700 Trades in Six Days
Between April 2 and April 8, 2025, more than a dozen members of Congress and their family members executed over 700 individual stock trades. The S&P 500 had just fallen more than 4.5% on consecutive trading sessions. The cause was not an earnings miss or a banking crisis. It was a policy decision made by the President of the United States on a date his administration had branded "Liberation Day."
On April 2, President Trump announced sweeping tariffs of at least 10% on imports from virtually every country. Markets cratered. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost over 1,500 points in two sessions. Volatility indices spiked to levels not seen since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. And members of Congress started buying.
The full scope of trading around the tariff announcements is larger than those six days suggest. Fortune reported in June 2025 that 53 members of Congress made more than 2,200 stock trades worth between $34.9 million and $140 million in a 55-day window surrounding the tariff announcements. The dollar range reflects the imprecise reporting requirements of the STOCK Act, which allows members to disclose trade values in broad brackets rather than exact figures. The true total could be anywhere within that range.
The Timeline
The chronology is essential to understanding the trading pattern.
March 31 through April 1: Trading begins to pick up. Several members file periodic transaction reports showing purchases in the days before the tariff announcement. At this point, the administration had been signaling a major trade policy action for weeks, but the specific scope and rates remained unclear.
April 2: President Trump announces "Liberation Day" tariffs. The announcement includes a baseline 10% tariff on all imports, with higher rates for specific countries: 34% on China, 20% on the European Union, 24% on Japan. Markets begin selling off in after-hours trading.
April 3 through April 4: The sell-off accelerates. The S&P 500 drops more than 4.5% on consecutive sessions, wiping out trillions in market value. Congressional trading filings from this period show a mix of buying and selling, but buying activity is concentrated among a small number of members making dozens of transactions each.
April 8: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) files disclosures showing purchases of Amazon, FedEx, JPMorgan Chase, Lululemon, Nike, Qualcomm, and Tesla shares, valued between $11,000 and $165,000 combined. These purchases occur while the market is still in a tariff-driven decline.
April 9: President Trump posts on Truth Social that it is "a great time to buy." Less than four hours later, the White House announces a 90-day pause on most of the new tariffs. The Nasdaq surges 12%, its largest single-day gain in 24 years. Greene's disclosure filings show additional purchases on this date: Apple, Adobe, NVIDIA, Palantir, and Cummins, valued between $21,000 and $315,000 combined. The Unusual Whales 2025 Congressional Trading Report later noted that one of Greene's trades occurred approximately 90 minutes before the pause announcement.
Who Traded the Most
Periodic transaction report data reveals the distribution of trading activity during the crisis window.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) filed the most individual transactions at 438 during the broader period, though Khanna has stated publicly that his trades are executed by outside financial advisors without his direct involvement.
Rep. Rob Bresnahan (R-PA) reported 182 trades between April 3 and April 9 alone. Bresnahan, a freshman Republican who represents Scranton, Pennsylvania, had publicly supported banning congressional stock trading during his campaign. His spokesperson attributed the trades to a financial advisor operating under a fiduciary agreement.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) filed 87 trades. Rep. Jefferson Shreve (R-IN) filed 57. Rep. Greene filed 42 trades. Rep. Julie Johnson (D-TX) filed 31. Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) made 23 stock purchases of at least $1,000 each, including positions in Amazon, NVIDIA, and Visa.
The single largest individual transaction during the window came from Rep. Kevin Hern (R-OK), who reported a trade valued at up to $5 million on April 4, two days after the tariff announcement and while markets were in freefall.
The Partisan Split
The trading data breaks along party lines in an unexpected way. According to the Unusual Whales 2025 Congressional Trading Report, Republicans during the period shifted approximately $194.6 million in purchases against $197.4 million in sales, making the party collectively net sellers of equities by roughly $2.8 million. Democrats moved approximately $130.8 million in purchases against $100 million in sales, making them net buyers of approximately $30.8 million.
That pattern runs against the popular assumption that the party controlling the White House would be more likely to buy ahead of favorable policy announcements. Republican members, who had the closest political proximity to the administration making the tariff decisions, were the ones reducing their equity exposure. Democrats, who had no institutional channel to advance knowledge of tariff policy, were the ones adding to their positions.
The aggregate numbers obscure individual variation. Within the Republican caucus, some members were aggressive buyers during the dip while others sold heavily. The same variation exists among Democrats. But the net directional flow by party raises questions about what information, if any, informed the collective positioning.
The Briefing Question
Members of Congress with seats on committees relevant to trade policy have access to classified intelligence briefings, economic assessments, and advance notice of policy deliberations that the general public does not receive. The House Ways and Means Committee, the Senate Finance Committee, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations all touch trade policy directly.
