John Hickenlooper sold Liberty Broadband stock worth between $500,000 and $1 million on May 19, 2025. He disclosed it on May 5, 2026. That's 306 days after the fact, or roughly 261 days past the legal deadline. The STOCK Act gives members of Congress 45 days to report a trade. Hickenlooper didn't file that one trade late — he filed all three late, in a single batch, on the same day, nearly a year after the first transaction cleared. The pile includes two Palantir sales, both in the $1,000-to-$15,000 range, sitting 339 and 291 days past due, respectively. The senator from Colorado apparently decided that one filing date in May 2026 was a perfectly fine moment to remember all of this. The calendar disagreed by about ten months.
The Trades
Per the disclosure filings, John Hickenlooper made three trades across a roughly seven-week window in spring 2025. Here's what he sold and when the public was legally entitled to know about it:
- April 16, 2025: Sold Palantir (PLTR), $1K-$15K. Disclosed May 5, 2026. Late by 339 days.
- May 19, 2025: Sold Liberty Broadband (LBRDA), $500K-$1M. Disclosed May 5, 2026. Late by 306 days.
- June 3, 2025: Sold Palantir again, $1K-$15K. Disclosed May 5, 2026. Late by 291 days.
All three disclosures arrived on the exact same date. That's not three separate administrative oversights. That's a batch filing — one moment someone looked up from their schedule and decided to clear the queue, about a year into the backlog.
What the Law Says
The STOCK Act, passed in 2012, requires members of Congress to publicly disclose stock trades within 45 days of the transaction. The penalty for a late filing is $200. That's it. Two hundred dollars for a late disclosure on a trade worth up to a million dollars. The fine was designed when the law was young and Congress was feeling optimistic about its own integrity. The optimism has not aged well.
Members are required to disclose. They are not required to divest, recuse, abstain, blush, or look up from their phones.
Hickenlooper's longest delay — 339 days on the first Palantir sale — is more than seven times the statutory window. His shortest — 291 days on the second Palantir sale — is still more than six times the window. The Liberty Broadband disclosure, the one involving up to a million dollars, sat for 306 days.
The Batch Filing Tell
The single-date batch filing is worth a pause. Three transactions spread across April, May, and June 2025 all surfacing on one day in May 2026 points to a specific kind of administrative decision: not a rolling failure to remember, but a deliberate choice to file everything at once when the moment arrived.
There are two ways to read that. One is charitable and involves staffing issues, an overwhelmed scheduler, and general Capitol Hill chaos. The other is that the office knew about the obligations and chose a convenient filing date without particular regard for the law's timeline.
The public record doesn't tell you which it is. The public record just shows the dates.
Liberty Broadband Is the Number That Matters
The Palantir trades are small in dollar terms — each in the $1,000-to-$15,000 band. The Liberty Broadband sale is not small. Up to $1 million in a single transaction is the kind of number that the STOCK Act's disclosure requirement was designed to put in front of the public. Quickly. Within 45 days. Not within 306.
Liberty Broadband is a cable and telecommunications holding company with significant exposure to Charter Communications. Hickenlooper sits in the Senate, which has oversight over telecommunications regulation, spectrum policy, and broadband funding. The connection between the holding and the portfolio isn't exotic — it's obvious. Which is precisely why the 45-day window exists.
The timing of the sale itself — May 2025 — isn't the story here. The story is the gap between when it happened and when anyone outside Hickenlooper's office was allowed to find out. Ten months is a long time for a trade of that size to sit in a drawer.
A Pattern, Not a Glitch
A single late filing is a glitch. A senator with three late filings, all disclosed in one batch, covering a span of nearly a year, is a pattern. The STOCK Act's $200 fine structure means there's little financial incentive to file on time when the alternative — filing everything at once, whenever — carries a maximum $600 exposure on a million-dollar trade. The math here is not complicated.
Hickenlooper isn't the only member of Congress to treat disclosure deadlines as approximate. He's not even close to the worst offender by raw count in any given year. But the Liberty Broadband trade alone — half a million to a million dollars, 306 days late — is the kind of filing that earns its place in the worst-of list without much competition.
The receipts are public. Make of them what you make of them.