Pam Bondi Implicated in As Much As $5.5 Million in Insider Trading
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Pam Bondi Implicated in As Much As $5.5 Million in Insider Trading<br>But what can be done about it?
Christopher Armitage<br>Aug 03, 2026
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Credit: Getty Images, Creator: Chip Somodevilla<br>A NOTE ON WHAT FOLLOWS
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Martha Stewart went to federal prison for something smaller than this. Her case grew out of a stock sale worth $45,673; she sold her ImClone shares in December 2001, one day before bad news about the company went public, and the government convicted her in 2004, not for the trade itself but for lying to the investigators who questioned her about it. She served five months. Stewart was no ordinary citizen either. She was rich, famous, and connected, and none of it stopped the prosecution.<br>Pam Bondi sold as much as $5.5 million in Trump Media securities on April 2, 2025, and hours later Trump announced the tariffs that sank the stock she had just left. This is what open-air insider trading looks like, and insider trading, in case you didn’t know, is very illegal, a felony carrying up to twenty years per count. The ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee referred it for investigation. We know why the federal government did nothing: Bondi ran the department that would have investigated her. The question this piece asks is why, fourteen months later, no New York prosecutor has opened a case.<br>Raskin is the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee. He referred the sale, which closed hours before the tariff announcement sent markets into a $10 trillion decline, and wrote that Bondi’s conduct “bears all the hallmarks of insider trading.” No investigation has been disclosed, the officials who could have opened one are gone, and the federal government has asked her nothing under oath about the trade.<br>New York State can still charge this. No pardon can stop it, no attorney general can quash it, and this article ends with the phone numbers.<br>Here is what the public record establishes.<br>Bondi received her Trump Media stake through the merger that took Trump’s company public. Her financial disclosure shows Digital World Acquisition Corp, the shell company that merged with Trump Media, paid her $2,969,563 in shares and warrants for consulting work on the merger. Her ethics agreement required her to sell within 90 days of her February 4, 2025 confirmation, a deadline in early May.<br>She sold on April 2. Her government transaction report shows a sale that day of between $1 million and $5 million in Trump Media shares plus between $250,000 and $500,000 in warrants; Raskin’s letter states the combined figure as between $1.25 million and $5.5 million. Trump announced the tariffs that evening, after the market closed. Trump Media closed April 2 at $18.76, opened the next morning at $17.92, and fell 13 percent over the following days.<br>The deadline required a sale by early May. Nothing required a sale on the one day that mattered.<br>Trump Media filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, dated April 1 and accepted April 2, the day of her sale, naming Bondi as a selling shareholder with 106,250 shares registered for sale. The company told Reuters the filing was routine and that no trading window was open for any of its affiliates.<br>Her disclosure form records the date of the sale and nothing else. It does not record the time, the price, or what she knew. Broker execution records answer the first two, and the first two are evidence of the third.<br>A single subpoena would produce them.<br>The federal government has not issued that subpoena, and the record of the past fourteen months shows why.<br>Raskin sent his referral to Inspector General Michael Horowitz on May 20, 2025. Horowitz left the department five weeks later to become inspector general at the Federal Reserve, and acting officials have run the office since. Bondi fired Joseph Tirrell, the director of the department’s ethics office and her own ethics advisor, that July, with no stated reason. One former Justice Department inspector general said publicly that the office has shown no evidence of any serious investigative activity in the face of highly publicized misconduct allegations.<br>Trump fired Bondi on April 2, 2026, one year to the day after the trade, and when she finally appeared before House Oversight on May 29 under threat of contempt, the interview concerned Epstein. Todd Blanche, the lawyer who defended Trump at his Manhattan criminal trial, has run the department as acting attorney general since the firing. No one has questioned her under oath about the trade.<br>Stewart’s sale avoided $45,673 in losses; Raskin’s letter states that Bondi’s sale “appears to have saved her, at the very least, hundreds of...