🎙️ *taps mic* Is this thing on?

Fifteen minutes before Trump announced he wouldn’t bomb Iranian power plants after all, somebody placed hundreds of millions of dollars in bets that the price of oil was about to drop. Trump posted, oil dropped, and that somebody got very rich in just minutes. Baffling you with acronyms is how this administration hides crimes like this, so we’re going to translate every bit of it. The CFTC is the federal referee for these commodity markets, the agency whose entire job is catching rigged bets like this one. Its career analysts saw the March trade, saw another $950 million in perfectly timed bets land hours before the April ceasefire announcement, and did their job by referring it all for an insider trading investigation. Then a senior adviser to the agency’s Trump-appointed chairman ordered the staff to retract the referral. He took over the examination personally. By July, the supervisor who got that order was gone from the agency. That’s not just the crime anymore. That’s the cover-up, running in broad daylight, at the agency built to catch the crime. Trump has made 28,700 stock trades since taking office, more than every member of Congress combined. Now the one agency sniffing around the biggest bets of his presidency just had its leash yanked. Whoever placed that oil money knew what the president would say before you did, and the government has decided you don’t get to find out who. We disagree.

A few months back we told you about Kirsten Gillibrand’s 22-year-old son raising $30 million from crypto investors. That haul included one of mommy’s own donors while mommy conveniently wrote the industry’s wish list into law. But if you thought she was shilling for the crypto bros just so her failson could get rich quick, don’t worry. She’s hard at work proving she’ll sell out the whole country for anybody in her orbit. New York Magazine just published the full portrait, and it’s a grifting landfill. Her communications director bought bitcoin and ether one week before Gillibrand announced the bill putting both under friendlier regulation. Her chief of staff leaned on other Democratic aides to back her crypto bill while reminding them that his boss runs the Senate Democrats’ campaign money. Nothing menacing about the party’s chief fundraiser’s office checking in on your vote, surely. Asked whether staff trading crypto while she writes crypto law bothers her, Gillibrand responded, “I could care less what they do with their money. This is not a nanny state.” A sitting senator, someone duly elected to protect New Yorkers from fraud, just waved off insider trading in her own office as a lifestyle choice. That's why we are building the tool to track every politician in both parties who treats public office as a family brokerage account. Gillibrand’s signature bill would shove crypto oversight away from the SEC and over to the CFTC, a chronically underfunded agency run by a former crypto industry lawyer. That’s the same CFTC we wrote you about days ago, the one whose leadership just buried its own investigation into suspiciously timed oil trades. That’s the self-dealing outfit she wants in charge of crypto. An agency that just proved it will shred its own casework when the right people get nervous. And crypto is only her latest patron. When AIPAC needed defending, she lobbed Islamophobic smears at Zohran Mamdani so ugly she had to apologize. Now that crypto needs defending, she’s calling critics of a scam industry “uneducated.” The clients change and the shamelessness doesn’t. The crypto industry bought itself a favorite Democrat and we’re cataloging the purchase.

🚨 A Trump pardon just sold for over $50 million. Yes, MILLION. Last month, we told you Trump pardons were up for sale, starting at around $300,000. Turns out we were looking at the clearance rack. The New York Times just found the premium model. 🧵 Venezuelan billionaire Julio Herrera Velutini was charged with trying to bribe the governor of Puerto Rico into firing the regulator investigating his bank. His family went shopping for a pardon. When that bought nothing, they looked for a louder doorbell to the Oval Office. They found Alina Habba, a lawyer whose main credential is losing cases for Trump so loyally that he parked her inside his Justice Department anyway. The Velutini family handed her a $50 million deal through a shell company created weeks earlier that has no known business. Habba signed the deal while still serving as a federal prosecutor. On January 1, she officially joined the billionaire’s payroll. Just weeks later, the pardon he’d been chasing for months suddenly materialized. Habba swears the two are unrelated. If you believe that, she has a shell company in Florida to sell you. A bribery defendant beat his bribery case by bribing a lawyer embedded in the department prosecuting him. At least he stayed on brand. And Venezuela keeps paying off for this administration of grifters. In January, Trump illegally toppled Venezuela’s government. Ever since, his administration has controlled who gets rich off that country’s oil. Now we know who. A 35% stake in the deal went to a company run by a Venezuelan businessman under investigation for laundering more than a billion dollars, right up until Trump’s own prosecutors hit pause on the case. The other investors? Nobody knows who they are. The ownership is hidden behind a company registered in Barbados. Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth signed the paperwork personally. Secret investors, paused investigations, and a $50 million pardon, all orbiting one country’s oil money. Every scheme here was built to stay buried.

