Senators Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff called the service an "outrageous abuse" of the presidency that could give Wall Street an unfair trading edge
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Senators Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff wrote to Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Paul Atkins on Tuesday asking the agency to open an investigation into whether Trump Media & Technology Group's paid data feed violates federal securities law.
The letter — signed by Warren as the Senate Banking Committee's ranking member and Schiff as a Senate Judiciary Committee member — described the arrangement as "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."
The target of the letter is Truth API, a licensed data service Trump Media announced on July 16 that delivers posts from Truth Social's most-followed accounts to subscribers within milliseconds. Trump Media has discussed charging up to $100,000 a month for the service, according to CNBC. The feed is scheduled to launch Aug. 1.
Warren and Schiff requested that Atkins finish a legal review of the service before it goes live, examining whether it runs afoul of laws barring insider trading and market manipulation. The SEC declined to comment.
President Donald Trump holds roughly 41% of Trump Media through a revocable trust managed by his family, and the senators argued he stands to profit from the service. They warned that high-frequency trading firms, which rely on executing trades in fractions of a second, stand to gain the most. The senators quoted their own letter to make the point: "While financial firms and analysts have relied on manual monitoring of Truth Social, the API automatically feeds around-the-clock Truth Social posts directly to those who are simply willing to pay up front for milliseconds of additional notice."
The letter cited multiple instances in which Trump's Truth Social posts moved markets, including a post about Citigroup $C stock on June 10 that the senators said caused the company's stock to outperform the broader market that day, and a post praising Palantir $PLTR Technologies that caused that company's stock to jump within minutes.
In a statement to CNBC, a Trump Media spokesperson rejected the senators' characterization, saying Democrats were misrepresenting the service "either out of ideological opposition to free markets or a failure to grasp the distinction between public and nonpublic information."
Trump Media announced Truth API on July 16, drawing conflict-of-interest concerns. Ethics attorney Virginia Canter of Democracy Defenders Fund said at the time that the president "has an obligation to the American people to convey information to them publicly, and he's now funneling it through a private channel in which he has a private interest as one of its largest shareholders." The following week, Senator Mark Warner urged the heads of six major financial industry trade groups to reject the service, arguing it would let Trump profit from the release of government policy information.
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