U.S. Rep. Blake Moore talks to a constituent during a June 11 meet and greet sponsored by Cache County Republicans in North Logan.
SALT LAKE CITY – Congressional candidate Andrew Badger says that his supposedly squeaky-clean opponent U.S. Rep. Blake Moore (R-UT) got caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
Seventy-six times.
Surprisingly, Moore’s campaign staff can only say that their candidate “settled the fine with the House Ethics Committee almost a year ago.”
In a recent campaign mailing, Badger charged that in 2021 the House Ethics Committee fined Moore for 76 violations of the STOCK Act.
The 2012 Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act prohibits members and employees of Congress from using “any non-public information derived from the individual’s position … or gained from performance of the individual’s duties, for personal benefit.”
On July 30, 2021, The Salt Lake Tribune reported that the House Ethics Committee fined Moore $200 for failing to report up to $1.1 million in stock trades.
Those fines covered Moore’s failure to report stock trades in the defense contractor Raytheon while serving as a sitting member of the House Armed Services Committee.
“It’s worth noting that without any requirement to do so, Blake has since put all his assets in a qualified blind trust,” according to press liaison Caroline Tucker. “He is also a co-sponsor of the TRUST in Congress Act to require all members to put their assets in blind trusts so that the American people can be assured that there is not even the appearance of any conflict of interest.”
Badger’s mailing also accused Moore of being an establishment Republican who “consistently caved to the radical left,” like U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT).
Romney has recently joined nine other Republicans and 10 Democrats in advocating a framework for a commonsense gun control measure in the Senate.
Moore is locked in a three-way battle for the GOP nod in primary balloting after a poor showing at Republican nominating convention in April.
His opponents are Badger, a former civilian intelligence officer, and former Morgan County commissioner Tina Cannon.
“These attacks from Andrew Badger are not resonating with voters, as we have seen in recent polling, including today’s Deseret News poll,” Tucker explained.
On Tuesday, Dan Jones & Associates reported the results of a survey conducted May 24 to June 15 of 221 registered Utah voters in the 1st Congressional District. That polling was commissioned by the Deseret News and the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah.
Pollsters found that 52 percent of survey respondents would vote for Moore, while Badger earned the support of 6 percent and Cannon won 5 percent.
That means that all of those candidates have lost ground with voters when compared to internal polling conducted by Moore’s campaign in early May.
Of 348 survey respondents, that internal polling revealed that Moore was favored by 59 percent of the vote compared to 8 percent for Badger and 6 percent for Cannon.
But voters in the undecided category had risen from 27 percent in Moore’s internal polling in May to 37 percent in the more recent Dan Jones survey.
With ballots already in the mail, the GOP primary is slated for June 28.