Americanswers… on 5 Live! Is insider trading corrupting Trump's White House?

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30business needs in one place, saving you time, headaches, and serious money. Stop paying for missing pieces. Go to odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com to learn more. With the new Schwab Teen Investor Account, teens can gain hands-on investing experience and build positive money habits. It's an account co-owned by you and your teen, so you can monitor and engage with the account while your teen learns how to invest and manage money. Learn more at schwab.com. It is Monday, which means we are answering your questions with Matt Chorley on Five Live. Today, you've been asking us about Iran, of course. Also about insider trading, though.

1:10And the BBC has done some work looking at trading spikes before some of the announcements that have been made by the Trump administration about Iran. We also are going to talk about allegations of alcoholism against the head of the FBI, Kash Patel. Those allegations made in the Atlantic magazine. He denies them. Plus, there's quite a lot of outrage about the Football World Cup, soccer as the Americans call it, which seems to be oddly expensive. Now, it's not just the price of the tickets to get into the matches. It's also the train journeys that you're apparently going to be forced to make if you're going to one of those matches and all about whether that is fair or not fair.

1:48So welcome to AmeriCanswers.

1:52Anthony Zurcher:AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News. You hear that, John? Oh, I think when I hear that sound, it reminds me of money. We didn't start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it.

2:05Marianna Spring:This is a big cover-up, and this administration is engaged in it. This guy has Trump derangement syndrome.

2:10Anthony Zurcher:I have four words for you. Turn the volume up!

2:19Right, we've got absolutely loads of questions, so we'll try and get through as many as we can. Let's start with Iran and an email from Jonathan in Oxford. He writes, if the Iranian Navy is laying at the bottom of the sea, as President Trump claims, what are the Iranians using to open fire on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz? Anthony.

2:37Anthony Zurcher:Well, you don't need a Navy, a traditional Navy, to attack tankers in the Strait of Hormuz because it's so narrow. The Iranians can launch drones from their own territory. They can fire missiles, which is what they've done. They even have threatened shipping, not just in the Strait, but around it, in the Gulf and then outside of the Gulf. And when we say the Iranian Navy, we're thinking about the big ships like that frigate that was sunk in the Indian Ocean and others. But Iran still has a bunch of speedboats, basically little Zodiac boats, which in theory could be armed with people with machine guns or mines or their own drones.

3:10Anthony Zurcher:And that could present as much of a threat to shipping as a big traditional Navy ship. So Iran still has a variety of different means to threaten shipping, which is exactly what they've been doing. So we've got a clip of the US released a video of the US Navy's warning and the attack on the Iranian cargo ship, although we haven't been able to verify the clip. So let's take a listen. Motor vessel Tosca, motor vessel Tosca, vacate your engine room, vacate your engine room. We're prepared to subject you to the sailing fire.

3:56I suppose, Sarah, the question that Jonathan's raising, it goes to the heart of Donald Trump keeps declaring victory and saying, you know, they've been obliterated, or this has happened, or that's happened, and then in the next breath has to say, and we're going to attack this or that, and then Jonathan's basically saying, but I thought you'd already done that, and you declared victory on that. There's clearly that sort of tension there. I mean, I think both of these questions show you very adequately why they ought to have thought about the Strait of Hormuz before they launched these attacks.

4:27Now, we understand from some reporting in the New York Times that it was the Israelis laid out a plan for President Trump in his cabinet and insisted that the first few days of attacks would disable the Iranians to the point where they would not be able to threaten the Strait of Hormuz, and everybody just accepted that at face value, and obviously that has been a huge mistake, and this has now become the biggest issue that needs to be sorted out between Iran and the United States, and it wasn't even an issue before the war began. So as a result, you've got all of this confusion coming from Donald Trump, who says one thing one day, another the next, because he wants to declare victory.

