79. Insider Trading in The White House?

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0:34Okay, 3.03 in the afternoon on the East Coast. Damn, I wanted to start bang on at three o 'clock to make sure that you didn't get told off. Anthony, I'm very worried about the fact that people, you know, somehow seem to get the short end of the stick. You know, it's... Yeah, everyone thinks that I'm because I had that one kerfuffle. I'm the one that's always late now. It's fine. I was here. Okay, you were here. It wasn't a kerfuffle, it was a kerfuffle. But anyway, you say keffefe, I'll say kerfuffle. I'm just, you know, I'm looking out for your reputation as ever, as your reputation management consultant.

1:06Yes, you've managed to enhance my reputation. So I am grateful for that. So we're in the middle of a constitutional crisis, but everything's fine. So what do you want to talk about today? Should we tell people who this is? This is the rest is Politics US, by the way, in case you hadn't figured out. But I'm assuming that if you've joined us, you did figure that out already and came looking for us. Thank you, founding members, for joining us for this question and answer session. I'm Katty Kay. That's Anthony Scaramucci needs absolutely no introduction. So there's a whole bunch of stuff going on apart from the, oh, we have people from everywhere.

1:38Look at this. Before we get to that, Switzerland, my home country, Robin Munger. Thank you, my fellow compatriot. Karen is joining us from Germany. Somebody's already commenting on your haircut. You get so many comments on your haircut, on your moisture. Carol Smith, wait to see you. I'm very well moisture. the French Alps. Incredibly well moisturized today. Malta, Dunbar, Scotland, from all over the place. Thank you. Your hair is looking great. Thank you. For those of you who are listening and not watching, we've just had a little hair rearrangement from Mr. Scaramucci. Okay, it's, we're going to take a lot of your questions today because there are so many different things that we want to talk about.

2:20Obviously, updates on the tariffs, the Ukraine situation, the president of El Salvador, who has been in the White House speaking. We are recording this. We are talking to you at three o 'clock on Monday afternoon. So the two have just wrapped up in the White House. But Anthony, you want to start with a small matter of a constitutional crisis, which I think will get us to El Salvador. Well, I mean, there was a nine to zero Supreme Court decision, the gentleman who was sent to El Salvador. He's here illegally. I just want to point that out to everybody. He was sent to El Salvador. He's a nonviolent violator of the immigration laws in the United States, but he was deported and sent to an El Salvador in prison without due process.

3:10And so in this country, we've always had, have had due process. I mean, there was one period of time when we didn't, that was during the Civil War, where the habeas corpus, the writ of mandamus, all that stuff was repealed by Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln is the only president, really, to disavow the Supreme Court. He did it with the Dred Scott case. He basically said, the Dred Scott case basically said that blacks could not be U.S. citizens. Lincoln did disavow that. That was like a form of civil disobedience. So the second president to disavow a Supreme Court case now is Donald Trump. People say it's Andrew Jackson, but if you actually really understand constitutional history, it isn't.

3:49But I bring this up because it was 9-0, Cady. I said, you have to go and get the guy and bring him back here. Of course, now that he's in another country, the president, quote unquote, does not have the power to do that. But of course, he could have leaned on President Bucolet, the president of El Salvador, to do that. And he purposefully did not do that. And so in the Oval Office, the two presidents, Bucolet from El Salvador, President Trump, are saying that the prisoner is staying exactly where he is. And then they laced into the media by saying that the media wants us to let criminals out of prisons.

4:26But El Salvador is now a safe country because we keep the prisoners in prison. And Trump was loving every minute of that. I'm sure the MAGA crowd loves that, but it does bring us closer to the line of what the president's doing. And so, again, just three quick things. Went after the law firms. He's rebuked the media. He's gotten settlements from the law firms. He's gotten settlements from the media. He's had a chilling effect on the corporations in terms of the CEOs, what they're going to say and not say no money center bank will disavow his tariffs, even though it's crumbling. the U.S. stock market, probably putting us into a recession.

