Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, And Michael Bennet Open Inquiry On Trump’s Tweet On Jobs Report
President Donald Trump’s tweet on June 1 has raised a lot of eyebrows.
On Thursday, three Democrat senators wrote to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), expressing concern over President Donald Trump’s reckless comments on Twitter over the market-moving economic data almost an hour prior to their public release.
On June 1, President Donald Trump tweeted “Looking forward to seeing the employment numbers at 8:30 this morning.” His tweet signaled positive employment numbers.
Senators Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, and Michael Bennet have now asked the four agencies to investigate whether any person or corporate entity was able to use this information to their advantage.
The senators said this disclosure, prior to its official release, politicizes economic data and increases the possibility that this inside information could be used for unlawful advantage in the market.
According to a report by the New York Times, strategists and market observers are using Trump’s twitter feed as a way of preparing for economic data updates.
The senators also pointed out that Trump’s tweet on this data was a violation of federal guidelines. They have questioned BLS about the controls it has in place to keep the data confidential.
Senator Warren said that the Trump Administration is swarming with people who have secret financial holdings and conflicts of interest.
“The BLS and the CEA should examine what went wrong here — and the SEC and CFTC should investigate to make sure that no one obtained and used non-public information to feather their own nest,” she stated in her press release.
The senators have asked the SEC and CFTC to investigate whether or not any individual or entity was able to get information from the president or White House official on any earlier statistical report given prior to release, and if so, whether they made any trades or took any other action based on that information. They asked BLS and the CEA to conduct an investigation into what controls are in place to prevent members of the executive branch from releasing statistical data prior to their official publication.
Democratic senators want to know if anyone on Wall Street was tipped off with information related to President Trump's premature tweet about a Labor Department jobs report. https://t.co/tADSzVF0dd pic.twitter.com/lzvuoeEejr
— CBS News (@CBSNews) June 8, 2018
“With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake, we need to determine if the President’s inappropriate disclosure of highly sensitive information is an isolated incident or representative of a broader trend. If the President cannot muster the discipline to refrain from blurting out information like this, he should no longer have access to it in advance,” said Senator Bennet.
