Trump biographer flags 'suspect' pattern in White House stock trades

Trump biographer Tim O'Brien made clear on MS NOW Friday that he doesn't remotely buy the Trump administration's excuse for the recent series of suspiciously timed stock trades coming from within the White House that profited off major government decisions before they happened.

"Tim, let's start there," said anchor Antonia Hylton, quoting a statement from the White House: "'Neither President Trump, his family, nor the Trump Organization plays any role in selecting, directing, or approving specific investments.' So end of story. No more questions needed, right?"

O'Brien noted that even accepting that claim, the "curious reality" remains that "while those trades were being made, there were policy decisions coming out of Washington and the White House that directly affected the profitability and the prospects of the companies whose stocks the Trump family was trading."

For example, he noted, massive trading around oil happened before the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, and before the invasion of Iran, "which all hinged on people having access to information from the Trump White House." Vice President JD Vance, he noted, blew off questioning on this when he "said, come on, do you think Donald Trump sits ... in the White House with a computer and is just trading stocks thousands of trades a day? He probably isn't. That's what he pays other people to do."

"He's on Truth Social," said Hylton.

"He's on Truth Social," agreed O'Brien. "And often he's tweeting things that affect the value of the stocks he's trading or his representatives are trading. So no one is saying that he's on Vanguard or any other app trading stocks for the fun of it and for his own, you know, financial gain. He's obviously doing it through advisers. But the timing of these trades, the stocks involved and the policy decisions happening in Washington had a confluence that makes it very suspect and should be examined."

The sad reality, however, he continued, is that any government officials who would investigate this, like the Securities and Exchange Commission, report to Trump and take orders from him — making a real reckoning almost impossible.

"I've been a business journalist for decades," said O'Brien. "I don't own individual stocks for the simple reason that I don't want someone to say, I edited a story or wrote a story about a business because I had a financial interest. My colleagues do the same thing. You know, if Barack Obama had picked up $5 on a street corner, the Republicans would have investigated him the next day. And why aren't they raising alarms about all of this stuff?"

The bottom line, O'Brien concluded, is that "from the Reflecting Pool to the jet to his trades, to his cryptocurrency dealings ... Donald Trump has made more money in two years in the White House over a two-year span than he ever did in decades as a real estate developer, because he's grifting off of his position in the White House."

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