Two days before President Donald Trump announced Dramatic plans for “reciprocal” rates In foreign imports, the Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy sold stocks in almost three boxes, companies, In accordance with the records Reviewed by Propublic.
February 11 sales occurred near the historic peak of the stock market, just before it began to slide in the midst of concerns about Trump’s rate plans and Finally fallen After the president announced the details of the new rates on April 2.
The dissemination records presented by Duffy with the US Government Ethics Office. Show Hey sold between $ 75,000 and $ 600000 or shares two days before Trump’s announcement of February 13, and up to $ 50,000 more that day.
Transportation secretaries normally have little to do with tariff policy, but Duffy Haas It appeared As one of the intellectual ancestors or Trump’s current commercial agenda. As a congressman in 2019, his last position of the government before Trump raised him to his cabinet post, Duffy presented a bill called the “Reciprocal trade law of the United States”. The legislation proposed, which was not approved, in many ways reflects Trump’s reciprocal tariff plan. Duffy worked on that bill with Trump’s commercial advisor, Peter Navarro. Trump’s tariffs were “the culmination of that work”, Duffy Posted onlinereferring to your own bill in the Chamber.
Government officials informed by non -public information learned in the course of their official duties could violate the law. However, it is not clear if Duffy had some information about the time or the Trump reciprocal tariff plans before the public.
Trump had repeatedly promised to institute significant tariffs through the campaign. But the duration of the first weeks of his mandate, investors were not selling panic, seeming to assume that Trump would adopt the large rota levies that led to the market accident after their announcement on the “day of liberation.”
In response to Propublic’s questions, a spokesman for the Department of Transportation said that an external manager made the trades and Duffy “had no contributions on the moment of sales”, a defense that ethical experts generally consider one of the strongest against.
Their transactions of actions “are part of a retirement account and are not directly administered by the Secretary. Account managers must follow the guide of the Ethics Agreement and did.”
“The secretary firmly supports the president’s tariff policy, but it is not part of the administration’s decisions on tariff levels,” said the spokesman.
The spokesman dismissed the notion that the knowledge of Trump’s next rates could be an internal knowledge because “President Trump has been discussing tariffs since the 1980s.”
Duffy is the second secretary of the Cabinet that has sold stocks at a timely manner.
Last week, Propublic reported that the Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $ 1 million and $ 5 million For Trump Media’s shares, the president’s social media company on April 2. An ethics agreement of the Government demanded that Bondi sell the shares within 90 days after his hiring, a deadline that Wolde has given him until early May, but. After the market closed that day, Trump presented its tariffs, sending the market drum.
After the history of Propublicics, at least two Democratic members of Congress asked for investigations. Bondi has not yet answered questions about whether he knew anything about Trump’s rates plans before the public did. The Department of Justice has not answered questions about trades.
The dissemination forms for the trade of values by government officials do not require that they indicate the exact amount bought or sold, but provide a wide range for the totals of each transaction.
Duffy’s dissemination records show that he sold 34 shares for a value of between $ 90,000 and $ 650,000 on February 11 and February 13. According to the Ethics Agreement He signed to avoid conflicts of interest as head of the Department of Transportation, he was asked to sell shares in seven of those companies. Cabinet members are requested to deflate the financial intersection with the role of supervision of their departments, which in the case of Duffy involves US roads, aviation and the rest of the nation’s transport network. The ethics agreement was dated January 13, and Duffy was confirmed by the Senate on January 28, which means that it had until the end of April to sell. His spokesman said he tried his account manager with the Ethics Agreement on February 7.
The actions he sold in the other 27 companies were not subject to the Ethics Agreement. These shares were valued between $ 27,000 and $ 405,000, according to the records. Among them were Shopify, whose merchants are affected by tariffs, and John Deere, the manufacturer of agricultural machinery that has projected Hundreds of millions of dollars In new costs due to Trump rates.
Other companies sold Duffy, such as the firm of gambling, the Doordash food delivery service are less directly vulnerable to tariff interruptions. But even those companies will be affected if Americans have less effective to spend. Few actions were not affected by Trump’s “Liberation Day” rates. The S&P 500, an Broad -based index, fell almost 19% in the weeks that followed Duffy sales and 13% specifically after Trump announced the details of his reciprocal rate plan. Since Trump unexpectedly retreated much of those initial rates, the market has recovered.
There are no indications that Duffy sales cash has immediately reinvested. It seems to have a hero in parts of his portfolio, including a Bitcoin background, Treasury Bonds, S&P 500 funds and Actions in Madrigal Pharmaceuticals, an American Biopharma company. (Duffy also bought some Microsoft actions, one of the actions he has forbidden, days before, on February 7, only to sell them on February 11 with the rest of his sales).
Government officials informed by non -public information learned through their work could violate the Congress or Update Cotrice Law. The 2012 law clarified that employees of the Executive and Legislative Branch cannot use non -public government information for the trade of shares and require that their operations quickly neglect.
But no case has led to the law, and some legal experts have doubts that they maintain the scrutiny of the courts, which in recent years have generally narrated what constitutes a trade of illegal privileged information. Current and previous officials have also raised groups that the Trump Department of Justice and the Bolsa and Securities Commission I would not investly investigate Trump activities or his allies.
Duffy’s president’s selection to direct the Department of Transportation was something unexpected. Duffy, who came to fame when he starred in the reality show “The Real World” at the end of the 1990s, held the first public office had Trump’s first mandate when he served as Wisconsin congressman.
As legislator, Duffy presented the bill that would have provided Trump, or any president, raise new tariffs, a paper that had a large extent lung leg reserved for Congress. The bill would have allowed the president to impose additional tariffs on imported goods if Hey determined that another country was applying a higher tax rate on the same goods when they came from the United States.
The bill was not approved, but Trump has essentially assumed that power by justifying new tariffs is essential for national security or in response to a national emergency. His February 13 Ads He called his advisors who come with new rates of rates on goods from countries around the world based on a series of restrictions that said that these tips were placing in US products, not only through rates and with their exhibitions.
Only the public launch of Duffy’s bill and Trump’s tariffs were similar. Simple launched a spreadsheet Showing how other countries touched the participular goods at a higher rate than the United States Trump also used a spreadsheet of its deployment to show that the new tariffs were the same or lower as commercial restrictions.
More recently, Duffy has been a reinforcement or Trump’s commercial policies.
“Liberation day! 🇺🇸🇺🇸 🇺🇸🇺🇸 🇺🇸🇺🇸e we will not bear it anymore! 💪iber💪💪”, Hello, tweeted Two Days After Trump Unveiled His Reciprocal Tariffs on April 2. US Face and Us Prachaal and Us Rovhocephaal and Us Rovhocepaal and Us Rovhocaraal and the United States Rovhocephaal and the United States Rovhaal and Usparoraral and Usparoraral and Usparoraotaotaot.
