President Donald Trump has alarmed legal experts by exploiting an area of federal law that may not contemplate modern technology.
Trump recently announced a new venture to sell early access to his Truth Social posts, which could move financial markets. Some legal experts who spoke with Will Gottsegen of The Atlantic explained that the idea reeks of insider trading, but there is so much overlap with existing informational products that it can be hard to hold Trump accountable under existing statutes.
“Some of the legal scholars I interviewed observed that because this situation is unprecedented, the law may simply not have caught up,” Gottsegen reported on Tuesday. “The SEC could potentially play a role in investigating Trump Media, but the agency, now under the aegis of Trump’s handpicked chair, Paul Atkins, has not commented on Warren and Schiff’s letter. (A spokesperson for the SEC declined to comment for this story.) When I asked Jonathan Macey, a professor at Yale Law, what he thought of Warren and Schiff’s letter, he told me that they were essentially asking the fox to come check on the henhouse.”
The new venture comes at a time when Trump has faced significant scrutiny for how much money he has made while in office. Trump recently reported earning $2.2 billion from different deals during his second term, and appears likely to increase that sum going forward.
“No other president has ever come close to generating this much personal wealth while in office,” Gottsegen wrote. “Now he stands to profit from something more straightforward: unmediated access to his own thoughts.”
The post ‘Unprecedented’: Trump alarms by exploiting area where law ‘may simply not have caught up’ appeared first on Raw Story.
