Democrats accuse Trump of insider trading on tariff changes but ethics issues persist in own ranks

House and Senate Democrats in recent days have called for probes into whether administration officials and allies profited from insider information before President Donald Trump’s tariff pause took effect last week, while some have ignored identical ongoing ethics problems in their own ranks.

Last Friday, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer, alongside four colleagues, asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate whether President Trump or any of his “affiliates” violated federal securities laws by engaging in “insider trading, market manipulation, or other securities laws violations.” Trump, who announced a 90-day pause on tariffs on April 9, had posted to his Truth Social platform, “GREAT TIME TO BUY,” just hours before.

“To ensure that market insiders do not unfairly benefit from privileged information that could impact stock prices, our nation has strict laws to prevent insider trading and market manipulation,” the senators wrote to SEC Chairman Paul Atkins. “Yet before pausing the tariffs that threw markets into disarray, President Trump appears to have previewed his plans to do so on Truth Social” with his announcement.

“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 added.

For example, one of Trump’s strongest congressional allies, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, is facing accusations from her colleagues of possible insider trading after she disclosed several stock purchases in the days leading up to Trump’s announcement to pause tariffs.

Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a longtime proponent of banning stock trading for members of Congress, urged her fellow lawmakers to divulge any stock trades in the wake of the tariff pause. “Any member of Congress who purchased stocks in the last 48 hours should probably disclose that now. I’ve been hearing some interesting chatter on the floor,” Ocasio-Cortez posted to X. “It’s time to ban insider trading in Congress.”

Long-time problem only gets attention when Trump is the target

However, Democrats quick to push investigations and scrutiny on their Republican colleagues and the administration have done little to address similar accusations of ethics violations in their own ranks in recent years from some of Trump’s staunchest critics, such as the lucrative stock trades by former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband.

Former Speaker Pelosi, who remains—de facto—one of the most powerful and influential Democratic lawmakers, has faced scrutiny for years for well-timed stock trades by her husband dating back to her first term as House Speaker, netting the San Francisco couple millions in profits over the years.

The Pelosi's trades have grown more frequent, and with bigger paydays in recent years. For example, in 2022 Speaker Pelosi’s husband, Paul, purchased between $1 million and $5 million of stock in a semiconductor company ahead of a vote on legislation that set aside $52 billion for chipmakers, Just the News previously reported.

In 2023, the Pelosis sold 30,000 shares of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, in a transaction worth up to $3 million, just weeks before the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against the tech giant.

Even AOC condemns Democrats' trading history

When the former Speaker was confronted by reports that dozens of lawmakers had, at some point, violated a law that prevents insider trading, she defended the ability of elected officials to trade in the market without restrictions. “We are a free-market economy. They should be able to participate in that,” Pelosi declared. Her blunt statement faced pushback even from fellow Democrats, including Ocasio-Cortez.

“There is no reason members of Congress should hold and trade individual stock when we write major policy and have access to sensitive information,” Ocasio-Cortez, who says she holds no individual stocks or digital assets, posted to X. There are many ways members can invest w/o creating actual or appeared conflict of interest, like thrift savings plans or index funds.”

Other leading Democrats joined in the accusations, including vocal Trump critic California Senator Adam Schiff. “The timing is too suspicious to ignore,” Schiff said in a statement. “We need to determine whether anyone close to the former president exploited privileged information to enrich themselves.”

Schiff has also faced his own ethics issues. According to a Just the News analysis of mortgage and election filings last year, Schiff repeatedly declared that both of his homes – one in California and the other in Maryland – were his “principal residence,” opening him up to a possible fraud prosecution.

Americans are allowed to claim just one home as their primary residence, the one they live in the majority of the year. Those declarations afforded the senator financial and political benefits, like lower mortgage interest rates, tax advantages, and the ability to run for election in his former California House district until he delisted the Maryland residence in 2020.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency referred another prominent Democrat and Trump critic to the Justice Department for potential prosecution for alleged mortgage fraud, New York Attorney General Letitia James. According to the referral, James purchased a property in Norfolk, Virginia and, like Schiff, declared it as her primary residence even though she resided in New York and served in the state's government, Just the News reported. 

Stock trading by government officials, specifically lawmakers who oversee the sectors in which they trade has been an ongoing problem for years. In 2022, an analysis from The New York Times found 97 of then-current lawmakers reported stock trades either they or their immediate families made involving firms working in sectors that overlapped with their committee assignments.

Between the years 2019 and 2021, more than 3,700 reported trades involved such potential conflicts of interest, the analysis found. Several prominent Democratic lawmakers were identified by the Times as making stock trades that could represent a conflict of interest, such as Rep. Rho Khanna, D-Calif., whose family members traded stocks in pharmaceutical company AbbVie while the lawmaker sat on a panel investigating the company.

The STOCK Act, which was passed and signed by President Barack Obama in 2012, was designed to prevent such insider trading by requiring financial disclosures. However, it does not prevent lawmakers from trading individual stocks.

Peter Schweizer, whose 2011 book "Throw Them All Out" was instrumental in educating the public about the lack of stock trading laws applicable to members of Congress, has long advocated for banning lawmakers and their spouses from trading.

"They still sort of continue to blatantly trade in stocks," Schweizer previously told Just the News in October 2021. "So in the case of the Pelosis, for example, she's the Speaker of the House, legislation that's going to affect Big Tech in a positive way or big contracts going to Big Tech, her husband's not only buying and selling stock in Big Tech, he's actually buying options, which are sort of leveraged bets that the stock is going to go one way or the other. And, of course, Paul Pelosi Sr. just happens to be really good at making those predictions.”

Ocasio-Cortez, though reluctant to confront Pelosi by name, has emerged as a frequent critic of her own party when it comes to lawmakers’ stock trades, saying the hypocrisy undermines the Democratic message. To that end, she has repeatedly signed on to legislative proposals to prohibit congressional stock trading.

“There needs to be Democrats who walk the walk and talk the talk. There is an insane amount of hypocrisy, and the hypocrisy is what gets exploited to use the cynicism and wherever there's a hypocritical window,” Ocasio-Cortez told Jon Stewart’s “The Weekly Show” podcast, diagnosing the Democratic Party’s problem.

“For example, I think one of the most biggest examples of this is insider trading in Congress,” she said. “It’s so crazy. I mean, like, it's the end of the thing. Like, people think that everyday people are stupid. I'm like, ‘Do you all really think that people don't see this s***?’”