It's almost like they want to go to prison.

An “epidemic” of insider trading. Stolen classified documents. Sham investigations. Trump and his henchmen are tempting fate — and building a paper trail.

An explosion of corruption allegations this week against the Trump administration is creating a paper trail that will follow the president and his team far from Washington when his time in the White House is over.

It’s only Wednesday, and Donald Trump and his lieutenants have already been confronted with suspicions that top officials might be using inside information about the war to make money in betting markets... with evidence that the administration has launched faux criminal investigations into innocent people as a way to intimidate officials who won’t bend to the president’s will... and with allegations that Trump himself may have stolen classified documents to make money.

For an administration that likes to throw around the word “treason,” it sure seems like they’re becoming intimately familiar with the definition.

Let’s start with the insider trading claims, because the latest is jaw dropping.

On Monday morning, with no public news to explain it, $580 million in oil futures flooded the market in a sudden spike. This happened just sixteen minutes before Trump announced a pause in strikes on Iranian power plants. Axios is calling the move part of an “epidemic of suspicious trading” that keeps happening right before Donald Trump announces major decisions. What a coincidence.

For instance, there was the suspicious surge of betting accounts predicting a U.S. strike on Iran the Friday before the war began… a trader who turned $32,000 into $400,000 by betting on the capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro hours before it was announced… and a burst of bullish stock trades minutes before Trump announced his famous 90-day tariff pause last April. Every single time, someone appeared to know before the rest of us.

One of two things appears to be happening here. Either (A) some super sleuth Wall Street bandit is conducting espionage against the Trump administration to collect info for breathtaking bets; or (B) someone, or multiple people, close to Trump are using firsthand knowledge of his official decisions to get rich. Whatever the case, the law is probably being broken — in breathtaking fashion — by someone.

We’ll put a pin in that for a moment because we should also talk about what happened in a federal courtroom that leaked out this week.

U.S. federal Judge James Boasberg quashed government subpoenas targeting Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell after a sealed March 3rd hearing exposed something quite extraordinary. Donald Trump’s prosecutors couldn’t name a single crime to justify their investigation into the Fed chair. Not one. When the judge pressed Jeanine Pirro’s assistant U.S. attorney to identify what false statements Powell made before Congress, the prosecutor replied, “We don’t know.” When pressed on evidence of fraud in the Fed’s building renovations, he said, again, “We don’t know.”

The judge concluded the government had produced “essentially zero evidence” of wrongdoing and remarked that the subpoenas looked less like a criminal investigation and more like a pressure campaign to force Powell to cut interest rates or resign, which is what Donald Trump has basically been demanding. Boasberg wrote plainly that there appeared to be a mountain of evidence suggests the subpoenas were served to coerce the Fed chair, which would seemingly be illegal. Pirro called him an “activist judge.” She’s appealing.

Some extraordinary questions have been raised here. Those questions, if asked by the right investigators, might land some folks in jail. For instance: Did Donald Trump pressure the Justice Department to open a federal investigation for political purposes? Did investigators know they were probing the Fed chair as a means of applying pressure on him? Were prosecutors aware at the start of this investigation that there was no predication — or evidence of a crime — and allowed it to continue anyway?

I have been claiming since Donald Trump came back to power that his investigations into critics and perceived foes (myself included) are politically motivated and, therefore, obviously unconstitutional. The Powell investigation looks particularly damning. If I was anywhere in that decision chain, I’d be nervous as hell. And we’ll get to that in a moment.

Finally, I want to mention what happened this week with Representative Jamie Raskin, who was handed an accidental gift by House Republicans.

In their relentless zeal to discredit former Special Counsel Jack Smith (who prosecuted the Trump classified documents and January 6th cases) House Republicans demanded a tranche of Justice Department documents. They got what they asked for. DOJ send them loads and loads of documents about the case Smith was prepared to bring to trial against Trump so that they could “cherry pick” it in an effort to make Smith look bad.

