U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow signed a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) with Laidley LLC — a shell company of Meta Platforms — on June 29, 2024, giving her access to confidential details about the tech giant's plans for a $50 billion data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana, according to the document obtained by the Gulf States Newsroom.
Within months, she began buying stock in Meta and Nvidia, the company whose chips power Meta's data centers. She didn't disclose those trades for more than a year, well past the 45-day deadline required under the STOCK Act, the federal law that bars members of Congress from trading on nonpublic information gained through their official position.
Click here to view and download Julia Letlow's NDA with Laidley LLC
Six months after signing the NDA, Letlow spoke at the public announcement of the project, championing the data center coming to her district.
“What a day for Richland Parish. I'm so honored to be here with all of you today,” Letlow said at the launch event. “I was so excited about it, I even skipped a vote in Washington. Don't tell anybody, please.”
Letlow’s trading continued after the deal became public and the window of secrecy closed. On Jan. 31, 2025, she partially sold her Nvidia holdings and purchased between $1,001 and $15,000 in additional Meta stock. A week later, she sold part of her Meta holdings, then sold the remainder on July 2, 2025. She did not disclose any of those trades until Aug. 11, 2025, more than a month after selling her last Meta shares.
Letlow would not interview for this story. In a written statement, her spokesperson, Matt Smith, said the congresswoman had no role in directing any of her trades, including the Meta transactions, and that the NDA played no part in them because she was unaware the trades were happening.
Ethics experts say the timeline raises serious questions: whether a sitting member of Congress and the current Republican candidate for U.S. Senate should sign an NDA with a private tech company that spent more than $26 million lobbying the federal government in 2025, and whether she traded stock after gaining access to nonpublic information through the agreement.
The NDA Letlow signed was one of Meta's own — separate from the NDAs at least 54 elected officials in Louisiana have signed related to large-scale industrial projects, including the Meta, Amazon and Applied Digital data centers, since Gov. Jeff Landry took office.
It’s the same agreement Landry personally signed with Meta in April 2024, two months before Letlow.
Timeline raises serious questions
Smith, Letlow’s spokesperson, said NDAs are common in economic development discussions and “was limited in scope to protecting preliminary business information and understanding the investment's potential to have a profound impact on Northeast Louisiana.”
But the NDA's language is broader than that description suggests.
Its definition of "Confidential Information" extends beyond preliminary business details to cover financial information, pricing, discounts and proposed terms. It also explicitly includes "the existence of this Agreement and the fact or nature of the discussions between the parties.”
This agreement means Letlow was barred from confirming the existence of the NDA or even that talks with Meta were taking place, thereby constraining what a sitting member of Congress could say publicly about a matter of significant impact to her constituents.
Letlow’s signed NDA itself is the first thing that strikes watchdogs and experts as unusual.
"That doesn't completely add up," said Kedric Payne, general counsel of the Campaign Legal Center and a former deputy chief counsel at the House Office of Congressional Ethics.
Meta's data center is a state economic development project, not a federal one, Payne said, which raises the question of "why a congressperson would be involved in this to such a level of detail that an NDA was necessary."
Robert Hogan, a political science professor at Louisiana State University who studies elections and representation, agreed the timeline of events "raises serious questions about what Congresswoman Letlow knew, and when she knew it, and why."
He added that non-disclosure agreements between elected officials and companies courting their states are becoming a bigger flashpoint in Louisiana politics generally.
"Citizens should expect members of Congress to be able to tell them the truth straight up about what they know," Hogan said, "and these kinds of agreements hamper that free flow of information."
The trades that followed the NDA, Payne said, represent a different — and less common — category of concern than the conflict-of-interest questions that typically dog congressional stock trading.
“What we see here is that you have a lawmaker who appears to have access to non-public information and trades stock in a company related to that non-public information,” Payne said.
Hogan called it an example of the “classic problem” that highlights concerns over members of Congress trading in stock, "because sometimes they are provided information that other retail investors do not have access to." He, however, cautioned against overstating what the timeline alone can prove.
"It's very hard to tell — did this motivate her purchase and sale? There are a lot of unknowns. But at the very least, it raises serious questions," Hogan said.
Payne said the Nvidia purchase — made the same day as one of her Meta transactions — can be read alongside the Meta trade, even though Nvidia itself wasn't a party to the NDA.
