Impeachable？! Fox hits Trump 'GRIFT' as INSIDER TRADING allegations mount： Ari Melber's Deep Dive

The backlash to the Trump profiteering, the billions coming in for Donald Trump. He makes more as president, where allegedly he's doing his work part time making money. He makes more now than he did as a citizen or a businessman, as he likes to say. And that alone, before you go into any more detail, raises really troubling questions like why someone who has a full time government job, who says they're only doing occasional private business stuff as a side job, which no other president has tried to do, why they're making more now. And whether that is because of abusing access, abusing insider information, or the kind of corruption that would be illegal if done by any other person in government. New details as well on the losses that Trump's own supporters and investors have been hit with when they lined up to try to join in. And this is a very familiar thing. If you follow Donald Trump's career, you know about the many bankruptcies and the many scams and the many littered projects that failed, leaving other people holding the back. There are those who call Donald Trump a conman, a confidence man. But as anyone who knows anything about conmans could tell you, you have to find new people. And apparently he did. New people interested in technology or crypto, new younger people who thought maybe this was a way to join Donald Trump, as if he would share in his largesse, but he didn't. Look at this Times reporting that a million investors lost not, you know, a couple bucks here or there, but a whopping total of over $3 billion on Trump's crypto coin. You could simplify this as a kind of transfer of wealth from those people who included his investors and people who believed in him, some MAGA fans, a transfer of wealth from them to him and his family. The financial disclosures that we have now reveal Trump got over $2 billion in one year alone, half that roughly from the crypto ventures that we know about, over $600 million from the crypto coin. A million investors in total lost billions. And the story here tells you a lot about where we are in the kind of unbridled, unapologetic, shameless Trump second term. There are some people who are critical of Trump and they tell you he's always been the worst thing ever, as if he had nowhere else to go or change. On this show, if you ever watch it, you know, we try to follow the evidence, the facts, the numbers. You can add the adjectives, the opinions yourself. And so I will tell you as a factual matter, the scale, the number of projects and self-enrichment efforts by Donald Trump in the first term were much smaller than this. And so who's paying for it? Well, to some degree, all of us, the American taxpayer, but some people are paying more than others. And they are the Trump believers. One invested half a million dollars into that coin I just mentioned and has lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's kind of incredible. It's almost a legal scam, they said, in discussing their Trump losses to The New York Times. Now, one of the other problems in our current era is how so many things get put immediately into a kind of partisan polarization machine. So if you talk about something that's just a fact, a sitting president is abusing their power and reach and influence to take money from people who have a lot less. That's just a general fact I just described, mentioned in the reporting. Some people would say, oh, is that an anti-Trump thing or an anti-Republican thing? No, it might sound bad for Trump, but it's just an old, classic, almost pathetically familiar example of why you need strict rules governing the people in power. That's government. And generally, if you look over history, there's been a belief that you want to find people who also have good ethics so that they won't constantly be testing what they can get away with. And I can name you people in both parties, John McCain, Barack Obama, who had those kind of ethics. And voters tended to respond positively to that. It goes beyond crypto, which I know can sound like a little bit of a newfangled, kind of confusing virtual place, even though the money some people have lost is real. There's also new revelations about this ring that Belgian diamond sellers gave to Donald Trump as a suspicious, unusual gift after he waived tariffs for Belgian diamond imports. Remember, bribery is an impeachable offense. It's one of the enumerated impeachable offenses in our Constitution. And again, we're talking about real money here, not symbolism. The ring has reportedly over 300 diamonds, over 50 sapphires, over a dozen emeralds and six rubies. Might say it looks a little gaudy or gauche. That's a matter of taste. As a matter of value, it is well above the gift limit that binds all members of Congress, for example. Most public traded company CEOs would be fired on the spot for trying to pocket something like this related to their business. That's payola. What I'm telling you is Donald Trump is falling behind even the lax business standards of American Wall Street. There's also a plaque with a solid gold base from Apple that probably is worth quite a bit less, a Rolex desk clock, I should say, and a gold bar from Swiss business leaders. I will remind you there is a senator in prison right now for taking gold bars, Senator Menendez. He happened to be a Democrat. Again, if you care about these issues as an American or as someone who thinks we should have nonpartisan ethical government, you'd be against gold bars when they go to a Democrat or a Republican. Only one of them, though, Donald Trump, is getting away with it right now. And there's the jet. Trump took the gifted plane on his first international voyage to a NATO summit, and he's promised those on board a luxury that nobody's ever seen before. That might be his typical hyperbole, political reports. But there's a wood paneled interior, tan leather seats, carpets, big screen TV. Trump's White House says this is all fine. No problem. And I can just tell