Because this hypothetical memo was paid for by our tax dollars, not your own private money! That means it belongs to the American people, not individuals for their private gain. Using it for your own gain would be theft from the American public.

In this hypothetical case, of course. There is no evidence that such a memo exists. But if it did...

Yes, because it was produced by the same people that are going to argue the case in court. You can hire the best lawyers in the world but they will still have to speculate on what arguments the government is going to make, and whether there are confidential communications showing evidence that there was some consistent rational justification for the tariffs and not just the president's public posts that leader X was mean to him on the phone so he imposed a tariff.

What a week argument - your still making excuses for this nonsense. Ridiculous.

Not just a Whitehouse insider, the guy actively doing the policy he was probably being advised was illegal and would be overturned.

And also probably one of the guys most pushing for this policy which was probably advised would likely be overturned.

Tariff policy is ultimately implemented by the Secretary of Commerce. This isn't some random other staffer in the Whitehouse that heard these policies wouldn't go, it was the guy actively doing it likely stands to make significant financial gains for his actions being found to be illegal.

The level of corruption on that is just absolutely mindblowing.

> yes but the opinion that it was illegal was the received wisdom by everybody with any sort of legal expertise in the subject

That isn’t true and you should really question whatever news source told you that. Putting aside that it was 6-3 in the Supreme Court. It was a 7-4 decision in the en banc Federal Circuit, with two Obama appointees voting in favor of upholding the tariffs. The lower appellate court opinions amounted to 127 pages: https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/25-1812.OPINIO....

You don’t get cross-party splits like that on issues where “everybody with any sort of legal expertise in the subject” agrees. If anyone with legal expertise was telling you that this issue was simple, they’re probably not very good at their job.

Who cares? The Treasury Secretary shouldn't have family profiting off fixing illegal policy the Treasury Secretary enacted. That should never happen. It is wrong, it doesn't explicitly spelled out.

The two answers I'm hearing to my question so far are that either this decision was so obvious that anyone could have predicted it without insider information, or that this was a split decision that the administration could not have predicted ahead of time.

You're right that maybe there never was any internal memo, just thought this was funny.

Wait...how do we know there was no such memo?

We have no reason to believe that if such a memo exists it was used improperly, but I don't see how we could know there is no such memo.

BTW you've got an extra Justice on the Supreme Court. Should be 6-3, not 7-3.

I understand your position but I disagree. If I were trying to predict whether the government is going to win in court, I think reading what the government's own lawyers think about the case would be valuable. If it were possible to pay for this I think people would, that's why I think it is material. Some random person's opinion is not relevant information, but the opinion of people directly involved in a case is.

The non-publicly known strategy they intend to use in court is “information”

Is a lawyer working on a case allowed to short the stock of his client?

Why not?

(Hint: it creates a perverse incentive to see your side lose the legal argument for your own personal gain.)

And in this case, it's the actual secretary doing it. Who has significant influence on the outcome of the case (largely in the negative - nothing he can do can make the government more likely to win it, but stuff he did has the capacity to make the government more likely to lose it.)

The Lebowski conjecture.

Oh - so the kid went out and he got permission to do this?

Where is that? Who approved his request?

> In this case, the idea that Cantor can't do something because the former head is now in a government job is crazy. No one "in the business" thinks Cantor is suddenly hobbled.

That's not the idea, and it almost seems like a straw man to be honest. The actual idea is that the current head of Cantor can't do something because he's a direct relative of a high ranking government official whose powers and job duties present a conflict of interest for this specific set of transactions.

Nope, wrong. Most companies have black out dates around earnings releases. Otherwise, good to go.

(and/or have an explicit approval workflow that effectively does the above).

They literally spent a decent chunk of money spinning up a line of business that could only make money if the tariffs were illegal.

even if they were not sure 100%, the fact that introducing the legislation is connected to him making money is a conflict of interest.

That's not really the comparable here, you need to find a person with vested interest in the outcome of the student loan forgiveness program.* Someone that was working within the agency responsible for the program and actively was in the discussions where the legality was discussed. Then made a scheme to financially get rewarded. Not only that used his son as a way to create the illusion of separation.

* And not just a borrower that wouldn't be anywhere similar to this level of conflict.

> dumb, or morally bad

This is easy to say in hindsight. There was a non-zero chance the decision could have went the other way. Also, companies aren't stupid. They don't buy insurance against things that are impossible.

And the supreme court doesn't hear cases that are 100% obviously illegal.

It’s sleazy because Lutnick’s son bet against the administration Lutnick was in, and against one of Trump’s signature policies. I’d be furious if I was Trump.

To buy after a market dip requires roughly zero specific conviction or insight regarding this supreme court ruling and its consequences.

It actually wasn't the worst assumption ever...

I thought his son just had a brain?

Because it encourages him to work against the administration.

.... what? 3 of the justices were nominated by Trump. You think the people appointing them didn't have internal deliberations before they were appointed, including about things Trump had thought about like tariffs? Even FDR knew the 'separation' was a farce, that's how he magically got the court to go along with progressive programs they prior didn't support, after the 'Switch in time that saved nine.'

SCOTUS largely functions as a post-facto legitimization machine for those that appoint them. They do not interpret the constitution so much as serve as god-people in funny costumes that provide the cultural message from god that the actions of their political persuasion were legal (or illegal) even in cases where a historical and literal reading of the constitution would otherwise find you with no way to find them legitimate if not for man in black robe say so.

