Farm, a corn and soybean farm near Welch, Les Anderson said crop farmers don’t have it as bad as livestock farmers at the moment – although crop prices are down, and markets don’t have the demand for grains. Ethanol plants are closed or running at low capacity, livestock farmers are not ordering as much feed and foreign markets aren’t ordering as much grain.

Lewis said he’s undertaken his Minnesota tour to hear what problems people are facing, and the biggest problem is how the economic shutdown is impacting their business. Whether it’s hog farmers and meat processors, dairy farmers or row crop growers, or main street businesses and the resort industry of northern Minnesota – resort owners in Brainerd said if they aren’t open by Memorial Day, half the resorts will go under, Lewis said – the ongoing closure of the economy has business owners worried.

“When this started, we were all on board,” Lewis said about stay-at-home orders issued to combat the coronavirus. “I was on board. We needed 15 days for hospitalization capacity to catch up.”

But 15 days turned into two months, Lewis said, and a recent study he cited said the vast majority of Minnesota COVID-19 deaths are attributed to people with underlying health conditions and the elderly.

Meanwhile, the government’s response has hurt people economically and infringed on their civil liberties without giving them the help they need to survive the government-imposed shutdown, he said.

He pointed to the CARES Act, which was supposed to have $30 billion for the Commodity Credit Corporation to help livestock farmers, but that money hasn’t made it to farmers yet. Meanwhile, Smith voted twice against COVID-19 relief packages.

“All of the other political liberties don’t mean much if they can take your means to earn a living and put food on the table,” he said. “It looks more like 1984 than 2020.”

###