In early August 2018, reporters breathlessly announced that Chris Collins, a Republican congressman representing the district that includes the city of Buffalo, had been indicted on several counts of insider trading.1 From the face of the indictment, the charges appeared quite serious. Collins had given his son material nonpublic information that the senior Collins had acquired as a result of his position on a pharmaceutical company’s board of directors. Collins had reportedly alerted his son and a third person, minutes after learning that one of the company’s most promising drugs had failed an FDA trial. This information, in turn, enabled Collins’s coconspirators to sell their stock in advance of a public announcement.2