Apparently, buried inside the files was a January 2023 memo from Smith’s office that Republicans didn’t read carefully enough before handing it over to Rep. Raskin. It alleges that the classified documents Trump stole were pertinent to his own personal business interests — and that prosecutors considered this a likely motive for why he kept them. The files also allege that Trump showed a classified map to passengers on his private plane. One document was so sensitive only six people in the U.S. government had legal authority to review it.

Raskin wrote to Pam Bondi that her own department had accidentally provided “damning evidence about your boss’s conduct.” Naturally, the White House called Raskin a Democrat with “zero credibility.” But too bad for them, Raskin doesn’t need credibility to make the case. The Justice Department literally handed him the evidence without realizing it.

Each of these stories, standing alone, would be a historic scandal in any other administration. When I was working for House Republicans back in the day, we would have used any of these fact patterns to open sweeping inquiries into Democratic administrations, if they’d been accused of such conduct. Some of those investigations would have certainly risen to impeachment-level.

The Trump team seems to shrug them off. But I’m summarizing these for a reason. Trump and his henchmen shouldn’t be shrugging. They should be lawyering up.

In particular, the insider trading pattern points toward a government where advance knowledge of presidential decisions — at the highest levels — may have become a commodity, traded on prediction markets and futures exchanges for secret profit. If true, that’s some smoking-hot criminal conduct. Meanwhile, the Powell investigation has laid bare the reality that the Trump administration is indeed launching faux criminal investigations into people, seemingly to satisfy the president’s personal revenge aims, which would be inherently criminal and unconstitutional, and for which there now appears to be serious evidence.

Finally, the classified documents revelations show that the charges brought against Trump were even more serious than we thought. The allegations suggest the president wasn't just recklessly handling classified documents or absconding with state secrets because he found them interesting. It suggests he was trying to monetize them. Putting American lives in danger for personal profit? That would fit the bill of “treason” more than any time Donald Trump himself has use there term to berate his opponents.

What Trump and his team are counting on is “the flood.” They promised they’d come back into power and “flood the zone.” They’d overwhelm the political opposition with bold presidential action, day after day. There’d be so much controversy, we wouldn’t be able to keep up. Instead, they seem to have flooded the zone with evidence of criminal conduct. (Enough, it seems, to give job security to an entire cottage industry of defense lawyers in Washington, D.C..)

Democrats are already laying the groundwork for congressional investigations if they retake the House in November. Indeed, the 2026 midterms are shaping up as a referendum on exactly this kind of corruption. Beyond that, they cannot make this go away. It’s all a matter of public record. And a future Justice Department will inherit these paper trails at some point or another.

So let me close with a personal appeal to Trump’s underlings.

If you’re a federal employee or political appointee who happens to be reading this — or someone with knowledge of trades timed to classified decisions, of investigations launched without evidence, or of documents stolen for profit — you are at a crossroads. And you probably already know it.

The way I see it, you have two choices.

The first is to come forward. You might be able to save yourself, your reputation, and your country by telling the truth to the appropriate oversight body. That might be Congress or an inspector general, and I suggest you do it while there is still credit to be earned for doing so. History treats whistleblowers harshly in the moment and kindly in the long run. John Dean from the Nixon era is remembered, while his co-conspirators mostly aren’t.

The second choice is to stay silent. You can keep your head down and hope the captain doesn’t let the ship go down. Perhaps you’re banking that loyalty flows both ways in this White House. But take my personal advice on this one: it doesn’t. It never has. The moment you become inconvenient, you’ll become a liability. And when the investigations come — and they will come — you will discover that no one from this administration is going to throw you a lifeboat, especially when it’s over.

That means the time to decide is now. Don’t wait until a subpoena lands on your desk or after your lawyer calls you at midnight. Now, while you still have something to trade, you can save yourself because the country still has something to gain from your honesty.

We’re only halfway through this week, and it’s already clear to me that you’re in trouble. At least some of you are. From these three news stories alone, there’s a paper trail that may well lead directly to your doorstep one of these days. The president is going to face some serious criminal investigations in the years to come. The only question is whether your name appears on the right side of it.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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