5:05And so he's slowly creeping down the road. We're moving down the road of Project 2025 to more authoritarianism. So please push back on me. Tell me I'm wrong about this and what I'm thinking about this is misguided. So the Supreme Court case was interesting that it ruled nine to zero. And the thinking is that the Roberts Court framed the ruling to be technical enough that he could get all nine of the Supreme Court justices to rule effectively against the administration and that that was important for him. But there is some thinking that the ruling itself, the language of the ruling suggests, which said that the White House had to facilitate Mr.

5:54Garcia's extradition from El Salvador was woolly enough in a way that that word facilitate, what does it actually mean? It doesn't say they didn't, the Supreme Court didn't say to the White House, you have to have Mr. Garcia on the plane with President Bukele when he comes to Washington DC next week. They didn't say that. And what does, So what does facilitate mean in that context? And I guess that leaves enough wiggle room for people in the government to say, well, we're not defying the Supreme Court order. We've spoken about this with President Bukele and President Bukele said he's not going to send him back to the United States.

6:34As he said in the White House today, that would be akin to sending a terrorist back to the United States. I'm not going to do that. And you saw President Trump sitting there kind of positively grinning like a Cheshire cat next to President Bukele. So can the White House now try and make the legal claim that they're following? You know, they've raised this and President Bukele says he's not going to do it. And it's actually a foreign policy issue now, not a contractual law issue. And so there's nothing more that they can do. And I think I don't we've been waiting, right, for the moment when there is a clash between the Supreme Court and the White House and the White House ignores a Supreme Court ruling.

7:16And that is the moment at which most lawyers have suggested, yeah, this really would be a constitutional crisis. And what would that mean? Obviously, the Supreme Court is painfully conscious of its own standing amongst the American public. Its opinion approval ratings are lower than they have been. It's seen as very political, which is not what Justice Roberts wants it to be seen as. And maybe that's also why the Supreme Court is kind of is trying to get into a position where it's urging slowness and deliberation rather than having a head on front confrontation by saying you've got to bring Mr.

7:54Garcia back by next Monday to the United States. And I don't know, I'm not a constitutional lawyer. I only play one on a podcast. I don't even play one on a podcast. I promise you that. But I do read some of them. And there seems to be some confusion about whether this really does constitute, if they don't bring him back, is that the crisis that constitutional lawyers have been looking for? That's I don't you're you're a lawyer, Anthony. Is would that be it? Would that be the moment at which, you know, we take the matches and set our hair? Actually, I'm not going to set my hair on fire. I've just spent a lot of money getting it highlighted.

8:31So I'm not going to do that. But would that be the moment? God forbid. I mean, I certainly wouldn't want that to happen. My hairdresser would be very offended. Why would we let a constitutional crisis turn into a self arsonist? God forbid. That's another issue going on in our country. But yeah, I guess I guess what I would say is this is going to be a non event. Republican senators are going to ignore it. Democrats are fighting with themselves, caddy, so they're not going to be organizing any type of dissent of it. But I do think it's going to do something to the court. And so I do think that Justice Roberts has taken notice of this now.

9:07And I think he's now sitting there saying, hmm, he's going to come after the court and the checks and balances and Marbury versus Madison and the whole 250 year structure that's made the country successful. And I think he's going to turn a modest friend, someone that is generally supportive of him and wrote a pretty stunning, gave him a very wide berth in terms of presidential immunity. But I think he's going to turn, I think he's going to turn the guy and I think he's going to turn this guy from a modest friend into a modest adversary. So that's what I think the outcome will be. And obviously, I could be wrong about that.

9:44You could see 30 days from now, 60 days from now, the guy slips back into the country when it becomes less of a triggering thing, you know. Sorry to interrupt, but our producer Fiona is pointing out something very smart, as ever, Fiona, thank you, which is that we should step back a little bit and just explain what this story is before jumping straight to our hair on fire. And that is that since March, El Salvador has accepted from America more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants and some other immigrants who have been sent to the country's notorious maximum security gang prison just outside the capital.

