Expose ALL Of Trump's War Profiteering

It can serve as a downpayment to the world on our commitment to restore accountable democracy to America.

We can say this much about Donald Trump, his advisers, and their many servants in other branches of government: They are prolific coverup artists, but poor craftsmen.

This became evident in Trump’s first term—indeed even in his first campaign—but the pattern has accelerated in his second, as the criminality has become more rampant. They most famously botched the Epstein files coverup. And now two more coverups—both involving the exploitation of state secrets for private profit—are unraveling simultaneously.

The underlying scandals are distinct, and separated by years, but now threaten to collide.

One was supposed to have been put to bed when Trump won the 2024 election, effectively terminating Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump’s theft and concealment of highly classified documents. Aileen Cannon, the corrupt, Trump-appointed judge in that case, had already ordered the case dismissed on frivolous grounds. When Trump won, the government withdrew from its appeal, all but ensuring he would never face trial. And to complete the coverup, Cannon issued a protective order sealing Smith’s official report on the investigation, so that the public couldn’t read it.

This coverup began to fall apart on Wednesday, when Trump’s Justice Department accidentally produced documents from Smith’s report to Congress that speak to Trump’s motive.

The document-production process stemmed from an ongoing Republican effort to discredit Smith—to pile dirt on top of the coverup—through selective disclosure. In their haste and sloppiness, DOJ officials accidentally confirmed that all this secrecy is about more than simply protecting Trump from embarrassment. It shows that prosecutors believed Trump stole classified information—which included planning documents for war against Iran—for personal profit.

In a January 13, 2023 memorandum, which was brought to light by House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin, “prosecutors wrote that the [FBI] has determined that the classified documents President Trump retained from the White House ‘were commingled with documents created after Trump left office.’ FBI has also found that certain classified documents President Trump improperly retained ‘would be pertinent to certain business interests.’ DOJ prosecutors further assessed that these’“classified documents pertinent to his business interests’ established ‘a motive for retaining them.’”

That’s the first faltering coverup.

The second stems from the fact that political insiders who trade on government secrets leave breadcrumbs for investigators. On March 16, Trump loyalists ousted the top enforcement official at the Securities and Exchange Commission, one of the few federal regulators with jurisdiction to investigate insider trading. She had reportedly “clashed with agency leaders over the direction of its enforcement program, including the handling of cases with ties to President Donald Trump and his family.” Then on Monday, just a few minutes before Trump announced a phased de-escalation of his war against Iran, an individual or individuals with advanced knowledge of his plans bet hundreds of millions of dollars that oil prices would drop, reaping over a billion dollars in profit.

This was just the most conspicuous trade. On unregulated betting markets, people are setting themselves up to make millions if Trump re-escalates, wagering on the precise timing of a land-invasion of Iran. Here’s one example from Polymarket.

Are these Trump insiders or merely reckless speculators? Would you place bets this large if you were shooting in the dark? Or has Trump created a culture of corruption through his own profiteering, in which getting rich off state secrets, stealing from other investors, and endangering U.S. service members has become standard practice?

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The term treason gets tossed around recklessly in politics, particularly in the Trump era, particularly by Donald Trump. It’s almost always total nonsense. But these crimes come much closer to the genuine article than anything any of Trump’s critics have done to earn the accusation. It still probably doesn’t match the statutory definition of treason—the most parsimonious explanation is raw greed, rather than a particular intent to betray the United States by aiding its enemies. But disclosing war plans to advance business interests, and placing large, conspicuous bets on military or diplomatic maneuvers that depend upon an element of surprise, both surely do aid U.S. enemies.

As chance would have it (or maybe it wasn’t chance at all) Trump became president again and launched a war against Iran. It quickly deteriorated into a humiliating debacle, which Trump may try to paper over by deploying ground troops as drone fodder. Why did he launch the war? What factors weighed on his mind? The allegiance of his fellow kleptocrats in the Middle East? The fortunes of his children? Naked, impulsive greed?

The fact that we can’t answer these questions with any certainty under Trump militates in and of itself for impeaching and removing him from office. Insofar as congressional Republicans are determined not to impeach him, the most straightforward legislative means of containing the damage from these serial breaches is to limit his war powers: force more votes on resolutions requiring him to come to Congress for military force authorization; refuse to fund an open-ended war.

