Several senior Senate Democrats have written a letter asking the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to investigate whether Donald Trump violated securities laws and engaged in insider trading and market manipulation while switching course on his global tariffs.
“We urge the SEC to investigate whether the tariff announcements, which caused the market crash and subsequent partial recovery, enriched administration insiders and friends at the expense of the American public and whether any insiders, including the president’s family, had prior knowledge of the tariff pause that they abused to make stock trades ahead of the president’s announcement,” said the letter, led by the Massachusetts senator and former presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren.
Early on Wednesday, Trump announced on social media: “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” The post was written at a time of severely volatile market trends and US indices down.
Hours after his post, the US president abruptly announced a 90-day pause on many tariffs. The move sent the US’s S&P 500 back up several percentage points in just minutes. Wednesday ended up marking the best day for the S&P 500 since the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis.
The letter was also signed by the Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, finance committee ranking member Ron Wyden, the Arizona senators Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego, and California’s Adam Schiff.
The senators accuse Trump of announcing “a series of erratic, reckless tariffs, leading to significant market turmoil”, adding: “As a direct result of this chaos, the US financial markets have experienced dramatic declines over the course of just a few days.”
The letter adds: “It is unclear which officials and affiliates of President Trump had advance knowledge of his plans to delay tariffs – but insiders may have known that he was going to announce a tariff pause and that the market would improve.”
The senators also questioned the Trump administration’s actions to undercut the SEC, asking what effects the recent actions and federal staff cuts had had on the agency’s ability to “investigate and pursue enforcement actions” as well as “monitor and respond to large-scale market events”.