5:03He wants to get out of this. He wants this to be over so that oil prices can go back to normal. You won't see price rises here in the United States ahead of elections later next year. This is not doing him any political good at all. The hostility is continuing, but as this kind of thing happens and as Iran is able to block ships in the Strait of Hormuz he can't say that it's a total victory and walk away because it's no kind of victory yet so I think that illustrates for you the political mess he's got himself into because of the military mess that there is in the Strait We've just had a text actually literally while you were speaking there so maybe this is one for Mariela can pick up if America has the equivalent of the man on the Clapham omnibus does he think what is happening with Iran is reasonable?

5:49Anthony, is there an equivalent of a man on the Clapper omnibus?

5:52Anthony Zurcher:What? I have no idea what that means. You're going to have to translate that for me. It's basically like, you know, it's often used in a sort of like, well, it's what they're really talking about down the dog and duck or what's a normal person who's on a bus in Clapper, basically, rather than somebody in the Westminster bubble or whatever. What would be the American equivalent of that? A person on the street. What are the man on the Clapper omnibus looking at social media? What are they thinking, Marianna?

6:20Marianna Spring:Well, some of the most viral content about the war has tended to be the rage bait style content, often coming from government accounts themselves, whether that's from the US, you know, White House accounts and otherwise, or whether that's coming from Iran, official accounts in Iran. And it's, I mean, particularly the Iranian content recently, like people might have seen those Lego videos where you've got like versions of what's going on in the war and in the US cabinet and various other places in the form of Lego characters. Because I think that the thing that's interesting is you've got quite a lot of left wing American accounts sharing the rage bait content saying this is actually quite funny.

6:55Marianna Spring:And I'm not very keen on Donald Trump and the people in his team. And I'm critical of the war. And or you've got people from who are supportive of Donald Trump and MAGA who are kind of trying to share the US equivalent of that rage bait. So you've got this kind of rage bait off occurring when it comes to actually the average person. So that's who we're talking about here. And it would maybe be Gabriella, Justin, your favourite, who's our undecided voter, undercover voter. Those are my fictional characters on social media. She's kind of seeing a little bit of the rage bait stuff. But I'd actually say that on the whole, her feed isn't so much about the war now, certainly than it was several weeks ago.

7:32Marianna Spring:And the main concern that's popping up is around the economy and actually everything is expensive. And the reason I like Gabriella and I like her anyway as a person. It exists solely in Mariana's imagination Anyway, the reason I like Gabriela actually is I think she genuinely does represent a lot of Americans who take an interest in politics once every four years, if then and take a lot less interest in politics than we ascribe to them and I think one of the big things about the United States is a big country, you get on with your life you're making ends meet things like gas prices, price of petrol does affect you, very very viscerally in a lot of a lot of particularly poorer parts of the United States so on that clapham omnibus equivalent but everything else all this other stuff just doesn't it just it's just it just faded out of most people's lives and I think you've got to keep that in mind.

8:26Well let's let's move on to another question we're sort of focused on a particular group in America this is a voice note from Dorinda in Swindon.

8:33Marianna Spring:How do you think the president's criticisms of the Pope will affect his support in America and polling in the midterms. Taking this a step further, J.D. Vance is a Catholic and his faith is very important to him. If things between the White House and the Vatican continue to deteriorate, who do you think Vance will side with, his political or his spiritual leader? Political, because he knows what side his bread's buttered on or whatever, at least on this earth. He can deal with the rest of it when the moment comes. And at the moment, he is wholly siding with Trump. Trump, on the other hand, has, I think it's fair to say, taken a bit of a knock from this.

9:16It seems from most of the reporting that there's been, and people have been out and talked to Catholics going to mass, and Catholics are obviously a very big voting bloc in the United States. And I think I'm right in saying most of them last time around voted for Donald Trump, but they're pretty split and they vote for both the main parties, that they will not have liked the tone of this. And it's not that you can't disagree with the Pope. Popes have long disagreed with American presidents. You think, obviously, the abortion issue. And lots of Democrats, lots of Democratic parties supporting Catholics are quite liberal on abortion.