But the approach with the greatest upside entails aggressive investigating—by Congress or any other entity—to expose the profiteers. Oversight would leave Trump and his henchmen vulnerable to severe political blowback for selling out U.S. interest and servicemen. It would chill the insider trading epidemic. And it would be an important, early gesture to the world that the United States might eventually cleanse itself of the Trump abomination.

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Republicans in Congress will go to great lengths to abet Trump’s corruption. But it can become politically untenable. They tried to help him bury the Epstein files, but could not sustain the coverup.

Would the same Republicans block an investigation of these state secrets trades? In an election year? Their reluctance—the fact that they did not initiate an investigation on their own, right away—speaks volumes already. If there were an innocent explanation, or one that would not inculpate the Trump machine, they would happily ride to the rescue. They must suspect, at the very least, that people in Trump’s orbit have big mouths. A more parsimonious explanation is that Republicans in Congress believe Trump or his proxies are the actual profiteers.

Transparency can be forced on the GOP in much the same way Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie blew the Epstein coverup wide open. The people who made these bets can be exposed. The people behind the coverup can be forced to explain themselves in public.

Of course, if we achieve bipartisan consensus that profiting from state secrets amounts to a betrayal of the United States—something that cannot be tolerated—what’s the rationale for keeping the Jack Smith report under seal?

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Some of this stuff might come out in due time, through more ordinary channels.

The watchdog group American Oversight has litigation pending in the 11th circuit to force disclosure of the Smith report.

The Monday trades were cleared on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which presumably gives Illinois jurisdiction to investigate—after all, people on the other side of those bets, who don’t have access to national security information, effectively had their money stolen. And that means the profiteers likely violated federal and state law simultaneously.

But there’s much more at stake here than justice for traders, or comeuppance in domestic politics.

Political discourse, in the U.S. and globally, is thick with doubt about the future of America, its influence in the world, its reliability as a partner. Our democratic allies, such as we still have any, rightly view the GOP as a rapacious authoritarian party, and have little faith in swing-state swing voters to lock Republicans out of power until they purge their criminal element. Our collective decision to return Trump to power has set off a severe crisis of confidence. But it’s almost as damaging for those same allies to watch Republicans loot the country with impunity, while competing elites look on unwilling or unable to hold them accountable.

Perhaps the biggest question on everyone’s mind: Is America rotten to the marrow, or is it effectively in exile? Is America going to be a part-time mafia state indefinitely? Or is its government simply occupied by a crooked cabal that can be disposed of permanently, once democratic forces summon the will to reclaim control.

The distinction is key, and you can see it in global perceptions of Trump’s war of choice against Iran. The strategic conduct of the war has been a humiliation. But the humiliation stems almost entirely from Trump the man. Swing voters may be duped by his bellowing pronouncements on Truth Social and the ensuing credulous news coverage, but foreign leaders understand that no other American administration would have done something like this. Not a hawkish liberal administration, not a neoconservative one. They also understand that the debacle says much more about Trump than about U.S. might in the abstract. The fact that Trump lacks political support for a penny-ante war-for-thrills against Iran doesn’t mean the United States would perform poorly in a real and justified defensive clash of great powers.

In other words, Trump has stained the United States, but it isn’t really clear to anyone yet if he’s permanently altered its character.

Clarity will come from future elections. If they go well, we will still have much penance to pay. Think of what this insider war profiteering looks like to U.S. allies in Asia, who are already experiencing severe economic hardship from the international petroleum shortage Trump created.

Imposing consequences now for all this globally destabilizing corruption would represent a handsome down payment. It can begin in Congress and in the office of the Illinois attorney general. But it can and must continue as Trump’s power ebbs, and, eventually, disappears.

Democrats should thus resolve to impeach Cannon, to expose all of Trump’s private motives for launching this war, and gain restitution from the thieves who got rich as a result. They should simultaneously warn all of the international leaders who chose to align with MAGA rather than the U.S. government¹ that they will be blacklisted when ethical democracy returns to America.

It’s too easy to imagine our leaders talking themselves out of this kind of confrontation once again. Trump is imploding on his own anyhow. Also, what about the troops? Affordability argle-bargle. But the world is watching. Its leaders are waiting to see whether democratic forces in the United States will hold criminals accountable, or whether they’ll once again prove too weak, too divided, and too cynical to enforce U.S. law. The conduct of the Trump opposition now will have a real bearing on whether or not they decide to trust us again.

1. Most relevantly in Israel and the Gulf monarchies.