------ re: "2 of 3" below due to throttling--------

A vote to refund here was not a vote against the admin, it was a vote to simplify the laundering of the tax. It was a vote to put the money straight into the coffers of admin insiders like Lutnick et al financial engineering scheme. Meanhwile it did not invalidate tariffs, as Trump immediately pivoted to a different tariff structure.

As a second note, the profit here was actually not dependent nearly as much on the vote as the insider information. The fact the best any rebuttal can come up with is the vote might have been 'wrong' is basically totally defaulting to the insider trading element which means you are totally yielding the underlying premise.

That is, the only 'vote' against the admin in this case would be one that went against their insider information. Failure to note this is how the justices and admin have swindled you and the public. The very posing of this comment of rayiner et al reveals how they tricked you.

You don't need to have access to everything for it to be insider trading, just more than the general public. Lutnick would know what case they are making to the court, perhaps the confidence of the attorneys in winning as well as information on how the case was going.

Yes?

I frankly do not understand your argument: "Some policymakers are sleazy (yes?), so it should be fine for all of them to leverage influence/access into personal gain" (?!)

This does not make sense to me.

> What partially non-public information did he have? Be specific.

How would I know? I'm neither Lutnick nor his son.

My point is that there is an extremely obvious conflict of interest here. If your family business is directly affected by decisions and information of the public office that you hold, then the very obvious risk is that you are going favor official decisions that help your business (possibly to the detriment of the majority), and that you leverage non-public information for personal gain.

For this specific case, insider knowledge could be a precise understanding on the "shakiness" of the initial tariffs combined with an insider picture of ongoing legal cases against them (progress and expected success rate).

I'm not saying that Lutnick & sons comitted some kind of crime, but if you let your family business overlap with your public office this much, then the resulting scrutiny is more than justified, and you could make a strong point that such a situation should be avoided in the first place.

If two companies come to you with an offer to sell the refunds, and one has strong ties to a central figure in the administration — which can, in the future, subject or exempt you from new tariffs and otherwise use the Federal government’s powers to mess with you - are you truly free to choose either offer? Or is there a risk and a benefit to taking the one that’s tied to the administration? (And frankly, can you even be certain either way?) This kind of conflict (even the appearance of this kind of conflict) is why we generally don’t want government officials or their families to be profiting directly off the policies they oversee. It is at best unseemly, and that’s being kind.

This is basically the government doing a protection racket. I swear, the amount of neoliberals in here lauding the move is a recession indicator. Did we all forget what corruption is?

Extortion rackets come in many forms.

For example, NCR (National Cash Register) used to have their sales people "accidentally" break competitive machines (dropping them on the floor was common -- these were old precision mechanical adders), then offer an NCR machine as a "free" replacement.

You could argue this wasn't extortion. What are the damages? The replacement machine was higher value, so the shop was "made whole", and was only temporarily without a cash register. Of course, the competitor got screwed out of support contracts + renewal, and it was made very clear to the stores they had to play ball. (Unless they wanted to buy a replacement, and watch it also get smashed.)

It's the same with the tariffs:

Adopt a bunch of Trump dictated policies, or they steal your money (the mechanism is not providing exemptions). Later, they "refund" the payments (so, no further court action), but somehow the money does not go back to the people that it came from.

Ignoring the businesses that sold their rights to collect, all sorts of prices have skyrocketed in the last year. The consumers that are paying the increased amounts at retail are not going to see a cent of this settlement. Where is my check?

Also, it's unclear how many Supreme Court justices changed their votes because of the sold rights to collect refunds. The company involved gave a lot of money to Trump and conservative campaigns, and many of the justices are in his pocket. It's also unclear if they bribed the justices directly, since that's not public data.

On top of that, when these "securities" were sold, it could have been made clear that they would come with favoritism in the future. Did businesses that paid up get special exemptions? Were they threatened with intimidation that then didn't happen because they sold the rights?

All of the above is standard practice with this administration. They had the benefit of the doubt, but burned through it years ago.

You think businesses as a rule can all survive a 15 to 100% surcharge on their products without running into liquidity issues?

Litigation funding is essentially just another asset class for investors:

https://thehedgefundjournal.com/the-emerging-market-for-liti...

I really hope those companies that passed the tariff to consumers are required to refund the increase to those same consumers, regardless of whether they sold their refund or not.

He bragged about it, and certainly didn't spoke out against them

So I pitch these ideas, and he says, ‘Let’s do it.’ ” Why not replace the I.R.S. with an External Revenue Service, which will collect tariffs and other levies from foreign sources instead of taxing citizens?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/07/28/donald-trumps-...

The commerce secretary has in this case a huge conflict of interest in pushing for these illegal policies in the first place

But he does know that Trump had no plan to contest the supreme court or make new laws

> The government knows exactly who paid what in duties

No, they have a record of who handed the money over to the government. This does not tell you who paid the duties. There's going to be a whole lot of Trump toadies & business owners in the chain, siphoning cash from refunds before they work their way back to the people who actually paid them. And that's not even getting into the open corruption & fraud that will be happening as part of this as well.

[flagged]

Ya, that's why this will be impossible to show off as insider trading.

After this is all over, we probably need to do something about presidential pardon power. Getting a constitutional amendment through is hard, but I don't see another option.

I'm sure plenty of wrathful extremists thought they held a moderate position too.

I will be happy to be wrong, assuming that happens.

I want everyone who associated with Epstein to be under oath at some point, and I think we should prioritize based on how many pieces of evidence their name appears on.

You think Trump will ever let himself be questioned under oath? Any rational person knows that his refusal is tantamount to an admission, but I bet he does not see it that way.