Several senior Senate Democrats are asking the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate whether President Donald Trump and others engaged in insider trading, market manipulation or other securities law violations related to his volatile global tariffs plans that have upended financial markets.
In a letter sent to SEC Chair Paul Atkins on Friday, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and five other senators pointed to Trump’s back-and-forth policy changes creating “significant market turmoil,” amounting to trillions of dollars of lost value, since their unveiling last week.
They also pointed to Trump publicly encouraging people to invest in the stock market just hours before he unexpectedly announced a 90-day pause on most tariffs, which triggered a massive rally Wednesday.
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A similar investigation request was made by Democratic leaders in a letter sent Wednesday to the Office of Government Ethics acting Director Jamieson Greer and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.
“This was his strategy all along,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters Wednesday of Trump’s surprise decision to walk back tariffs on every country but China. The reversal triggered what Trump and others recognized as one of the best market days in history.
White House spokesperson Kush Desai accused the Democratic leaders of “playing partisan games” with their SEC request in a statement to HuffPost.
“Democrats railed against China’s cheating for decades, and now they’re playing partisan games instead of celebrating President Trump’s decisive action yesterday to finally corner China,” Desai said.
An SEC spokesperson declined comment on the investigation request when reached Friday by HuffPost.
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In their letter Friday, the Democratic senators said that it’s “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.”
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This is reason enough for an investigation, they said.
“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,” the letter reads.
The letter was additionally signed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Finance Committee ranking member Ron Wyden, Arizona’s Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego, and California’s Adam Schiff.