you here in the real world of news and facts and journalism, almost nobody believes that. I showed you Fox News trying to hedge their bets a little, saying, well, this might be too far. I've shown you Megyn Kelly, Joe Rogan and other conservatives who aren't bound up in the partisan Republican machine, who, whatever you think of them, have talked about this as a grift, as elitism, as unfair. And the bill may be coming due. There's also the focus on Donald Trump's stock trades, where, as I mentioned, the crypto stuff can seem kind of vague. Here you have the very direct question of whether he is timing his personal enrichment towards things that only he can do and he knows about, like his unilateral trade war. And again, if he is doing that in a manner that abuses government power or is a quid pro quo, that could be impeachable. Notice I didn't say jailable. He's got a lot of immunity for anything that goes near his official duties. Tariffs probably do. But it certainly is the kind of thing people have been removed over. People have been removed for less, quite frankly. There's a disclosure form that shows Trump bought hundreds of stocks, including in tech giants, the day before he then pulled back his tariffs, which he and anyone in Wall Street knew would help juice those stocks. On April 8th last year, Trump bought over 300 stocks in the millions of dollars, including companies directly affected by this international trade war. NVIDIA, Amazon, Apple. The next morning, he said, it's a great time to buy and halted his tariffs. The stock market went on another wild ride today. Stocks were mostly sideways until midday when President Trump posted on Truth Social that he was authorizing a 90 day pause on reciprocal tariffs with amazing moves in some tech names. NVIDIA up 18 percent, Amazon up 12 percent, Apple rallying as well. Those rallies were huge. Some of the largest jumps in recent history. The overall top 500 stocks went up about 10 percent. I'll remind you, that's considered a good return for an entire year, let alone a day. And there were larger spikes in the stocks Trump bought, which, as I reminded you, are the kind of international trade related stocks that would benefit from the tariff pause. Now, let me tell you exactly what the question is. Did Donald Trump abuse inside information to enrich himself? If the answer is yes, again, it's up to Congress to decide whether they view that as an abuse of power, an abuse of office, or whether they view that as one among several abuses of power that enriched himself. Do they view any of this as a quid pro quo of government favors? Were there other people, non presidents, for example, his family, other staff, lobbyists, lawyers, ex aides who were involved in this who could actually be prosecuted again if there is bribery? Those are the questions. Now, some people, they dislike Trump so much, they say, I'm sure he knew. You could be sure, but you would sound pretty presumptuous, because in law, you'd have to have the elements of the crime, and one of them is the mental state. And I will report for you, the White House says that Trump was not personally involved in the timing of those stock purchases. So if that defense is true, someone else had good timing but didn't benefit from government information, then that would be what we call a defense to that. But the timing is so suspicious, and the other activities that Donald Trump is taking have been so blatantly self-enriching, and his public statements talk about helping people in crypto in order to get benefits from crypto for his family, that any investigator would have to look at all of this in totality. A few months later, Donald Trump discussed corrupt trading in pretty specific detail, so he was thinking about that kind of stuff, and yet projecting or accusing a Democrat, Pelosi of it. It happened by she knows exactly what's going to happen, what's going to be announced, she buys stock, and then the stock goes up after the announcement's made, and she had to be investigated. You know what's going to be announced, you buy the stock, it goes up. Was he talking about her? Was he talking about a process that he'd already participated in or encouraged others to do so? Those are questions to be investigated. There is, of course, a reason he was discussing it. There's a provision that apparently Trump didn't like, that was trying to address some of this. He attacked a Republican who introduced it, Hawley had to go on Fox, and basically assure Donald Trump by way of his preferred medium, Fox TV, that any Trump trading would be unaffected. A number of people who are opposed to banning stock trading had said to the president that he would be covered by the bill, he'd have to sell Mar-a-Lago and sell assets. Not the case at all. The president and the vice president, all their assets are totally exempted. Ah, so this is an important way to fight corruption, but the president is exempted, Hawley wanted everyone to know. The bill that ultimately moved forward had that carve out for Trump. I can tell you, we're reminding you all of this because so much goes on that it would be easy to lose track, but this would go into any impeachment investigation about why there was already such an active discussion of exempting them for a law that ultimately did not pass. And why is it bad if everyone else does it, but okay if Trump does it? So Trump's account was buying those stocks, timed towards things that he knew he was about to do. And he fought against a potential law that would ban that very type of activity. I want to bring this all into our orbit tonight because while they want you to think nothing matters and they'll get away with it all, there's a heck of a lot of evidence that the winds are changing, conservatives are mad about this, and that even Trump was worried that the Congress might then, under Republican control, do something that it would certainly want to do without him exerting influence, which is stop this kind of self-dealing while gas prices and everything else is up and people are struggling.