The question is not whether members received briefings. They did. The question is whether the information in those briefings was material to their trading decisions. The STOCK Act prohibits trading on material, nonpublic information obtained through official duties, but enforcement has been minimal since the law's passage in 2012. The Department of Justice has brought almost no cases under the statute, and the Congressional ethics offices have not publicly referred any trading cases for prosecution based on briefing access.
CapitolExposed's analysis of the Liberation Day trading window shows that members serving on trade-relevant committees were slightly more active traders during the April 2 through April 9 period than members who do not serve on those committees. The difference is not large enough to be conclusive, but it is present in the data. Members on the Ways and Means Committee averaged 2.3 times as many trades during the window as members on committees with no trade-policy jurisdiction.
The Market Context
Understanding what the market did during this period is essential to evaluating the trading behavior.
On April 2, the day of the tariff announcement, the S&P 500 closed down 1.6% in after-hours trading. On April 3, the index fell 4.8%. On April 4, it fell another 5.9%. By April 7, the index had lost more than 12% from its pre-announcement level. Trillions of dollars in market capitalization evaporated.
On April 9, the 90-day pause reversed the decline. The S&P 500 surged 9.5% in a single session. The Nasdaq gained 12%. Companies with heavy international supply chain exposure, the ones most affected by tariffs, saw the largest rebounds: Apple gained 15%, Nike gained 14%, Amazon gained 12%.
Members who purchased shares of these companies between April 3 and April 8 and held through April 9 would have seen immediate paper gains of 10% to 15% in a single day. Members who sold between April 3 and April 8 locked in losses that reversed within hours of the pause announcement.
The Bresnahan Contradiction
Rep. Rob Bresnahan's trading activity deserves specific attention because of his public position on the issue. During his 2024 campaign for Pennsylvania's 8th Congressional District, Bresnahan endorsed legislation to ban members of Congress from trading individual stocks. He described the practice as a conflict of interest.
Within his first four months in office, Bresnahan's financial disclosures showed 182 stock trades in a single week, concentrated during the most volatile market period of 2025. His office attributed the trades to a financial advisor acting under a fiduciary agreement.
The STOCK Act does not distinguish between trades made personally by a member and trades made by a financial advisor on the member's behalf. Both must be disclosed. Both are subject to the same insider-trading prohibitions. The use of a financial advisor does not create a legal safe harbor if the member communicates material nonpublic information to the advisor, or if the advisor has reason to believe the member possesses such information.
Separately, Rep. Tim Moore (R-NC) was reported by Fortune in June 2025 to have failed to properly disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal stock purchases made around the Liberation Day period, a potential STOCK Act violation that adds to the pattern of disclosure failures surrounding the tariff trading window.
What CapitolExposed's Data Shows
CapitolExposed's conflict-scoring model assigns elevated scores to trades made during the Liberation Day window for several reasons. The timing proximity component fires because the tariff announcements constitute legislative-adjacent executive action that directly moved markets. The committee-overlap component flags trades in tariff-sensitive sectors by members serving on trade-relevant committees. The volume-anomaly component triggers for members who traded at multiples of their normal activity during this period.
Among the trades in CapitolExposed's database from the April 2 through April 9 window, the average conflict score is 0.14, more than double the overall congressional average of 0.058. Trades by members on trade-relevant committees during this window average 0.22.
These scores do not prove insider trading. They quantify the density of publicly observable red flags around specific transactions. The gap between a conflict score and a criminal charge is vast. But the data establishes that the Liberation Day trading window produced the highest concentration of elevated conflict scores in CapitolExposed's entire dataset.
The Regulatory Gap
The STOCK Act requires disclosure within 45 days. Many of the Liberation Day trades were not publicly known until late May or June 2025. By that time, the market had partially recovered, the tariff pause was in effect, and the news cycle had moved on. The disclosure lag means that the public cannot evaluate a member's trading in real time. By the time filings appear, the informational advantage has already been realized or lost.
The proposed TRUST in Congress Act and similar reform bills would require members to place their holdings in qualified blind trusts, eliminating the possibility of trading on advance knowledge of policy decisions. As of this writing, none of these proposals have received a floor vote.
The Liberation Day episode represents the clearest test case for whether congressional stock trading reform is necessary. Fifty-three members traded through a period when government policy decisions moved markets by double digits, classified briefings informed committee members about trade policy, and the public learned about the trading weeks after the fact. Public disclosure records show these facts clearly. What they cannot show is what was in any member's mind when they placed the trades.