Democrats want to know whether President Donald Trump and his GOP allies financially benefited from implementing and then pausing recent tariffs — a move some said was effectively insider trading.
“It happened in front of our eyes,” Sen. Ruben Gallego told NOTUS. “This hurt the economy in the end. People on Main Street are going to see the slowdown (of) the economy. You’re going to have layoffs happening. You’re going to have higher costs.”
Gallego and Sen. Adam Schiff sent a letter Thursday to the White House chief of staff and the U.S. Office of Government Ethics requesting an “urgent inquiry” into whether Trump, his family and other members of his administration engaged in “illegal financial transactions informed by advanced knowledge of non-public information regarding his changes to tariff policy.”
The senators wrote that Democrats have “grave legal and ethics concerns” with Trump encouraging users on Truth Social to buy stocks while stock market prices were low Wednesday morning and then pausing the tariffs without warning just hours later.
“I’m demanding answers from the White House and Office of Government Ethics about whether anyone in the Trump family or administration profited off of this tariff chaos through insider trading,” Schiff wrote on X.
Gallego told NOTUS that Trump’s tariff policy rollout was riddled with “just absolute corruption.”
The White House said that Democrats were “playing partisan games.”
“It is the responsibility of the President of the United States to reassure the markets and Americans about their economic security in the face of nonstop media fearmongering,” spokesperson Kush Desai said in a statement. “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.”
In response to an inquiry from NOTUS, a spokesperson for the Office of Government Ethics said it is “committed to transparency and citizen oversight of government,” but declined to comment “about specific individuals.”
“OGE publishes ethics disclosures, associated documents, and oversight correspondence to its website as soon as practicable,” the spokesperson said.
House Democrats are also calling for more information on who benefited from the tariff policy changes. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters at a press conference Thursday that Democrats “need to get to the bottom of the possible stock manipulation that is unfolding before the American people.”
Jeffries said they can gather this information from House members’ financial disclosures, which require members to list any stock trades they’ve made 30 days from the date of those trades.
“The reality is people are going to have to pay the piper in terms of disclosure,” Jeffries said. “Our point is: You might as well get it out into the public domain now because it’s coming later, and there’s nothing that you can do about it.”
After the press conference, NOTUS asked Jeffries if Democrats plan to target Trump, his family and cabinet members. Jeffries said that his focus is on the House GOP for now, but didn’t rule out an eventual investigation into Trump family finances.
“What we do know is that House members are going to be required to disclose, in short order, their trading activity,” the minority leader said. “So we have a foundation to be able to make some determinations as to whether some things happened that were not kosher.”
Other Democrats have also called for probes into Trump’s tariff policy. Rep. Steve Horsford, a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, which grilled the White House’s top trade negotiator about the tariffs, said Wednesday that he plans to request information regarding how Trump implemented his tariffs and who knew what when. Rep. Ro Khanna called for Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to be fired over how he handled tariff policy rollout.
Rep. Wesley Bell, an Oversight Committee member, said Democrats could assemble evidence even if they’re limited by being in the minority party.
“I’m a prosecutor, so I do believe in due process [and] gathering evidence, and I think that’s exactly what the Oversight Committee is designed to do and should be doing,” he told NOTUS.
Ultimately, though, Democrats acknowledged their Republican counterparts were unlikely to launch their own inquiries into stock trading around the tariffs.
“We’re going to need a Republican that has a conscience, a Republican that is not a coward” to help force an investigation, said Rep. Summer Lee, who is also a member of the Oversight Committee. “The work to try to really move at least one or two of them to do the right thing and to realize that, ‘You are the party supposed to be the party of law. You are supposed to be the party of fairness.’ We recognize that that’s going by the wayside.”
Rep. Shontel Brown, another Oversight Committee Democrat, told NOTUS she’s unsure what avenues exist for Democrats to force investigations into Trump’s tariff policy. Regardless, she said, Democrats will do something.
“We are not always clear about what options are available because our Republican colleagues like to change the rules on us even when we pursue things like petitions,” Brown said. “We’re not dealing with honest brokers, so it does make it very challenging. But we will continue to fight as much as we can to protect our constituents.”
Tinashe Chingarande is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS and San José Spotlight.
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