Two Reports, Two Days Apart. I Have Questions.

Part 2 of a series. Florida's 14th Congressional District. Tampa Bay / Hillsborough County. 2026 Cycle.

While looking into Rep. Kathy Castor, I came across two federal filings submitted two days apart. They match in almost every respect. The year does not.

That was enough to make me keep reading. The questions are part of the story.

Members of Congress live under the STOCK Act. Any stock trade over $1,000 has to be disclosed within 45 days. That is the rule. There is also a separate statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1001, for false statements to a federal office. That one is not a slap-on-the-wrist civil fine. Knowingly submitting false information to a federal agency can be a crime, punishable by up to five years. The House Clerk is a federal office. Hold that while you look at the paperwork. Once I realized one of the laws in this neighborhood is criminal, not administrative, I wanted to know why there were two reports covering the same three trades instead of one.

The First Report

Filing ID #20019168, signed July 27, 2021. Three purchases of Berkshire Hathaway in a joint retirement account: June 18, 2020; June 25, 2020; and July 16, 2020. Each listed between $1,001 and $15,000.

View the original filing directly on the House Clerk's site →

Measured against the 45-day clock, those three trades were each more than 300 days late. Not a few weeks. Not a couple of months. Close to a year.

The easiest explanation is a typo: maybe 2020 was a slip and the real year was 2021. That would close the file. So I kept looking. Two days later there is a second PTR. I'll come to that. I also found a Fox Business story from September 2021 that cited this exact filing, the same 2020 dates, and the same combined value: $45,000. Around the same time, the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust filed a formal ethics complaint using the same figure. Both landed on 2020.

That matters because of the timing. Both the Fox Business story and the FACT complaint came after the amended filing already existed and was public. Neither one had to guess at a wrong year. Both had the option to cite the amended 2021 dates and chose the original 2020 dates instead.

The first report holds together. The year on it is 2020.

The Second Report

That should have been the end of it. It was not. On July 29, 2021, a second filing goes in: Filing ID #20019181.

View the original filing directly on the House Clerk's site →

Same stock. Same account. Same three dollar ranges, $1,001 to $15,000, in the same order. Every date has moved forward one year. June 18, 2020 becomes June 18, 2021. June 25, 2020 becomes June 25, 2021. July 16, 2020 becomes July 16, 2021. Nothing else on the form changes.

I sat with that. The first question is the blunt one: did she buy the same amount of Berkshire Hathaway three more times, exactly one year later, on each of the same three calendar days, in the same account, in the same dollar bracket? What are the odds of that lining up three times running?

The more generous reading is that the first filing had the year wrong and this was a correction. Amendments exist for that. But by the time Fox Business and FACT looked at this, in August and September of 2021, the amended filing was already sitting in the public record too. Both had the same two documents available that you and I do now. Both picked the original 2020 dates as the real ones. Neither treated the amendment as the corrected, true version. That undercuts the simple typo theory.

Then there is the STOCK Act itself. Each filing is certified, under her signature, as true, complete, and correct. If the first filing is the accurate one, and I think it is, the next question is obvious: why file a second one?

Run the 45-day clock on the second set of dates. The original filing was 359, 352, and 331 days late. The amended filing, covering the same three trades, comes out to 41, 34, and 13 days. All three fall inside the window.

Version one is a documented late disclosure. Version two of the same three trades, filed two days later under the same sworn certification, is not. I found that interesting.

She Knows How to Do This

Weeks before those Berkshire purchases, in the same account, Castor sold American Airlines and Southwest Airlines. The sales were July 10 and July 14, 2020. She reported them July 16, 2020, two to six days later. Filing ID #20016973. Not merely inside the 45-day window. Almost immediate.

So in the same stretch of 2020, in the same joint account, one set of trades is filed within days and another sits unreported for most of a year. When she uses the process, she knows how it works.

Not the Only Time

In 2016, Castor sold AT&T stock from an IRA on December 14. She did not disclose it until May 3, 2017, 140 days later, more than three times the deadline. No amendment followed. It is simply on the record, late, with no second version offered.

Why I Wrote This

I am not a judge. I am not a prosecutor. I have no role in the legal system, and it is not my job to say what these documents prove. What I have are two federal filings that do not agree with each other. Voters in this district should be able to see them before they decide who represents them.

Here is a fact, not an opinion: Democrats spent years telling the country that no one is above the law. Adam Schiff said it in December 2018: "No one is above the law, not even the president of the United States." Nancy Pelosi said it in July 2019: "In America, no one is above the law." She said it again that September, opening the impeachment inquiry. She said it a third time in January 2021, signing the second article of impeachment against President Trump. That standard was repeated, by name, for more than two years of a presidency.

It looks to me like this: when something looks off and the person involved is a Democrat, very little happens. I am not saying there is wrongdoing here. I am saying two documents exist, they contradict each other, and voters can decide what that means.

There is an old courtroom move, the kind you see in a film like A Time to Kill. Ask the jury to keep the facts and change who is sitting in the chair. See if the verdict still feels the same. I'll ask you to do that. Picture these same two filings attached to a Republican member of Congress up for reelection. Picture the coverage. Then remember what happened to Trump for less than this.

Sources: House Clerk Periodic Transaction Reports, Filing ID #20019168 (filed 07/27/2021), Filing ID #20019181 (filed 07/29/2021), and Filing ID #20016973 (filed 07/16/2020). Fox Business, "Complaints on STOCK Act violations stack up against members of Congress," September 2021. Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust ethics complaint, reported by The Washington Times, August 20, 2021. House Clerk PTR Filing ID #20007192 (AT&T sale, filed 05/03/2017). 18 U.S.C. § 1001.