On May 19, 2025, John Hickenlooper sold between $500,000 and $1 million worth of Liberty Broadband stock. Three trading days earlier, Charter Communications had announced it was accelerating the timeline on its acquisition of Liberty Broadband, pulling the deal closing forward to coincide with the newly announced Charter-Cox combination. Hickenlooper sits on the Senate Commerce Committee, which has direct jurisdiction over cable and broadband mergers. He did not disclose the sale for 306 days past the 45-day STOCK Act deadline. On the same day he finally filed that trade, May 5, 2026, he also disclosed two separate Palantir sales from 2025 that had been sitting unreported for 339 and 291 days past deadline, respectively. Palantir's federal contracts are also squarely inside Senate Commerce's oversight lane. The pattern across all three late disclosures is the same: buys got filed on time, sales did not.
The receipts
Per the public disclosure filings , three trades dropped on May 5, 2026, all dated from 2025, all sales, all blown past deadline:
LBRDA (Liberty Broadband):May 19, 2025 . Disclosed May 5, 2026 . Filed 306 days past the deadline. PLTR (Palantir Technologies):April 16, 2025 . Disclosed May 5, 2026 . Filed 339 days past the deadline. PLTR (Palantir Technologies): Sale of $1K–$15K on June 3, 2025 . Disclosed May 5, 2026 . Filed 291 days past the deadline.
For contrast: smaller LBRDA trades from May 9 and a May 19 Liberty Broadband buy in the $250K–$500K range were all filed within the deadline. The on-time filings were buys and small routine activity. The year-late filings were the sales.
The math does the rest.
What Liberty Broadband was doing in May 2025
Charter's move to acquire Liberty Broadband had been announced back in November 2024 — an all-stock deal, 0.236 Charter shares per LBRDA share. Shareholders approved it in February 2025. Then on May 16, 2025 , two things happened at once: Charter announced its combination with Cox, and Liberty Broadband announced it was accelerating the merger closing to occur at the same time as the Charter-Cox deal. The timeline moved. The deal got closer. The calculus on holding LBRDA shares shifted in an instant.
Three trading days later, Hickenlooper sold up to $1 million of it.
He has a seat on the Senate Commerce Committee. Communications and broadband sit directly inside that committee's jurisdiction. A major cable consolidation involving Charter, Liberty Broadband, and Cox is exactly the kind of transaction that ends up in front of that committee.
The timing is the thing.
What Palantir was doing in 2025
Hickenlooper's first Palantir sale came on April 16, 2025 , in the $80–$90 per share range. The following month, the Pentagon awarded Palantir a ceiling boost of $795 million. That landed between his two PLTR sales. His second sale followed on June 3, 2025 .
The subsequent federal contract wins kept coming. A DoD multi-year ceiling of up to $10 billion for AI Maven systems. A $30 million ICE contract for ImmigrationOS. A $75 million no-bid USDA deal for federal-worker monitoring. Palantir's federal contract revenue roughly doubled in 2025, reaching approximately $970 million, with multi-year ceilings across its 2025 awards approaching $13.7 billion. The stock hit an all-time high of $207.18 in November 2025, approximately 144% above where Hickenlooper sold in April.
As of the day he finally filed — May 5, 2026 — Palantir was trading around $135.91. Still roughly 58% above his sale price. He disclosed the trade at nearly the worst possible retrospective moment.
Senate Commerce's jurisdiction over scientific research and emerging technologies puts Palantir's federal AI contracts in the committee's lane. Hickenlooper sits on that committee.
Two tickers, two sectors, one committee, zero timely disclosures on the sells.
The selective late filing
This is where the filing pattern earns a second look.
STOCK Act disclosures run through the same office. The senator's staff files them. If the mechanism for reporting were broken, you'd expect random failures across trade types. Buys late. Sells late. Small trades late. Large trades late. A general slippage in administrative discipline.
That's not what the public record shows. The smaller LBRDA activity from May 9 was on time. The Liberty Broadband buy from the same day as the late sale was on time. The on-time filings were activity that looks unremarkable in retrospect: acquisitions, routine sizing moves, the kind of thing that doesn't look worse in hindsight than it looked at the time.
The late filings were the sells. Specifically the sells that, depending on what the holder knew about their own portfolio context, could prompt questions about timing. Those are the ones that sat unreported for the better part of a year.
The receipts are public. Make of them what you make of them.
The penalty
Here's what the STOCK Act does with a 306-day late filing on a trade worth up to $1 million: it levies a $200 fine.
Flat. No escalation. The fine is the same whether you're a week late or a year late. The fine is the same whether the trade was $2,000 or $2 million. The Ethics Committee can waive it on a first violation entirely. There is no mechanism that scales the consequence to the size of the trade or the length of the delay. A senator can sell seven figures of stock in a sector their committee directly oversees, blow the disclosure deadline by ten months, and walk out of the process $200 lighter — and that's if they can't get the waiver.
Members are required to disclose. They are not required to divest, recuse, abstain, or apparently set a calendar reminder. The $200 fine is the whole enforcement architecture.
Yes, really.