10:21That's of course made President Bukele a very popular ally in the Trump administration, which is why he's in Washington today, because he's agreed to take these migrants who are here in the country illegally on the campaign trail. Donald Trump, of course, had said that they would be sending back the criminals. There's quite a lot of evidence reporting now that the people who were sent to El Salvador were not actually criminals. And amongst them is this Maryland resident, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who the administration has said was deported because of an administrative error. And the error was that he had had a court ruling in his favor that he could not be sent to El Salvador because that would put his life in danger.

11:09And so that's the kind of background to this story. But I think the bigger context of this story is the clash that this is setting up with the Trump administration pushing the Supreme Court to almost daring the Supreme Court to take on an immigration case. The Supreme Court historically has not wanted to take on immigration cases, but there are now, I think we've got six that have been ruled on and four that are pending of what are called these emergency docket cases before the Supreme Court around the issue of immigration. So it's the Trump administration really pushing to the max its own authority to get rid of people, but the Supreme Court pushing back and saying, you have to give people due process before you just put them on a plane and send them to El Salvador.

11:56You have to have them have their rights. I mean, even if they're in the country illegally, they do have right to due process and have their case heard. And so you can't just whisk them off the street and send them off to a foreign country. Well, one of our founding members, Olivia O 'Neill, is pointing out that, and she's right, that they weren't deported back to the country that they came from. They've now been imprisoned in a dictatorship. And so she is correct. This is a major international human rights violation. It should be treated very seriously. But unfortunately, Olivia, in this country, the one I live in, they're not going to treat it seriously.

12:33Maybe there'll be some human rights activists that will voice concern. If the Republicans did voice concern, Trump would turn to them and say, hey, let's leave it alone. 30 days from now, we'll get the guy back. That sort of thing. But I guess you're left out there to think. I ask everybody on this podcast listening to think about this. Imagine you're out there on your own. He did come into the country illegally. but now you have no human rights. You have no due process. You have no advocacy. And then it's the it's the age old question, Katya. They came for that group. I didn't care. Then the domino hit another group.

13:13I didn't care. OK, wait a minute. The domino is hitting me now. Now I care. And who's coming to help me? Yeah, who's coming to help me? And I think this is the big issue. And so this is this is where organized leadership, organized dissent. Somebody's got to come in here and provide advocacy. And let's go to Lincoln for a second. It's interesting because he did disavow the Supreme Court, but he did it on a human rights basis. He did it on a human rights basis. And there was clarity in his thinking. And of course, Lincoln would be saying to people, because I've tried to read a little bit of Abraham Lincoln's old words almost every week, but what Lincoln would be saying is that a person doesn't have the right to govern another person without their consent, number one.

13:57And number two, you can't apprehend and hold somebody without a due process. That's the whole anchor of the system of freedom, Katty. So this is super upsetting. If we go from kind of constitutional crisis to kind of the sort of meta issue of all of the things we've been speaking about over the last couple of weeks, and this crisis of confidence that the world has in the United States, in the competence of the leadership of the United States around tariffs, but also in the system of the United States, don't underestimate the degree to which the rule of law is the kind of diamond in America's crown.

14:39And if the rule of law, whether it comes to immigration or to other issues, is seen not to be adhered to, then America loses something that has made it very special over the last two and a half, you know, 250 years. And it does so, I would say it is peril. Okay, there's one other question here. Joe here, who's a YouTube user is asking, now that the Trump administration is actively defying the Supreme Court, what action could scoters take unprecedented times. I guess the question is around this narrow legalese, Joe, and we have to look at this, is the Trump administration actively defying the Supreme Court?

15:21And I think that is something that constitutional lawyers are sifting through at the moment. And I think the Supreme Court phrased this in such a way that it has allowed the administration a certain amount of wriggle room because they know the risks of an open confrontation. And they know the risks in terms of their own standing, the Supreme Court standing, but the risks also in terms of what would happen if the Trump administration didn't do anything. We're going to take a quick break and then take more of your questions.

