Same tune, different verse from some Louisiana leftist media outlets, this time involving Republican Rep. Julia Letlow.

A couple of months ago a media organization that combined forces of three far-left news sites (backed largely by leftist out-of-state foundations) ran a piece on land acquisition and sales that involved GOP state Sen. Jay Morris concerning the Hyperion project in northeast Louisiana. It used what frequently has become a go-to tactic when leftist media wish to disparage a public official: taking disparate actions and events that themselves are perfectly legal and ethical, trying to present a misstep, and using that to attempt to connect those even if unrelated as evidence of some kind of corrupt behavior, as a means of discouraging the official from pursuing a goal against the left’s agenda.

In the case of Morris, this was because Morris fronted legislation to right-size various offices around New Orleans held by Democrats, whose government is thoroughly awash in leftist ideas very out of step with the rest of the state and finds itself increasingly leeching off state taxpayers. Now comes a piece produced by regional public radio and National Public Radio doing something similar with Letlow, in what appears to be a desperate attempt to stop her expected big win this fall in the race against a far-left Democrat nominee.

As in the case of Morris, the story begins with a small kernel that in certain circumstances could suggest an ethical breach, which actually was something brought out by her opponents for the GOP Senate nomination that she secured at the end of June. Letlow failed to file her equity trading activity in a timely fashion as a member of the U.S. House. She said this was an oversight by the entity she had hired to manage her finances while in Congress.

The story reveals she signed a nondisclosure agreement with a subsidiary of Meta Platforms in the summer of 2024 that was connected to the Hyperion project, the building of a huge data center in her district in Richland Parish. Meta announced the project formally at year’s end, and has since expanded it significantly in size and potential economic impact.

Between the signing and announcement, Letlow’s account bought shares in Meta and Nvidia, a computer chip maker whose products could be in demand by Meta when the center is built, which is still far from complete. When she signed the NDA, Meta’s Class A common stock traded at around $500 a share while Nvidia closed at about $118. On Jan. 31, 2025, when her account sold Nvidia and bought a small amount of Meta, the former was at about $120 and the latter around $689. A week later she sold some Meta at around $715 and the remainder of it on July 2 when it closed around $714. The article also noted that her account had bought into some names that could be related to the subject material of the House committee on which she sits a couple of days after it reviewed budgets on national, foreign affairs, and international finance in July 2025.

Isolated, the timing of all of this could suggest Letlow trades on inside information. But that argument falls apart because Letlow engages outsiders to do her investing with whom she says she has no contact when it comes to investing. And it doesn’t seem likely, precisely because of the NDA provision, that after signing it she would signal to her brokers that she signed a Meta NDA, wink wink, nod nod, that something big was going to happen regarding Meta, so buy up shares.

If that’s the inside information, it sure wasn’t inside. Meta was going to build a data center somewhere, so perhaps a number of congressmen signed these during the site selection process. And the general public figured Meta was a good investment in this period, since public buying drove up the price during the period before the announcement without any need for inside information.

The article invites readers to be analytically lazy and, drawn to the ideological agenda it supports (and there always is with each and every one of these from the left an ideological purpose behind the story selection and its execution), to assume that the presence of an NDA by definition must lead to insider information that subsequently proves profitable. None of these assumptions necessarily must be made, given the actual facts. Thinking readers will recognize the flaws in the attributional chain and see the effort for the shilling it is and the motive behind it.

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