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- [00:00]
A
George, is it legal or is it illegal? It sounds illegal to me. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Illegal News. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bulwark and Today. Got a hot one for you guys. I am welcoming my old friend George Conway, namer of this show, in fact, back from the trail, from the campaign trail. George, it's great to see you, man.
- [00:30]
B
It's great to be back. I'm very nervous.
- [00:34]
A
Are you?
- [00:35]
B
Yeah. I haven't done this in a long time.
- [00:38]
A
Wow. What?
- [00:39]
B
Just take it easy on me.
- [00:41]
A
I'll take it easy on you. Here's. Here was my first question. When you were on the campaign trail and big legal news was breaking, did you have to be like, okay, I've got to focus on this, but, like, were you desperate to talk about things? Was it. Did it drive you crazy not to be able to, like, constantly opine on national news?
- [00:58]
B
It drove me crazy not being able to have time to follow it to the extent I normally would. I mean, for example, I missed the last couple weeks of the Supreme Court's term, basically because I just was. I was just totally checked out. And then I did a podcast over the weekend where I actually had to talk about some of the major decisions, like the Voting Rights act case and the birthright, and I hadn't read any of them, which I normally do, and I. You know, I mean, there are three levels on which you can learn about judicial opinions. One is you can read the newspaper, which is the worst way to learn because you have no idea what it's about. The second best way is really just to skim the opinions because you know what they're saying. If you've read enough of these things, you can. You get where they're coming from, But I didn't have time to do that, so. And then there's a third way, which you read them over and over again, and then you see stuff in there that probably doesn't matter, but you become obsessed with. But that's too much for the illegal news.
- [02:03]
A
Well, I'm happy to see you. Happy to have you back. It's like coming home. Don't be nervous. These are your people. These are your people.
- [02:08]
B
These are my people. Hello, people.
- [02:11]
A
We're glad to have you back from. To do the real work. George. Of a podcaster. Of a podcaster.
- [02:18]
B
Yeah.
- [02:19]
A
Well, let's jump into it and just, like, get our rhythm back, because I wanted to start with Trump's new plan to sell early access to his truth social posts, because let's not just do insider Trading, okay, we gotta monetize insider trading, like, publicly. Like, it's just a wild, wild thing. So I just want to, for people who don't know. The new service announced by Trump Media, which is called Truth psi, will allow Wall street firms and other financial businesses to get access to Trump's posts milliseconds before the posts are public. The early access is intended to allow subscribers the ability to make stock trades and similar deals to profit off the subsequent moves in the market once Trump's posts go live. The company hasn't released the details yet on the cost of the subscription or who can enroll, but it says they already have subscribers signed up. George, is it legal or is it illegal? It sounds illegal to me.
- [03:22]
B
It should be completely and totally illegal. I mean, at the very least, it's incredibly unethical on a number of levels. I mean, let's, let's set aside the insider trading aspect first. I mean, there are two things that essentially, Donald Trump is getting the benefit of this money because he is a big shareholder, in truth, social. So essentially, I mean, we might as well, these people might as well be writing him checks. First of all, okay, that's one level upon which this is corrupt. The second level upon which it's corrupt is he's essentially being incentivized to make statements that move the markets, whether they be the oil markets, the securities markets, the commodities markets, other commodities markets, or prediction markets. The more stuff he says, the more he creates statements. But we people are going to be willing to pay for. So he's incentivized to say more rather than less. Not that he really needs that incentive. Because one day he says, we're at war with Iran and we're going to destroy them. And the other, next day, the next day he says, oh, we have a peace deal coming. And you know, he, he, he, one day tariffs are up, one next day tariffs are down. You know, he's all over the place. He already makes plenty of statements, but he's being incentivized by this to make even more statements. That's the second level upon which it's corrupt. The third level upon which it's corrupt is the insider trading aspect. The fact that people who pay for this service are getting advanced notice and therefore have a market timing advantage over people who do not pay. So they're essentially paying for inside information. And that's illegal. That's, that's something, if you paid a investment banker for advance notice of a deal that's going to be announced at the open, at The Open at 10 o' clock on Monday morning and you pay, or it's going to be, you know, you pay in advance and you trade on the after hours exchanges. You're, you're engaging in insider trading. And if the banker is being paid for that, that person is also guilty of insider trading. So that's the third level on which the, this is completely corrupt and illegal. And it's