Stephen Miller, a top adviser to President Trump, sold shares worth $50,000 to $100,000 in the mining company MP Materials following a July announcement of a lucrative deal between the Las Vegas company and the Trump administration, government filings show.
The sale came one month after the Trump administration announced an extraordinary series of measures to support MP Materials, which produces valuable rare earth minerals and magnets. The deal, which included the government purchasing shares in the company and committing to buy its products, led MP Materials’ share price to skyrocket.
The company’s stock price rose to $45.23 on July 10, the day the deal was announced, from $30.03 a share on July 9. The share price climbed to $76.58 on Aug. 14, the date Mr. Miller sold his shares — a historic high. The stock peaked at just under $99 on Oct. 14, after the company reported earnings. It closed at $59.82 on Tuesday.
Mr. Miller’s sale, which has not been previously reported, was part of a collection of trades that he made in August when he sold stakes in nearly two dozen companies. That included others in which the Trump administration subsequently committed to take an equity stake, including Intel and Westinghouse.
Mr. Miller does not appear to have participated directly in government negotiations with MP Materials. But as Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, he oversees a broad and diverse portfolio of policy and security issues, and has spoken publicly about U.S. minerals.
Ethics experts said that the sales raised a number of questions and concerns, and that they could have been done more quickly to resolve any apparent conflicts of interest, given the Trump administration’s own equity stake.
MP Materials declined to comment. Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that “there are no conflicts of interest.”
“Stephen fully divested from stock holdings early in the administration in proactive coordination with the Office of Government Ethics on the timeline guidance they provided,” she said.
A White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to describe the details of the purchase said that Mr. Miller had consulted with the Office of Government Ethics before entering the White House, and had ordered his broker to divest of any apparent conflicts of interest. The official said that it took several months for the office to respond to Mr. Miller with a divestment plan and the required forms. The office on Tuesday did not respond to requests for comment by phone or email.
The White House official added that Mr. Miller was not involved in negotiating the government’s deal with MP Materials. Mr. Miller did not remember exactly when he purchased the MP Materials stock, the official said, adding that the purchase had been made several years earlier.
Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, a government ethics watchdog group that has been critical of the Trump administration, said it was not obvious that any ethics laws or rules were violated in the acquisition or sale.
“That said, this is a large investment in an obscure company that just happened to massively benefit from the unusual interventions of the Trump administration,” Mr. Weissman added. “At minimum, it’s a really bad look.”
Mr. Miller in August also sold between $15,000 and $50,000 of shares in Cameco, which owns Westinghouse, the nuclear company, according to his disclosure form. In October, the Trump administration gained the option to take an 8 percent stake in Westinghouse as part of a deal to help facilitate the construction of nuclear reactors.
The disclosure form shows that Mr. Miller in August also sold shares worth at least hundreds of thousands of dollars in other companies that have had dealings with the Trump administration, including the defense contractors GE Aerospace and Palantir Technologies, as well as Amazon and Intel Corporation, in which the Trump administration has also taken a stake. Some of those sales have previously been reported. Mr. Miller’s wife, Katie Miller, also owned between $15,000 to $50,000 of shares in MP Materials, the disclosures show.
The Trump administration began discussions with MP Materials in April, amid a U.S. trade clash with China that involved the type of minerals the company produces. After Mr. Trump imposed hefty tariffs on China earlier this year, Beijing responded with restrictions on exports of rare earth minerals and the magnets made from them. Automakers, defense contractors and other U.S. manufacturers rely on those minerals, and the restrictions jump-started an effort in the Trump administration to increase rare earth mineral production.
A group of Chicago investors formed MP Materials in 2017 to buy a struggling rare earths mine that faced tough competition from Chinese exports. In July, MP Materials announced that the Trump administration had agreed to invest $400 million in the company in exchange for a 15 percent stake, including warrants that would give the government the right to make future stock purchases.
The Defense Department also offered the company a $150 million loan and agreed to establish a price floor for the company’s minerals for a decade. It also agreed to ensure that all of the magnets produced by a newly constructed facility would be purchased by the government or commercial customers.
The announcement made the government the company’s largest shareholder. Since January, the company’s stock price has risen 269 percent.
MP Materials’ executives and investors have overlapped with Mr. Trump in some ways. Gina Rinehart, a major investor in MP Materials, has invested in Truth Social, Mr. Trump’s social media site, and has appeared at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s club in Florida. Andy Litinsky, the brother of MP Materials chief executive James Litinsky, was one of the founders of Truth Social, and was once a contestant on The Apprentice, Mr. Trump’s former TV show.
To resolve potential conflicts of interest, government employees typically exchange shares in individual companies for investments in managed funds that are handled by outside financial advisers, said Hui Chen, who served as a government ethics adviser and a compliance officer to Microsoft, Pfizer and Standard Chartered Bank.
She said the sale could have been completed far earlier, given that Mr. Trump announced last November following his election that Mr. Miller, who also worked in the White House in the president’s first term, would serve as a key policy adviser in the administration.
“It shouldn’t have taken that long,” she said.
Ana Swanson covers trade and international economics for The Times and is based in Washington. She has been a journalist for more than a decade.
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