NJ.com: Wealthy N.J. congressman promised saintly ethics. He chose getting richer instead, rivals say.
By Riley Yates | July 23, 2025
- Tom Kean Jr. pledged not to be anything like the politician he had defeated.
- The incoming Republican congressman said he would bring the “highest level of ethics and transparency” to Washington, D.C., after winning a hotly contested election in 2022.
- Kean would move his millions in personal assets into a blind trust, he promised a day before taking office. That way, the scion of a wealthy political dynasty would avoid allegations of using a public position for private gain, like the very claims he had levied against his Democratic opponent.
- Yet two years later, Kean has backed away from that vow […]
- Kean’s decision is drawing criticism in a closely watched battleground district, which Democrats are targeting as they seek to recapture Congress in next year’s midterms and upend President Donald Trump’s agenda.
- Kean “promised New Jersey voters one thing to get their votes, only to turn around and do the opposite as soon as he got to Congress,” said Eli Cousin, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
- Now he “continues to profit off the stock market despite running on a promise to ban congressional stock trading, and he has failed to put his assets in a blind trust more than two years after he pledged that he would,” Cousin said.
- Kean, who lists at least $12.4 million in assets on his most recent disclosure, was propelled to Washington in a campaign in which he hammered his Democratic predecessor, Tom Malinowski, over stock trades he’d failed to timely disclose. Kean is now in his second term, having won a hard-fought reelection in November in the 7th District, which includes the counties of Hunterdon and Warren and parts of Morris, Somerset, Sussex and Union.
- Kean informed the Ethics Committee last month that he was dropping his bid to win its approval for a blind trust, under which public officials appoint an outside manager to oversee their portfolios, without their input or knowledge about where the money is invested.
- Kean is the second wealthiest of New Jersey’s 12-member House delegation […] The son of former Gov. Tom Kean, his wealth is largely derived from family trusts that benefit him and other relatives.
- Those investment holdings provide him with significant income each year, and he reported making at least $270,000 from dividends, capital gains and interest in 2023 — far exceeding his $174,000 federal salary.
- To make it to Congress, Kean unsuccessfully ran against Malinowski in 2020, before unseating him in 2022. Kean repeatedly knocked the ethics of Malinowski, whose failure to timely disclose stock trades led to an ethics inquiry.
- Amid the criticism, Malinowski moved his holdings in 2021 into a blind trust. Malinowski told NJ Advance Media that Kean shouldn’t be making excuses for why he can’t do that same.
- “He spent an entire campaign attacking me on this issue, even though I had established a blind trust, and then he promised that he would do it,” Malinowski said. “So while I’m not surprised and always expected him to try to weasel out of it, I think that it is and should be an issue.”
- Republicans hold a slim eight-member majority in Congress, making every seat critical. […] The district is among 70 seats in the 435-member House seen as competitive by the Cook Political Report, which tracks elections.
- “It doesn’t sit well with me to complain about the onerous nature of the rules themselves,” said Malinowski, who now heads the Hunterdon County Democratic Committee. “Because I met the conditions, even though it was extremely expensive for me to do so.”
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