Democratic congressional candidate Paige Cognetti accused U.S. Rep. Rob Bresnahan on Wednesday of acting corruptly and repeatedly lying about his stock trades.
At a news conference in a teachers’ union hall in Plains Twp., Luzerne County, Cognetti ripped Bresnahan for promising two years ago never to trade stocks as a congressman, then doing just that hundreds of times.
The Scranton mayor also criticized the first-term Republican congressman for falsely saying he never talks to his financial advisers about stock trades. She pointed to a radio interview with Bresnahan that surfaced this week.
“He has a pattern of saying one thing and doing another,” Cognetti said in the Pennsylvania State Education Association office. “But to hear that audio where he says he speaks with his financial adviser after having said so many times in the interim that he does not, just shows us who this person is, how he feels about his constituents.”
Bresnahan campaign spokesman Chris Pack blasted Cognetti for using an "out of context" comment in the radio interview "to prop up her campaign.”
What Cognetti is talking about
In an April 2025 interview, Bresnahan told WILK Radio talk-show host Bob Cordaro he meets with his financial adviser.
“We talk about, you know, what different positions are coming up,” Bresnahan told Cordaro.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which aids the party's congressional candidates, portrayed Bresnahan's statement as a contradiction of at least two past statements.
During a June 10 town hall, Bresnahan said his stock trades “are being executed on my behalf.”
“I do not have any dialogues with my financial advisers,” he said.
The other statement was in a July text to WVIA News.
“Most importantly, I will continue to provide absolutely no investment advice or input to my financial advisers and will not trade my own equities,” Bresnahan told WVIA on July 30.
'Sickening' and dishonest
Cognetti called Bresnahan’s statements “sickening” and said "he can't even be honest with us about how he talks to, how frequently he talks to and if he talks to his financial adviser."
"The congressman is spending his time and energy trading stocks, instead of focusing on the people in northeastern Pennsylvania," she said. "I have no desire to begrudge anyone their wealth or making money in the financial markets, but as a member of Congress entrusted with 800,000 people's lives, you cannot be using your position and the information you have to boost your portfolio."
Cognetti said that’s “the exact type of public corruption” that led her to join the Scranton School Board in 2017 and run for mayor in 2019.
"There is a generational problem in this region about public corruption, and sadly, Rob Bresnahan represents that same type of behavior," she said.
Bresnahan campaign fires back
In an email Tuesday after the Politico story was published, Bresnahan campaign spokesman Chris Pack said the publication took the talk-show quote out of context. He said it related to whether the congressman directs stock trades.
“As he explained in the interview, Rob does not trade his own stocks and does not direct individual trades,” Pack said. “His financial advisers manage the portfolio, and his conversations with them are limited to broad discussions about overall risk tolerance and long-term strategy, the same type of retirement planning conversations that millions of Americans have every year.”
At the start of the WILK clip, Cordaro asks Bresnahan if it’s fair to say he doesn’t trade stocks based “on information I’ve gleaned in Congress” and “my adviser is doing my trading for me, and I am duly reporting it.”
“Absolutely, ... right hand to God on my mother's life without a question,” Bresnahan said.
That part of the interview squares with Bresnahan’s repeated past statements that he never tells his advisers how to invest. Bresnahan told Cordaro he sometimes finds out about his holdings on Twitter (now X). After that, he mentioned meeting with his financial adviser.
The WILK clip does not mention in any greater detail what Bresnahan and his adviser talk about when they meet.
“Any suggestion that Rob is personally trading stocks based on congressional information is simply false and contradicts what he clearly stated in the (WILK) interview,” Pack said.
In response to Cognetti’s statements Wednesday, Pack repeated that saying it’s true “no matter how much Goldman Sachs private-wealth adviser Paige Cognetti tries to take his comments out of context to prop up her campaign.”
Before moving to Scranton a decade ago, Cognetti worked for Goldman-Sachs, the giant international banking and investment firm.
“It’s nice to see that Mayor Cognetti is once again blowing off her job at Scranton City Hall in the middle of the workday to travel to Wilkes-Barre to focus on her vanity congressional campaign,” he said.
Bresnahan's history on stock trades
The WILK interview followed a New York Times story on Bresnahan’s stock trades. The story reported Bresnahan wrote in a letter to a local newspaper that Congress should ban members from trading stocks, then became Congress’ top stock trader after he was elected.
In July, Bresnahan told WVIA he has tried to place his stocks in a blind trust so he couldn’t know how his money is invested, but was thwarted by House rules.
The rules would have forbid him from using his financial adviser as the trustee and prevented him from telling the trustee to avoid investments in foreign adversaries or betting against American-owned companies.
Reminded he could order his financial advisers to stop trading his stocks, Bresnahan said he did not plan to do that.
“And then do what with it?” he asked in an interview with WVIA News in July. “Just leave it all in the accounts and just leave it there and lose money and go broke?”
In December, a spokesperson said, Bresnahan told his financial advisers to halt stock trades until Congress votes on a bill to ban congressional stock trading and force members to sell stocks they already own.
Bresnahan signed onto a petition to force a House vote on the bill. Only 81 members had signed the petition as of Wednesday, far short of the 218 required to force a vote.
Cognetti dismissed Bresnahan’s support for the petition.
“The behavior that he has shown is just another example in northeastern Pennsylvania of self-service instead of public service,” she said.
Cognetti seeks to oust Breshanan from the 8th Congressional District seat that he narrowly won in 2024 by defeating Rep. Matt Cartwright, a Democrat.
The race is expected to become one of the most hotly contested and expensive in the country as Democrats seek to regain control of the U.S. House.
The 8th District, where about 765,000 people live, consists of all of Lackawanna, Wayne and Pike counties; roughly the eastern half of Luzerne County, including Wilkes-Barre, Pittston and Hazleton; and all of Monroe County, except for Polk and Eldred townships and part of Ross Township.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Wendy Wilson, a spokesperson for Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti’s campaign, is the spouse of Ben Payavis II, chief content officer and executive producer at WVIA Public Media.
