(Bloomberg) -- U.S. Representative Christopher Collins, a Republican from New York who was an early supporter of Donald Trump's presidential run, is resigning from Congress and pleading guilty in an insider-trading case.
Collins was charged last year with passing non-public information about Innate Immunotherapeutics Ltd., an Australian biotechnology company, to his son. The lawmaker was arrested in August 2018 along with the son, Cameron Collins, and Stephen Zarsky, the father of Cameron's fiancee. Prosecutors said the case was the first in which insider-trading charges were brought against a sitting member of Congress.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's spokesman Drew Hammill said on Monday that her office had received a letter from Collins and that his resignation would take effect Tuesday.
Democrats could use the Collins case as they build their argument against the GOP in the 2020 election. But more narrowly his resignation could help Republicans hold the district by removing Collins as an issue. Though he won re-election while under indictment by only 1,000 votes, it's a heavily Republican district made up of areas surrounding Buffalo and Rochester in western New York.
There are no constitutional provisions or House rules that require a member to forfeit his or her seat after a felony conviction. But the lawmaker, who had already been stripped of his committee assignments, would no longer have been able to vote in Congress.
Collins, who'd claimed that seizures of evidence from his staff by law-enforcement authorities had violated his constitutional rights, is scheduled to change his plea to guilty in federal court in Manhattan on Tuesday, according to court documents. His son and Zarsky are scheduled to plead guilty on Thursday.
James Margolin, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Geoffrey Berman, declined to comment on the planned guilty pleas. Lawyers for the three defendants didn't immediately return calls seeking comment. Collins's office declined to comment and referred calls to his attorney.
Collins was the first member of Congress to endorse Trump in the 2016 election. Last week, he took to Twitter to criticize the announcement by House Democrats that they're pursuing an impeachment investigation of the president, calling it a “witch hunt.”
A judge ruled this month against a request by Collins to review materials he said would show that investigators breached a constitutional provision limiting official inquiries into legislative matters. He'd moved to appeal the ruling, claiming that the evidence seizures violated the Speech or Debate Clause, which protects members of Congress from arrest and prosecution based on their political views.
The three defendants were scheduled to go to trial Feb. 3.
Prosecutors claimed Collins tipped off his son about negative results in a clinical trial for a drug being developed by Innate Immunotherapeutics to treat a form of multiple sclerosis. Collins, one of the company's largest shareholders, served on the board and had access to non-public information.
His son then passed the news to his girlfriend, his girlfriend's mother, Zarsky and a friend, prosecutors said. In the four days before the negative drug news was announced, they and others sold more than 1.78 million Innate shares, avoiding losses of about $768,000, according to prosecutors.
The case is U.S. v. Collins, 18-cr-567, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
--With assistance from Daniel Flatley and Erik Wasson.
To contact the reporters on this story: Bob Van Voris in federal court in Manhattan at rvanvoris@bloomberg.net;Chris Dolmetsch in Federal Court in Manhattan at cdolmetsch@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Peter Jeffrey
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