Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., on Friday called on the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate whether Trump administration officials or those close to them profited from insider knowledge of President Donald Trump's pause on tariffs announced this week.
"We ask the SEC to determine whether President Trump, any members of his Cabinet, or other donors, insiders, and administration officials engaged in insider trading, market manipulation or other securities laws violations on April 9, 2025, when President Trump announced that it was a 'GREAT TIME TO BUY' into the stock market," the senators wrote in a letter to SEC Commissioner Paul Atkins.
They noted that Trump made the post at 9:37 a.m. Eastern time Wednesday, "just hours before he announced a 90-day pause on his recently announced tariffs, leading to a historic market rally after days of dramatic market declines."
"It is unclear which officials and affiliates for 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," Schumer and Warren said.
Trump met with investor Charles Schwab on the same day he announced a pause on most of the tariffs he had recently imposed on nearly all U.S. trading partners. Trump later noted that Schwab "made $2.5 billion today," thanks to his announcement while meeting with him in the Oval Office.
Warren posted a clip of Trump making the remark on social media with the comment, "Donald Trump in a nutshell: doing everything he can to make the ultrarich even richer. We need to find out if Trump's tariff chaos was used as cover for insider trading."
The letter followed a similar call from Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., who wrote letters to the SEC and the Government Accountability Office requesting that they investigate the decision to pause tariffs.
"The timing and scale of the call option purchases would suggest that an official of the Administration, or perhaps the President himself, provided friends or associates with a heads up that the announcement was happening," Waters wrote.
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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