worse than that in that, in the sense that it doesn't even, not even worse than that, but it's, it doesn't take much time of advance notice for this to be profitable somebody, because there's a lot of trading that goes on today is program trading. So even if you have just a few seconds or maybe even milliseconds of advantage in knowing what statement is going to be made, what the subject of the statement is, you have an advantage if you pay these fees. So this is absolutely, everybody who's involved in this should go to jail. Even if the President has criminal immunity, and even if the President is not subject to ethics statutes and ethics provisions, the fact that somebody is paying for information that is confidential and not known to the public and that is being issued in an official capacity by someone who has a duty to act in the best interest of the country, it's comparable to a CEO who has a duty to his shareholders. And if that CEO, and to give the hypothetical, says to his friend, hey, we're going to announce our merger on Tuesday and you should trade on Monday night, that's illegal. And this is every bit as illegal. So even if Trump has some kind of criminal immunity for this, but I actually don't think he does, which I can get to in a minute, it's illegal for everybody else who's participating in the scheme, including the people who are signing up for this service, they should be prosecuted as well. And I think, you know, I think we can pretty, should be sure, be pretty sure that the Justice Department isn't going to prosecute this because they turn a blind eye to any profit making scheme involving Donald Trump or his cronies or beneficiaries. But it's, it's illegal. It should be illegal under state law. So, for example, if there's trading on the New York Stock Exchange, I don't see why Attorney General Tish James couldn't go after this whole scheme and prosecute it as an illegal insider trading scheme. But to go to the one other point about the criminal immunity, Donald Trump's criminal immunity, and I know in our prior incarnation we talked a great deal about the Problems with the Supreme Court's decision in Trump versus the United States involving the January 6th trial, that immunity only extends to the outer perimeter of the president's official responsibilities. Now, the statements, issuing the statements alone is within the outer perimeter of that authority. But receiving money for it and providing advanced access for it and being a participant in a scheme to profit from the statements, that's not within the scope of presidential criminal immunity. And the Supreme Court said that in a footnote in the Trump versus United States decision, where he said that, well, yes, the President can't be held criminally liable for his official acts, whether that be whatever that is, but he can be held liable for bribery. So if the president takes cash in exchange for doing something and receives cash, that's illegal. And that, you know, as long as you have the ability to prove through public means that he made the statements and you have the ability to prove otherwise that he was benefiting from those statements, I think you could prosecute this. But, of course, this Justice Department won't do. Will have to be a succeeding Justice Department, and we hope someday that will occur.
- [09:43]
A
Yeah, then we'll get one of those. I'm pretty obsessed with this in part because one of the crazy things about it is it was clearly already happening. Like, we have been watching the Iran war news, specifically, right? The market hangs on Trump's truths, his blitz on truth social, to figure out what he is going to do with Iran, because it's going to have a direct impact on oil prices and therefore futures and therefore so many other commodity goods that rely on oil, transportation. I mean, just a million things. And we were watching the markets move. And also Trump himself, like, you could start to plan how things were going to go in terms of announcements about the war. Because on Sunday nights, Trump would always announce a deal. Barack Ravid is right there to be his stenographer and say, no, no, no, no, no. A deal is close. And they were doing it specifically because when the markets opened on Monday, they wanted the markets nice and calm. But also, you could see people in the movement, you could see that, like, some people were getting insider information on. On stuff that Trump was going to do. And now it's almost like, forgive me if I don't explain this correctly, this theory, but it seems to me like sometimes Trump does things that are patently illegal, and then they try to just bring them out into the open, like the illegality of them, to try to codify them and litigate them so that the stuff that they were doing behind closed doors, that was illegal. It like, takes the sting out of it or something. Am I overthinking this?
- [11:15]
B
No, no, I don't think you're overthinking at all. I think one of the things that has been confounding about the whole Trump era is that for the most part, the corruption and the criminality has been out in the open. They don't, you know, one of, one of the things that they, the arguments that they seem to like to make is, well, this wasn't criminal. There was nothing wrong with this, because we just did it out in the open. If we, if we meant to be criminals, we would have hit it. And they hide.
- [11:40]
A
If we'd done Watergate during the daytime, it wouldn't have been illegal.
