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OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author’s opinion.
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In the past few weeks, things have seemed to get worse for House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), after she fell in Europe and had to have emergency hip replacement surgery.
One week ago, Pelosi was seen using a walker on the House floor as she continued to heal from her accident. Now, a far-left former staffer for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is running against her in the primary, according to a report released Thursday.
Saikat Chakrabarti, who used to be the chief of staff for AOC, said on Wednesday that he would run against Pelosi in the primary. Politico reported that he was running because the former speaker tried to stop the progressive New York congressman from becoming the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee.
Chakrabarti, a 39-year-old former tech worker, wrote on the X platform, “I respect what Nancy Pelosi has done in her career, but we live in a very different America than the one she knew when she got into politics 45 years ago.” There are real problems in America, and people want real solutions that are as big as the problems we have.
She was speaker for almost 20 years before she stepped down in 2022. Last year, Pelosi easily won reelection to her seat in San Francisco, which is mostly Democratic. Her office wouldn’t say anything about Chakrabarti’s news.
She has turned in the paperwork to run for re-election in 2026, but she hasn’t said in public that she plans to do so. For a long time, people have thought that State Sen. Scott Wiener would run for the seat if Pelosi quit. Some people in the local political scene also think that Christine Pelosi, the speaker’s daughter, might run for the seat if her mother retires.
Politico also said that whoever wins the primary is likely to win the general election and keep the seat for a long time in a city that is still a stronghold for Democrats.
Meanwhile, Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, made $38 million worth of stock trades in the weeks leading up to President Donald Trump’s inauguration, which will no doubt lead to further calls for stock trading bans for members of Congress and their immediate families.
The New York Post said that one of the trades worth tens of millions of dollars was “an investment in a once-obscure artificial intelligence firm whose shares have soared nearly 50% in the past week.”
Paul Pelosi sold Apple stock worth $24 million and Nvidia stock worth $5 million. AI chips are made by Nvidia.
According to documents filed with the government, both of these big deals happened on New Year’s Eve. The Post also said that Nancy Pelosi is legally required to talk about the stock trades her husband makes.
Paul Pelosi, who survived a brutal hammer attack inside the couple’s San Francisco home roughly two years ago, has also taken a new role with Tempus AI, a Chicago-based health technology company that deploys artificial intelligence to analyze clinical and molecular data.
Filings show that on January 14, Paul Pelosi bought $100,000 worth of call options in Tempus AI. The company’s stock has gone through the roof since it was made public that he was involved.
Tempus AI stock was worth about $32 per share when the market opened on January 14. However, as of Thursday, shares of Tempus AI— which went public last June with an IPO price of $37 per share— were trading at around $50.50 per share, marking a 60% increase, noted The Post.
All the while, Nancy Pelosi continues to recover from her hip surgery.
“Earlier this morning, Speaker Emerita Pelosi underwent a successful hip replacement and is well on the mend,” spokesperson Ian Krager said in a statement sent to HuffPost in mid-December.
The statement added that the former House Speaker was “grateful to U.S. military staff at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center at Landstuhl Army Base and medical staff at Hospital Kirchberg in Luxembourg for their excellent care and kindness.”