9:49And that doesn't comport with the teachings of the church as we would generally understand them. And they just live with that. But what they don't want is a sort of open argument where Donald Trump is being vituperative about the Pope or saying that he wants the Iranians to have a nuclear weapon or that he's soft on crime, which I think most American Catholics will just think, oh, come on, we don't want that. So the answer to the question is it's not good for Trump, basically.

10:14Marianna Spring:It's worth saying on that criticism point that Justin was just making and on the deleting this AI-generated image of Donald Trump as Jesus, it is very rare for Donald Trump to delete stuff, particularly rage-baity type stuff. It's really unusual and I think that probably is reflective. Yeah, well, exactly. And I think that probably is reflective of the criticism he's experienced across the political spectrum. Yeah, exactly. Not just from people who don't like him, which is what he usually gets. In fact, one of the people who told him to take it down was his pastor, Mark Burns, who was on the show.

10:45I spoke to him last week. And this is what he had to say. I know that Donald Trump, Mark Burns, you, the presenter, every person that was watching this have the same struggle. But just because he's the president doesn't mean God holds him at a higher standard. No, he is still a man and still has to bow down to Master Jesus, just like the janitor who's not the president, but he still owe his allegiance to the living God. I think that was after I was trying to get him to explain if he felt that the president always acted in accordance with the Bible. Let's move on. John in Yorkshire has WhatsApp.

11:25that if and when insider trading is proven in the Trump administration, will anyone actually suffer the consequences? Would it prove another nail in the coffin of Trump's political career? Sarah? Fascinating question, especially as there's a BBC investigation online today showing the spikes in various trading just before different announcements about the Iran war from Donald Trump then caused a major move in the price of oil or sent the stock market up or down. It seemed as though people knew a few minutes in advance, a crucial few minutes in advance, what was going to happen. Or certainly they made a lot of very astute bets immediately before an announcement.

12:06So that's just one more instance in which people could look at that and say here is a way that people are either doing insider trading or some form of corruption, making money out of the Trump administration. Will there be some kind of backlash and the administration suffer? To be honest, I doubt it. I think people expect this of the Trump administration. It's pretty naked the way in which the president and his family are doing deals for the Trump organization around about the same time as diplomatic deals are being done. It's absolutely blatant the way the president is fundraising for various of the things he wants to build around Washington and that there seems to be surplus funds.

12:43Nobody quite knows what happens to them. It's it's out there that he wants to make money from the presidency, that the people around him are trying to do the same thing. And I think it's baked in already to people's understanding of what the Trump administration is about. What can be done about it, though, Anthony?

12:59Anthony Zurcher:Well, it is illegal, first of all. It is illegal for government officials to trade inside information. But having said that, it is difficult to prove. And in fact, since government officials have been included in these insider trading laws, which happened a number of years ago, No one has been prosecuted over it because you have to prove who made the trade and that they had that information ahead of time. So it is it's a bad look, clearly. And I think it's a bad look for this White House. And they did. The White House put out a note, I believe it was last week, saying that no one on White House staff can place bets on these on these prediction markets, Calci and others like it.

13:45Anthony Zurcher:because you do, you have inside information, not just on when Donald Trump is going to send out a tweet that could change the economic landscape, but even words in Trump's speeches and things like that that are bet on in these prediction markets. So it is a kind of an unseemly look, but whether anything can be done about it at this point, as Sarah says, it's kind of the way this administration operates. And I guess we shouldn't be too surprised that someone out there is lining their pockets if they have a little bit of heads-up notice. Got to be said as well, a lot of Americans will say they all do it because it's a big issue.