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17:08Here in the United States, it's been a very busy week already, and we are only Monday. We're going to talk about the tariffs as well, or no? I thought we were going to talk about those until this happened. We are going to talk about the tariffs right now. Okay. And I'm going to start the tariff discussion with Alina Steffelbauer's question, which I think gets us into this. Anthony, can you explain insider trading and why it is illegal and how does SEC process Liberation Day? I'm going to just quickly put the context of that and why Alina is asking that. There's been a lot of questions, particularly online, go on social media platforms and in some of the press about whether, and the Democrats in the Senate have launched an investigation into this from the Democratic side about whether there was illegal trading around the tariffs, because did the White House, in other words, give anyone a heads up that it was going to put the pause on the tariffs, thereby giving some people the opportunity to buy as the market was really at its bottom and then make money when it started to rise after the president changed the policy i have never been accused of insider trading clearly i'm not even quite sure if i've explained it right but well i think you've done a pretty good job but i just want to apply some historical context for people in the 1920s professionals had the inside information they had the scoop.

18:42So if I knew about a merger and you were my friend, I could call you and say, hey, buy Anadarko Steel or whatever it is, and they're going to announce a merger next week. And so it was causing a lot of unfairness in the marketplace. And so stock markets crashed, people lost trust in the markets. And so in 1933, Joseph P. Kennedy became the first commissioner of the SEC, and he tried to go through what caused the crash, and he tried to regulate or create rules that would prevent this stuff from happening again. And one of them was the insider trading law. So there's a tipper and a tippy. And so if I'm tipping you on something, I'm the tippy, I am breaking the law by telling you something that I know that I know is inside information.

19:26And you're breaking the law by acting on it if you decided to do that. Now, that's for the average American. Here's the irony and here's the hypocrisy. And this is why people don't like people in the Congress. The Congress had been trading on inside information forever. And so Peter Schweitzer, I think you know who he is, investigative journalist. He wrote an article about this, turned it into a book in 2011. And the 60 Minutes actually did big interviews on this. Well, wait a minute. They're allowing themselves to trade on insider information. And the answer is yes. And so then the Congress voted to renege that.

20:02And that lasted about six months. And then on a voice vote, Cady, not on C-SPAN, not in the public, but on a voice vote over the phone, they reinstated it. And so people like Nancy Pelosi, people, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is dead against it. She doesn't have her own personal trading account. But Marjorie Taylor Greene does, others do. And what they do is they trade on the information. And it looks like there's lots of patterns that have happened where before Liberation Day, a lot of people were selling the stock market in the Congress, but also friends of those people and friends of Donald Trump.

20:38And then it looked like they were buying several hours before Donald Trump, quote unquote, went to the 90 day. Didn't Marjorie Taylor make a lot of money just before the pause? She did. She did. And so that's one of the things that's fueling the questions about whether there was people were giving her information. And there's Sluice and there's Sherlock Holmes is out there with their, you know, magnifying glass looking at the data. up and she got caught, but she doesn't care because for her, she has an exception. So literally, I can join the Congress. I know about legislation or I know about a drug that's about to get approved from the FDA.

21:15I can buy call options in those stocks and I can trade. You know, my buddies in the hedge fund community always laugh. They say, well, the best hedge fund out there is Nancy Pelosi. We could just figure out what she's doing. We'll shadow her trades. Of course, she gets upset when we say that. But I mean, the truth of the matter is there's a high level of unfairness going on. And there's a feeling that Donald Trump's friends are trading the volatility of his decision making. Do we have any evidence? And I know this investigation has only just been launched by Senator Adam Schiff in the set. They're a Democrat from California looking into this.

21:53But at the moment, my understanding is that this is speculation. there isn't actually any evidence. Is that right? That the little the little looking glass that, you know, Dr. Watson is walking around the halls of Congress with has not actually produced any. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Here's what I would say is no one's going to get in trouble. But I think he's raising it because he wants people to know that there is a high level of corruption. You know, I I told Alistair and Alistair loves using it. There's a golden age of corruption taking place. Bloomberg reported that the Trump family has made a billion dollars off these internet money scams.