"You do not know what all was discussed with the NDA," he said, "but you can reasonably conclude that it would involve the business partners of Meta."
‘Some degree of irony’
Letlow’s Meta and Nvidia trades weren't an isolated lapse. In a Periodic Transaction Report filed in January, Letlow disclosed 210 individual stock trades from the prior two years that she'd failed to report on time — 100 of them, including the Meta and Nvidia stock, more than a year late.
Added together, the trades were worth between $225,000 and $3,185,000 — the broad range members of Congress are allowed to report.
Letlow's four Meta transactions and two Nvidia transactions, added together, fall in a reported range of roughly $6,000 to $90,000, according to her congressional filing, but the questionable timing of her trades extended beyond the two companies.
On July 23, 2025, the House Appropriations Committee — where Letlow sits — debated and approved budgets touching on national security, the State Department and international lending institutions. Within two days, Letlow traded 16 stocks, including Boeing, Goldman Sachs, Taiwan Semiconductor and Visa — a combined value worth between $16,000 and $240,000.
Both experts said the dollar amounts themselves aren’t the only metric to scrutinize.
"All trades are worth paying attention to," Payne said. "It's not about the value of the trade. It's about improper use of your official position, and about complying with the law."
Hogan put it in more local terms: "Even on the low end of the range, $6,000 is a lot to the average Louisiana voter that she represents. It doesn't necessarily have to be a large sum in order for there to be nefarious possibilities there."
Letlow's explanation that her broker acted without her knowledge or direction is common among members of Congress, Hogan said, and it's difficult to verify independently.
"A lot of members make this argument — Nancy Pelosi makes this argument all the time, that her husband is the stockbroker and they don't talk about these things," Hogan said. "Maybe that's the case. It's hard to tell."
The Appropriations Committee trades raise a more familiar — but no less serious — question, Payne said: the appearance of a conflict between Letlow's committee duties and her portfolio.
"This is two different sides of the same coin of problems with congressional stock trading," he said. The pattern "does show why the public would lose trust in members of Congress who seem to trade stock that is conflicted."
Letlow supported the Stop Insider Trading Act, which passed the U.S. House last month and would ban members of Congress from purchasing stocks and require them to give public notice before selling them. While the timing of her trades raises questions, Hogan and Payne said her support for the legislation isn’t surprising.
"There are many members of Congress who currently trade stocks and support banning the trade of such stocks," Payne said.
Hogan agreed there's a version of self-interest at play either way.
"Perhaps there's some degree of irony here that she's busy trading stocks, not disclosing appropriately as she was required to by law and then voting for a law that clamps down on this behavior even more," he said.
Election implications
Since signing the NDA with Meta, Letlow received President Donald Trump’s endorsement in her bid for U.S. Senate and defeated incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy and state Treasurer John Fleming in her party primary to become the Republican nominee for the seat.
She faces Democrat James Davis in the general election in November, who has been an outspoken critic of elected officials signing NDAs with private corporations. Commenting on a Gulf States Newsroom social media video about the usage of the agreements in Louisiana, Davis vowed to never sign an NDA and “close this loophole” to ban the practice.
“The people should know what’s happening to their land, and they should have a say on what affects their lives before deals are approved,” Davis wrote.
Letlow’s questionable trading timeline could become a talking point in the run up to the election, and Payne said the burden of explaining it is on Letlow.
"The very first thing that needs to be revealed is the reason for an NDA with Meta," he said. "That information can be revealed without violating the NDA, but it is the public's right to know why a lawmaker has a secretive agreement with a federal lobbyist and major corporation."
Whether anyone with the power to investigate will ask that question is a separate matter, Hogan said. The House Ethics Committee, which would have jurisdiction, is controlled by Letlow's own Republican party.
"If the potential investigators were Democrats, I think that things might look very different for her," Hogan said. "I think they may be less curious than Democrats would be" about opening an inquiry into a colleague.
That political reality doesn't make the underlying questions less legitimate, Hogan said. If anything, it's why they matter beyond any single investigation.
"The fact that it is raised and people are asking questions creates distrust in the political system by voters," he said. "It makes them think, ‘Oh, the insiders, they're making lots of money off of this, and I don't have that information. It's so unfair.’"
That dynamic, more than any single finding of wrongdoing, is the strongest argument for a blanket ban on congressional stock trading.
"I think this example is a prime case for why you need that kind of law,” Hogan said.
This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.
