Democratic lawmakers are calling for federal agencies and state attorneys general to investigate whether President Donald Trump, members of his administration, or any of his associates manipulated markets or helped enrich allies in connection with Trump’s sudden reversal on tariff polices Wednesday.

Six top Democrats wrote to SEC Chairman Paul Atkins Friday, asking the agency to investigate “whether the tariff announcements, which caused the market crash and subsequent partial recovery, enriched administration insiders and friends at the expense of the American public and whether any insiders, including the President’s family, had prior knowledge of the tariff pause that they abused to make stock trades ahead of the president’s announcement.”

In varied missives over the last few days, Democrats—who for months have publicly struggled with how aggressively to combat Trump—have taken direct aim at the economic damage inflicted by the president’s erratic tariff policy. And they have zeroed in on seemingly suspicious trading activity that took place ahead of Trump’s about-face.

“It is unconscionable that as American families are concerned about their financial security during this economic crisis entirely manufactured by the President, insiders may have actively profited from the market volatility and potentially perpetrated financial fraud on the American public,” Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) wrote.

The White House dismissed Democratic calls in a statement Friday. “It is the responsibility of the President of the United States to reassure the markets and Americans about their economic security in the face of nonstop media fearmongering,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said. “Democrats railed against China’s cheating for decades, and now they’re playing partisan games instead of celebrating President Trump’s decisive action yesterday to finally corner China.”

The senators and other lawmakers have noted Trump’s post at 9:37 am Wednesday—just hours before he announced the tariff walk-back—on Truth Social: “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT.”

Some Democrats pointed also to data showing an apparent spike in purchases of call options—a contract allowing the buyer to lock in a set price for a security and reap a potentially large benefit if the price rises—about 10 minutes before Trump announced he would be backing off on his tariffs.

“Given the uncertainty of when the President privately decided to pause the tariffs, and the fact he convened several meetings during that timeframe (including with Members of Congress), there is an open question as to who had access to this material, nonpublic, and market-moving information,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said in a letter signed by 18 other Democratic members of the House Financial Services committee on Thursday, seeking investigations by the SEC and other entities.

It’s not clear from the publicly available data who purchased the call options—it is could plausibly be no more than a well-timed gamble that the previous two days of collapsing prices would pause or be reversed. But the House Democrats also pointed to Trump’s gleeful celebration of huge gains by those around him in the hours after the stock market rebounded.

Waters noted a video of Trump talking in the Oval Office on Wednesday, the day the stock market briefly surged following Trump’s announcement that he was partially pausing his tariffs. In the video, Trump can be seen speaking to several men and laughing about how much money they had supposedly made that day. “He made $2.5 billion today, and he made $900 million—that’s not bad,” Trump laughs as the other men chuckle.

“From an initial standpoint, these activities and statements appear to be a blatant violation of insider trading and market manipulation laws aimed at preventing government officials and corporate insiders from profiting off material non-public information in the stock market,” Waters wrote.

Democrats, despite their requests for investigations, said that they do not believe the SEC or other federal agencies under Trump will act. Waters asked for probes by the GAO, a congressional agency, as well as by the SEC’s inspector general, in an apparent effort to overcome likely federal reluctance to anger Trump.

Warren, Schumer, Wyden, and Schiff on Friday also wrote to the National Association of Attorneys General, seeking state-level investigations.

“Every Attorney General must immediately investigate whether” Trump’s Wednesday morning post “or anything else surrounding this tariff policy…was illegal market manipulation or insider trading,” the senators wrote. “It is imperative that they investigate whether President Trump, his family, members of his administration, or members of Congress profited from recent changes to tariff policy.”.

In an appearance Thursday night on MSNBC, Schiff said that with the Justice Department run by former Trump lawyers, “we can’t hope they’re going to do any scrutiny. If they’re not going to hold people accountable, then somehow it has to get done.”

“They’ve got a get-out-of-jail-free card from the Justice Department,” Schiff said, citing the Supreme Court’s “absolute immunity” ruling last year. “So, it falls on the rest of us in Congress to do something. And we’re going to have to do the oversight that in a normal world would be very bipartisan, where there would be people in the executive doing it.”

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