14:21It has been a big issue, hasn't it, Anthony, in Congress where there have been various efforts to get it kind of banned completely. And some prominent members of Congress, I'm not going to name them now, but some prominent, quite well-known members of Congress seem to have got very rich while being in Congress. And that could be because they made wise moves. But there is a sort of sense the entire American political class has been up to doing this. and so Trump just does it better, which is one of those things where the waters are muddier than you might at first think. Very good. Right, let's finish off with football.

14:53Someone sent us a question. Let me find the question. It's from Andy. He said, could you please touch on the build-up to the Football World Cup in the US and just how much trouble is it in? Mariana, you like the soccer ball.

15:04Marianna Spring:I do love a bit of soccer ball. What I won't say, sorry, I shouldn't do impressions of American accents. That often upsets people, not least Anthony.

15:12Anthony Zurcher:You did a great job, Ariana.

15:16Marianna Spring:I do love the football. There has been a lot of noise about this World Cup, not least because of the political context, people that are both happy and not so happy about the games that are being hosted in the United States, but more so around the cost of everything. So there was outcry at some of the ticket prices. And then there's been a lot of criticism of the venue, which is going to be hosting the World Cup final. It's the MetLife Stadium, which is in New Jersey. They've been caught in the middle of a load of criticism because it was announced that a 30 minute train journey to a World Cup game hosted there will be 11 times what it would usually cost.

15:50Marianna Spring:So that is one hundred and fifty dollars to go on the train, one hundred and eleven pounds. So some of the criticism has then been sort of deferred to or transferred to FIFA. So New Jersey governor Mickey Sherrill says that FIFA are to blame for fans having to pay loads because that's to do with them not subsidising some of the transport and everything else as much as they could. It's interesting about Mikey Sherrill. So we did a lot about her quite recently. She's a fairly recently elected governor of New Jersey, Democrat. She wants the people of New Jersey not to be built by the World Cup and not to have to pay for it.

16:27And that's going to be the right across. They don't care about soccer ball or whatever. They just don't.

16:33Marianna Spring:They do a bit more than they used to. We keep saying that. We've been saying that since about 1966. Oh, they'll care in America now. They do. They've got into Miami. They've got Messi. I don't think they care. And I think ultimately the... I'm not saying it's going to be a disaster. But why don't we ask an American? Why don't we ask an American? Anthony, are you excited? Because Anthony's too polite to say. But here, let's give it a go.

16:53Anthony Zurcher:I actually think that a lot of Americans care about soccer and they care about the World Cup. They get into it. But I also think this is part of a larger political spat between Mikey Sherrill and the Trump administration and FIFA because it all comes down to money. and New Jersey wants more money to pay for security and for the mass of people that are going to be coming in for these games and they see an opportunity to squeeze some out of FIFA, understandably. But I think a lot of people are going to enjoy the soccer games. But if you've been following the United States for even a few years, you know that companies are going to try to squeeze as much money out of all of this and commercialize it and corporatize it as much as they can.

17:34Anthony Zurcher:So you shouldn't be shocked the tickets are more expensive. You shouldn't be shocked that hotels are going to be very expensive and that the train to the stadium, at least in New York City, of all places, is going to be more expensive. That's kind of the way things work here. And Sam, often, whether it is Qatar or Russia or in the past when there's been big sporting events in controversial countries, there's a lot of talk about it beforehand. And once we get to the event, everyone stops talking about that and they just talk about the football. Do you think that will end up happening here? As long as no politics or events go around it, there's every possibility, yeah, that people will settle down and enjoy the football and that Americans may really, really get into it properly whilst it's being hosted in America or in North America.

18:14Anyway, there's games in Canada and Mexico as well. But if there's any immigration raids in the same cities as the games are being played, if other political events somehow encroach on it, then they're going to get huge attention because everybody will be watching the cities in which the games are being played and have the potential for some of these more domestic political disputes actually to go kind of worldwide as a result, especially if you end up with any of the football players making a political stance. Remember when sports stars were all taking the knee in the middle of stadiums to protest that Black Lives Matter?