| New reporting from Bloomberg details how Rob Bresnahan’s prolific stock trading and broken promises are haunting him on the campaign trail.
Bloomberg reports that Bresnahan “has faced scrutiny for selling shares in healthcare providers before voting to slash Medicaid funding and trading AI-linked stock while encouraging data center development.”
And a Republican strategist even tells Bloomberg that Bresnahan “made an unforced error” by making hundreds of stock trades in office and voting to raise costs on Northeastern Pennsylvanians.
As NEPA voters continue to hear about Bresnahan’s corruption, they are turning to Paige Cognetti to clean it up. Paige tells Bloomberg: “People understand the connectivity between their costs and the corruption, and they really want something to be done about it.”
Read more from Bloomberg:
Bloomberg: Anger Over Stock Trades Puts Pennsylvania House Seat in Play
By Liz Skalka | October 7, 2026
- The blue-and-yellow signs outside Paige Cognetti’s Congressional campaign headquarters drive home her message: “Ban Corporate PAC Money,” “Ban Congressional Stock Trading,” and “Fight Washington Corruption.”
- Cognetti, the Democratic mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, has made “corruption” synonymous with issues top of mind for voters across the country, from the rising cost of living to the proliferation of data centers. She even adopted the slogan “Paige Against the Machine.”
- To make her case, Cognetti has hammered Bresnahan over his stock trades while in office.
- [Bresnahan] has faced scrutiny for selling shares in healthcare providers before voting to slash Medicaid funding and trading AI-linked stock while encouraging data center development. Like around the country, AI data centers are unpopular in Pennsylvania. A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday showed 64 percent of likely voters think data centers will do more harm than good in the state.
- Overall, Bresnahan made about 650 individual stock, bond and option trades in 2025, his disclosures show, after calling Congressional trading “sickening” during his 2024 campaign.
- “People understand the connectivity between their costs and the corruption, and they really want something to be done about it,” Cognetti, 46, said late last month.
- GOP consultant Christopher Nicholas said of all the Republicans running in Pennsylvania’s competitive House races, Bresnahan is “the only one who made an unforced error.”
- Bill Jones, a three-time Trump voter from Scranton who appears in one of Cognetti’s ads, said it’s getting harder to make ends meet.
- “Groceries are ridiculous,” the 73-year-old said. “And don’t even get me started on gas.”
- As mayor, Cognetti vowed to reform City Hall, getting rid of cash payments and setting up a whistleblower hotline. Cognetti has refused a city-owned vehicle for her job.
- The area bordering Scranton’s Lackawanna County is known for an early 2000s scandal in which two judges took millions in kickbacks to send juveniles to for-profit detention centers. Cognetti said that case still resonates and criticized Bresnahan for not doing enough to push back on “the system in Washington.”
- “People all throughout this district are really, really sick of corruption, and this feeling of the system being rigged,” she said.
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