22:34We'll call them that, because they're meme coins and the pump and dump that they're doing, and they've made a billion dollars off of that. They've got the true social thing that they have wired, although that's down heavily recently. But Donald Trump is letting people know what he's doing before he does it. And then he was literally bragging in the Oval Office, this guy made a billion and that guy made a billion. And oh, you know, it's peanuts to that other guy. It's only 500 million. And what it does is it decays. It decays the trust and it causes people. Yeah. And it causes people to lose faith.

23:12And then with cynicism, you do get compliance, Katty. If you do study human behavior, what ends up happening is you give up on the idealism, you become a cynic, and then all of a sudden you comply with whatever the nastiness is going on out there. So it's a problem. Will Parker is asking, is this the most corrupt administration in US history? I don't know if I would say it was the most corrupt, but I think there is. Not yet. Not yet. We are only three months in and there were a lot of questions about the corruption, the first Trump administration too. There was one thing, I remember the Wall Street Journal, when the tariffs were first announced, had this great line saying, Liberation Day is going to be buy another yacht day for the swamp.

23:56Because on top of all of the issues around insider trading and whether people are being given proprietary information and actually making money out of it because they're Donald Trump's friends, don't forget that for all of these countries that are coming to the United States trying to negotiate trade deals or industries that are trying to negotiate carve outs, somebody is making an awful lot of money. And this city makes money through lobbying and those foreign governments will have lobbyists. So, yeah, somebody is buying extra yachts at the moment. OK, the other thing that I wanted to ask about is you talk about is Ukraine, because we've just had Donald Trump, as we're recording this on Monday afternoon in the Oval Office, and he said something pretty startling on top of the attacks.

24:44and we can talk about those, the awful attacks in Sumi that happened on Sunday night. Here's what Donald Trump said today. When you start a war, you got to know you can win a war. You don't start a war against somebody that's 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles. So that is the level of Donald Trump's empathy for the fact that Ukraine was invaded by Russia, did not start this war. The Russians walked into it and would have tried to take the country in the space of three days if the Ukrainians had not fought back far more ferociously than most people gave them credit to.

25:20But it was also another thing that Donald Trump said about this that struck me when you had, I think it was Chancellor-in-waiting Mertz of Germany, questioning whether that attack on the town Sumi in Ukraine was actually an act of war crimes because civilians were being killed as they were going to Palm Sunday Mass, including children in Sumi. And what was Donald Trump's response, Donald Trump's response was he was told that it was a mistake. Without questioning whether it was a mistake, he was saying, oh, it was tragic. I hear it was a mistake. But the degree to which Trump now seems to, having a couple of weeks ago pushed back against Vladimir Putin and seemed to get annoyed with Vladimir Putin for not coming to the negotiating table, I think two things are happening.

26:07One is that Putin is emboldened by the lack of resistance from Donald Trump. And Donald Trump, once again, seems to have given Vladimir Putin the benefit of the doubt over this civilian attack. And now here he is again saying that Ukraine started the war against somebody 20 times their size. I mean, what's going on here? Is he getting frustrated that he can't end this on day one? And so he just wants to give Putin whatever Putin wants. Is that Is that what's happening here? I don't I don't understand. Well, I mean, it could be that it could be something more sinister than that. But I think that the 60 minutes, I encourage everybody, if you get a chance, just go online, watch the interview.

26:51It was broadcast in the United States last night, the 60 minutes interview of Zelensky. If you could just see the facial expressions when he asked, does the U.S. have your back? Does the U.S. have your back? And I think that the facial expression that Zelensky gave off in that interview is a metaphor for the rest of the free world. And so I would imagine any Western leader sitting there with the 60 Minutes journalist being asked the question, does the U.S. have your back? The facial expression on Zelensky was such that, no, actually, the U.S. doesn't have my back. But I can't say that because I'm hoping against hope, a glimmer that there is leadership inside of the U.S.