I helped write our nation’s insider trading laws. Here’s how Donald Trump might have broken them.

President Donald Trump has spent years testing the limits of the law and discovering that, time and again, they do not seem to apply to him. But Citizen Donald Trump may finally have crossed a line that even the presidency cannot erase, violating the nation’s insider trading laws.

Here’s the timeline:

According to public reporting on Trump’s recently released 2025 financial disclosure and analyses of it, his brokerage accounts made 327 individual stock purchases on April 8, 2025, including major technology companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, and Alphabet. Uncharacteristically for Trump—a frequent trader—the transactions that day were overwhelmingly concentrated in purchases, not sales.

Then, on the afternoon of April 9, Trump announced a 90-day pause on most of the sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs he had unveiled just a week earlier. The announcement triggered one of the largest one-day stock market rallies in American history.

Depending on how Trump’s financial disclosures are interpreted, the April 8 purchases may have been worth as much as $12.8 million. The resulting market surge increased the value of those holdings by as much as an estimated $1.2 million in a single day, with the technology stocks likely generating even larger gains.

But wait there’s more…

This was not an isolated episode. According to one report, Trump’s brokerage accounts executed more than 21,000 securities transactions during 2025, an extraordinary level of trading for a sitting President that has prompted broader questions about whether government policy and personal investing became dangerously intertwined. But unlike those other trades, the April 8 purchases stand out because they were followed just one day later by one of the largest market-moving presidential announcements in modern history.

Maybe it was remarkable foresight. Maybe it was extraordinary luck. Or maybe Trump already knew what every other investor did not: that he was about to reverse course and send the markets soaring. Hours before announcing the tariff pause, Trump publicly declared on social media, “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” Later that day, his policy reversal sent the market sharply higher. If that is what happened, this is not merely another ethics scandal. It is potentially a felony.

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114308272725981913

I know something about the nation’s insider-trading laws because I helped write them.

I was the principal author of legislation that culminated in the bipartisan Insider Trading and Securities Fraud Enforcement Act of 1988, signed into law by President Ronald Reagan. That law strengthened penalties and expanded enforcement against those who exploit material, nonpublic information for personal profit, helping establish the modern framework for policing insider trading.

If the publicly reported facts are accurate, they present a textbook case for investigating insider trading. Trump allegedly purchased stocks while possessing material, nonpublic information that he would announce a market-moving tariff pause the following day. If Trump caused the trades to be made while knowingly exploiting nonpublic government information – in a breach of a duty of trust and confidence – prosecutors could have a serious insider-trading case.

The consequences are severe. Insider trading can carry up to 20 years in federal prison, millions of dollars in criminal fines, forfeiture of unlawful gains, and civil penalties of up to three times the profits earned.

Trump must be investigated.

In any functioning democracy, allegations this serious would trigger an immediate criminal investigation, including through appointment of a special counsel. But we are not living in normal times. Trump has transformed the Justice Department from the nation’s chief law-enforcement agency into an institution that serves his personal and political interests, led by his former criminal defense attorney. There is no reason to expect a DOJ that answers to Trump to impartially investigate Trump. If the Justice Department will not follow the evidence wherever it leads, Congress must.

That investigation should examine not only Trump’s financial disclosures but also every communication surrounding the April 9 tariff announcement, every person involved in the trading decisions, and every financial benefit that flowed from them. If the facts support it, Congress should not hesitate to impeach Trump for this “high crime,” and prosecutors should not shy away from pursuing criminal charges against him.

Trump should not expect the Supreme Court’s 2024 immunity decision to rescue him. That ruling protects Presidents from prosecution for official acts, not private schemes for personal enrichment. Setting tariff policy may be an official act. Secretly profiting from advance knowledge of that policy through personal stock trades is not. The alleged crime is the trading itself, not the policy decision.

For years, Donald Trump has behaved as though the presidency placed him above the law. Whether sitting in the Oval Office or elsewhere, if Trump used inside information to enrich himself in the stock market, he did more than cross an ethical line, he may have crossed a criminal one.

Trump must be held accountable.