- [11:44]
B
Right. And that's part of, that's one of their many, many tricks, one of their many, many techniques for arguing that what they're doing is not illegal. And I think also it just, the other aspect of it is they know they're not going to be prosecuted if they think they are completely immune from prosecution. Everybody is out there knowing that the Justice Department isn't going to prosecute this because the Justice Department is totally beholden to Donald Trump, which in and of itself is an impeachable offense. I mean, but so it really is just. The quintessence of the overt corruption is really, really staggering. They're not making much of an effort to hide it at all, at any level. And it doesn't, you know, and to go back to the statements that, the Sunday night statement, the Barik Ravib stories, it doesn't even matter whether what Trump is saying is true or not. The fact that he makes the statements makes the markets move. Because. And so if you know he's going to make a statement which you almost know just sort of instinctively, but it's better to know specifically in advance that there is something that is going to be said and what that something is, it moves the market. So basically it doesn't matter. He can just say things without regard to their truth and move the markets, tell people in advance that he's moving the markets and they pay him to move the markets and everybody profits. It's insider trading. But more, it really is a massive, massive market manipulation scheme, a scheme that manipulates all sorts of markets all at once. The stock markets, the futures markets, the commodities markets, the commodities, futures markets, every. There are all sorts of, you know, and it seems, given the volume of trading that is going on, that you can see these, that there's somebody front running this. And Then you see the volume of the President's own stock trades. A guy who never really traded stocks that actively all of a sudden started trading stocks in January of 2025 like never before, or buying shares of companies in which that are, whose stock prices are affected by government actions. And then he also makes statements that are favorable to companies that he happens to take a position in. I mean, this is just, this is corruption on a scale that we have never seen. And this is only one aspect of the corruption that's like, even if you just took this alone, this is more corruption than we've probably seen in all prior administrations in the history of the United States. And this is only one aspect of the corruption. I mean, there's this clearly some kind of market going on for pardons. There's the emoluments he's receiving from foreign governments who are buying shares in companies that he's invested in or buying or that his kids own or that his kids own. And we saw these situations where a situation where the Pentagon gave a big contract to a company that a firm in which Don Jr is invested in has a big position. I mean, we're seeing. It's impossible to keep up with. And it's like we're getting like a Teapot Dome or a Watergate every, every couple of days. It's, it's really incredible. And what's, what's even more mind blowing to me than that is that it doesn't seem like a lot of people are paying attention. And the Democrats don't really. I mean, some of them are making a big deal of it, like Senator Ossoff, Senator Schiff, Senator with Senator Murphy. But it just, the, just, it doesn't, it doesn't seem to break through and because most people are just like completely tuned out and they also don't understand how it affects them, which is, which is also scary.
- [16:05]
A
That's really true. Can I, can I just do one just on this thing? So I don't know if you heard about this, but I bet you did. Where Trump's teleprompter guy was betting on what words Trump would say in his speeches and because as we've been talking about futures and the markets wherever, you also forget that now there's all these betting markets for regular people, right? So it's like Kalshee and Poly Market and whatever. And so that guy, the teleprompter guy is under investigation by the Commodities Future Trading Commission, which, so this exists. There's a thing, they're meant to regulate this for Using insider information to bet and win tens of thousands of dollars on the prediction market. Kalshee. He was placed on unpaid leave by the White House. Trump called the GU guy a disgrace. And the White House reportedly issued an internal memo telling staffers not to bet on non public information. How is the teleprompter guy any worse than what Trump himself is doing through the release of these posts?
- [17:09]
B
Well, his failure is that he's not a member of Mar a Lago and that he's not betting in big enough tranches. I feel bad for him. He's kind of like, if we, you and I played, you know, Trump speech, bingo, whether, you know, we would be good at that. We would be good at that, you know, slurred word. Well, you gotta. I guess the slurred word would be no. This poor guy. I feel sorry for him. He should, he's the one who should get a pass. I mean, he's just doing what everybody, he knows, everybody else is doing. It's a culture of corruption and he's the, he's the least of the problem.
- [17:46]
A
I think about this all the time, about the way that people sort of process information and I hear voters say some version of, well, if it was illegal, somebody would stop it. Right. Like there's this sense among the public that if what Donald Trump was doing was so bad, well, then, come on, we've got things to deal with these things, you know, like, nobody's doing anything about it. I think because the DOJ doesn't prosecute it, it gives people the sense that, like, oh, well, this must be okay, because otherwise they wouldn't let them get away with it. Yeah, but you know, who else knows how to get in on this business is foreign governments.
- [18:22]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [18:24]
A
Is there not, Isn't there like a different, I don't know, fair. Isn't there. Aren't there other things out there meant to govern foreign interference that could engage on this? Like, because I got to ask, as, as somebody who basically feels a little bit similar to the voters, it's like, if this is really as bad as it seems it is, do we not still have mechanisms remaining to do something about it? Not just doj, is that the only entity that can do something about this?
- [18:53]
B
We should. But if we have a federal government that is, you know, that is profiting off of the same activities, or a federal government who's principal actors are profiting off the same activities, you're not going to see that kind of enforcement. And what people can't get their heads around is they don't understand that the same guy who's profiting and the same group of people who are profiting from the illegal activities effectively have control over the enforcement mechanisms.
- [19:30]
A
Yeah, that's right.
- [19:31]
B
And that's, that's the fundamental problem. And that's why this is so corrupt. And, and that's what, you know, I mean, I think we, we need a Magyar in our country, like, you know, the new prime minister of Hungary who was elected, you know, very surprisingly, last year, who went around the countryside of Hungary explaining to people how the corruption affected them. And we need somebody like that here in the United States to do that. And I you know, I mean, the only person I see who's really doing it that effectively is Senator Ossoff.
- [20:02]
A
Yeah, Ossoff. He has been after my heart a little bit. I appreciate his straightforward communications to.