By Chris Prentice
NEW YORK, July 29 (Reuters) – Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff have asked the U.S. securities regulator to probe whether Truth Social parent Trump Media’s plan to sell early access to President Donald Trump’s social media posts breaks the law, according to a letter reviewed by Reuters.
Trump Media, or TMTG, unveiled a paid, licensed data feed this month that will give trading firms “the fastest” access to posts from the 10 most influential Truth Social accounts, including Trump’s. The letter, sent on Tuesday, ramps up pressure on the product, as well as any Wall Street firms that may have bought the feed, potentially increasing what some industry sources said they believed to be legal, political and regulatory risks.
“This appears to be an outrageous abuse of the President’s office for his personal benefit that undermines everyday investors and the integrity of our markets, while enriching Wall Street and other wealthy insiders,” Warren and Schiff said in the July 28 letter to Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins.
A spokesperson for the SEC and Atkins, a free-market Republican appointed to the role by Trump who has generally taken a softer stance on enforcement, confirmed receiving the letter but declined to comment further.
“Senate Democrats continue to mischaracterize Truth API either out of ideological opposition to free markets or a failure to grasp the distinction between public and nonpublic information — or, quite possibly, both,” said a spokesperson for TMTG in an emailed statement.
The White House referred requests for comment to the company.
EARLY DATA ACCESS, FOR A PRICE
Trump Media has discussed charging as much as $100,000 a month for the Truth API product, Reuters and other media outlets have reported. Trump’s social media posts have in the past moved markets, and the profits of many top trading firms, hedge funds and financial services firms depend heavily on the speed at which they can trade off such news.
Trump, who owns about 41% of Trump Media through a trust his children oversee, stands to profit from the paid access model. The company said it has already signed up customers ahead of the August 1 launch, but did not identify them.
Truth API is the latest example of the president mixing his personal business with presidential affairs, raising ethical issues, Warren of Massachusetts and Schiff from California said. Trump reported last month, for example, that he received more than $1.4 billion last year from his family’s crypto projects.
While tech platforms are generally allowed to offer clients early data access, even if it disadvantages some market participants, according to lawyers, some ethics experts have said the Truth API product is different because Trump’s posts are government information and he has an obligation to disseminate it publicly.
Warren and Schiff also noted Trump has in the past used Truth Social to endorse specific stocks including Citigroup, Intel and Palantir, which they said raises the risk of insider trading and of undermining investor confidence that the market is operating on a level playing field.
In the statement, the TMTG spokesperson said: “The Senators must have invented a new theory of ‘insider trading’ based on publicly available information.”
(Reporting by Chris Prentice in New York; Editing by Michelle Price, Matthew Lewis, Deepa Babington and Bill Berkrot)
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