Pam Bondi Implicated in As Much As $5.5 Million in Insider Trading

Credit: Getty Images, Creator: Chip SomodevillaThe ArticleThe Call to ActionThe Existentialist Republic LibraryThe Existentialist Republic Self Fact Check: This section is to help whichever Snopes writer gets assigned to this piece.Martha Stewart went to federal prison for something smaller than this. Her case grew out of a stock sale worth $45,673; she sold her ImClone shares in December 2001, one day before bad news about the company went public, and the government convicted her in 2004, not for the trade itself but for lying to the investigators who questioned her about it. She served five months. Stewart was no ordinary citizen either. She was rich, famous, and connected, and none of it stopped the prosecution.Pam Bondi sold as much as $5.5 million in Trump Media securities on April 2, 2025, and hours later Trump announced the tariffs that sank the stock she had just left. This is what open-air insider trading looks like, and insider trading, in case you didn’t know, is very illegal, a felony carrying up to twenty years per count. The ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee referred it for investigation. We know why the federal government did nothing: Bondi ran the department that would have investigated her. The question this piece asks is why, fourteen months later, no New York prosecutor has opened a case.Raskin is the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee. He referred the sale, which closed hours before the tariff announcement sent markets into a $10 trillion decline, and wrote that Bondi’s conduct “bears all the hallmarks of insider trading.” No investigation has been disclosed, the officials who could have opened one are gone, and the federal government has asked her nothing under oath about the trade.New York State can still charge this. No pardon can stop it, no attorney general can quash it, and this article ends with the phone numbers.Here is what the public record establishes.Bondi received her Trump Media stake through the merger that took Trump’s company public. Her financial disclosure shows Digital World Acquisition Corp, the shell company that merged with Trump Media, paid her $2,969,563 in shares and warrants for consulting work on the merger. Her ethics agreement required her to sell within 90 days of her February 4, 2025 confirmation, a deadline in early May.She sold on April 2. Her government transaction report shows a sale that day of between $1 million and $5 million in Trump Media shares plus between $250,000 and $500,000 in warrants; Raskin’s letter states the combined figure as between $1.25 million and $5.5 million. Trump announced the tariffs that evening, after the market closed. Trump Media closed April 2 at $18.76, opened the next morning at $17.92, and fell 13 percent over the following days.The deadline required a sale by early May. Nothing required a sale on the one day that mattered.Trump Media filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, dated April 1 and accepted April 2, the day of her sale, naming Bondi as a selling shareholder with 106,250 shares registered for sale. The company told Reuters the filing was routine and that no trading window was open for any of its affiliates.Her disclosure form records the date of the sale and nothing else. It does not record the time, the price, or what she knew. Broker execution records answer the first two, and the first two are evidence of the third.A single subpoena would produce them.The federal government has not issued that subpoena, and the record of the past fourteen months shows why.Raskin sent his referral to Inspector General Michael Horowitz on May 20, 2025. Horowitz left the department five weeks later to become inspector general at the Federal Reserve, and acting officials have run the office since. Bondi fired Joseph Tirrell, the director of the department’s ethics office and her own ethics advisor, that July, with no stated reason. One former Justice Department inspector general said publicly that the office has shown no evidence of any serious investigative activity in the face of highly publicized misconduct allegations.Trump fired Bondi on April 2, 2026, one year to the day after the trade, and when she finally appeared before House Oversight on May 29 under threat of contempt, the interview concerned Epstein. Todd Blanche, the lawyer who defended Trump at his Manhattan criminal trial, has run the department as acting attorney general since the firing. No one has questioned her under oath about the trade.Stewart’s sale avoided $45,673 in losses; Raskin’s letter states that Bondi’s sale “appears to have saved her, at the very least, hundreds of thousands of dollars.” Stewart answered the investigators and went to prison over her answers.Bondi never answered a single question, because the investigators answered to her.The referral produced nothing, and the person it names ran the department it was sent to. That is the reason this piece exists, and it is the reason for the next section.New York can charge this.What this calls for is criminal action, not civil, and the Stewart case shows the government once treated a $45,673 trade as worth a criminal prosecution.New York’s securities fraud statute, the Martin Act, criminalizes deception in the purchase or sale of securities within or from New York, and its misdemeanor provisions require no proof of intent at all; its felony provisions, class E felonies carrying up to four years, reach intentional schemes to defraud. Trump Media trades on Nasdaq, the New York-based exchange, and shares sold into the open market on April 2 went to buyers wherever the exchange matched them, New York included.The Manhattan District Attorney can charge crimes committed in the county under New York’s own fraud statutes, and that office has already proven it will act where federal enforcement will not: it convicted Trump himself on 34 felony counts in May 2024. The Attorney General’s office enforces the Martin Act, maintains a standing Investor Protection Bureau that takes complaints from anyone, and filed a Martin Act insider trading suit against a former chief executive in early 2026, so the statute is in current use for exactly this conduct. New York’s statute of limitations on felonies gives prosecutors until 2030.A state charge is beyond Trump’s reach. The Constitution grants the president the pardon power over offenses against the United States, and a New York crime is not one. The Department of Justice cannot dismiss a state indictment, cannot fire a state prosecutor, and cannot order a state grand jury to stand down. Bondi could try to remove a state case to federal court under the federal officer removal statute, and the statute covers only acts performed under color of federal office. Supremacy Clause immunity has the same requirement: a federal officer performing a federal duty. Selling personal stock is neither.The trade was hers, not the government’s.Any person who unlawfully interferes with a New York prosecution commits new New York crimes in the act, whatever office they occupy. Hindering prosecution, tampering with evidence, and obstructing governmental administration are all New York offenses, all chargeable by the same state prosecutors, and all equally outside the pardon power. A federal official who conceals records from a Manhattan grand jury or pressures a witness in a state case has stepped outside the protections federal office provides. The same doctrine that strips Bondi of immunity for a personal stock trade strips her protectors of immunity for obstruction.New York can charge them too.To say the obvious once: the federal government has done nothing, and it will do nothing, and this article is not about that. Some readers will answer that the remedy is the next election.You don’t restore justice by waiting for the next election’s results; you don’t restore justice as a prosecutor by saying “not my job”; you don’t restore justice with civil litigation over openly criminal activity. You restore justice by putting corrupt bastards in handcuffs.A country where the attorney general can face a formal insider trading referral, outlast the inspector general who received it, fire the ethics official advising her, and exit government without answering one question under oath is a country where accountability has stopped being a function of law. New York can restart it this year.Two officials have that power today, and a third can support them publicly. Alvin Bragg is the Manhattan District Attorney. Letitia James is the Attorney General of New York. Kathy Hochul is the Governor, and her public support matters to both.Bondi named them both first. The memo she signed on her first day as attorney general established a Weaponization Working Group and listed Bragg’s prosecution of Trump and James’s civil fraud case among its subjects, and her department went on to indict James on mortgage fraud charges, an indictment a court dismissed because the prosecutor who brought it was unlawfully appointed. The memo named one other prosecutor, Jack Smith, whose federal cases were already over; the administration had no way to end the state cases except through Bragg and James themselves.Most of the country lives outside their jurisdictions, and this is a national issue anyway. Two prosecutors can reach what the federal government will not, and whether they use that power is now a question of whether enough people are watching to make the cost of doing nothing higher than the cost of acting.Our country was founded by people who fought tyranny when it wasn’t their job.