An OpenAI bot spent the summer breaking into US government systems all on its own, including the Department of Education. And this thing is a repeat offender.  Before our government, it broke into an Australian health system and a rival AI company.  Researchers count hundreds of thousands of attempts on government sites, with the bots wriggling past every leash their makers wrote. And Sam Altman's response to his creation going full sentient burglar is pouring money into super PACs whose entire pitch is “hey, what if we made this thing even better at finding the nuclear codes.” Victor Frankenstein at least had the decency to try to destroy his monster.  Sam Altman is funding the campaign to make it more dangerous. We are the only group tracing which members of Congress the broligarchs are paying to keep the machines unleashed. Two OpenAI executives alone dropped $25 million into the midterms, and a $50 million pressure campaign is grinding through the statehouses right now to smother AI rules before they exist.  And for good measure, a bullying super PAC is out there to bury any politician who so much as whispers the word regulation. Step back and the whole picture is a mess.  Most of Congress is on the take, and the reps that are left are a bunch of well-intentioned but uninformed boomers who can barely open a PDF, never mind grasp the software that just picked the locks on federal agencies.  Bought or baffled, this can't be all we've got. The fix starts with a system where the public can see who is bought, name by name and dollar by dollar, before they vote.  That system is Track Big Tech.

We write about a lot of crooks in this line of work, but Ken Paxton is becoming a subscription all his own. At this point, the man needs his own wing of our research department, staffed around the clock, because he generates a fresh corruption scandal every couple of days. The Washington Post just counted five separate organizations that donated to him while their business was parked on his desk. Executives at a slot machine company sent his committees more than $100,000 while his office was deciding whether their machines counted as illegal gambling. A donor who wanted to build a concrete plant the city of Fort Worth had rejected got Paxton’s official blessing to go over the city’s head, then wired another $10,000 two months later. Anesthesiologist groups got the ruling they’d spent years chasing, and a month later, three donations totaling $24,000 landed, all reported the same day. And the day before Paxton threatened the Big 12 with a $200 million lawsuit over a Texas Tech player’s suspension, the chairman of the Texas Tech board handed his fundraising committee $247,300. Honestly, between all this pay-to-play, it’s a wonder the man found time for his other hobbies, like trying to overturn the 2020 election or offering a confessed child predator a plea deal of one single day in jail. Remember, this is the man whose own staff reported him to the FBI, who got impeached for allegedly renting his office out to a real estate developer, and who skated when a Senate full of allies acquitted him. Now he wants a promotion to the United States Senate, where donors get bigger and favors get more expensive. Paxton belongs in prison, not the Senate. He’s one of the most corrupt Senate candidates of all time, and lord knows that bar was already in the stratosphere. Texans are walking into early voting locations right now, and over the next two weeks, they’ll decide whether this walking indictment gets a six-year term.

Since returning to office, Donald Trump has made more stock trades than every member of Congress combined. At this point, the federal government is warped Whose Line Is It Anyway, where the corruption rules are made up, and the points don’t matter. You already know members of Congress trade on insider knowledge and get rich doing it. We’ve spent months showing you the AI portfolios, the committee conflicts, the suspiciously timed buys. It’s infuriating stuff, and somehow it’s only the opening act. Since January 2025, the entire House has logged about 19,400 trades and the entire Senate about 2,900. Trump has logged 28,700 all by himself. One man is out-trading the whole legislative branch, and many of those trades landed right before market-moving events that he initiated. Congress trades on inside information, but Trump CREATES the inside information. He announces a tariff and the market tanks. He pauses it, and everything rips back up. He hands out a no-bid contract, and the stock pops the same afternoon. It’s no different than writing tomorrow’s lottery numbers and buying the ticket today. And every one of his “wins” comes straight out of your wallet. When he dumps shares ahead of bad news, it’s because he wrote the bad news himself and scheduled its release. The suckers buying what he’s selling are pension funds and index funds, meaning teachers, nurses, and you. Nobody is coming to stop it either. The SEC answers to him, and Congress won’t investigate a game they’re playing themselves at smaller stakes. So the watching and tracking falls to us. And we intend to do it trade by trade, lining up the dates and policy moves side by side for every voter to see.

Susan Collins just got caught in her third bribery scandal in two weeks. The appropriations committee she chairs spent $345 million on armored trucks the Army flat out said it did not want. In the weeks after the bill passed, the truck company's CEO, its private equity owners, and its employee PAC showered more than $58,000 onto committees raising money for her. Any single scheme like this used to be enough to end a Senate career. Collins is stacking them up weekly and cruising along like nothing happened. That's why Tracker PAC is working to launch the tools that make corruption scandals end careers. The Army announced last year it had enough of AM General's vehicles and that any more would be "excess." That's the military itself begging Congress to stop sending it trucks. Congress bought the trucks anyway. And before the Army tried to kill this program, Collins hadn't seen a dime from these people in more than a decade. Her defense is a thing of spineless beauty too. Collins brags on her own campaign site about chairing the "powerful" appropriations committee that "decides how federal dollars are spent," yet her office swears she had nothing to do with this particular spending. You’ll excuse us if we don’t think the most powerful appropriator in the Senate is an innocent bystander to her own committee. Cataloguing every one of these cash-for-contracts deals is the job Tracker PAC was built for. When Collins' first two scandals broke, we learned she told the contractor bribing her, "you've seen me deliver." And deliver is honestly the right word. No senator moves your tax dollars into the pockets of contractors building junk the military rejects more reliably than Susan Collins. Contractors are legally banned from donating to candidates, but the ban means nothing, because their executives and PACs write the checks instead. General Dynamics and RTX rank among her top donors too. The defense industry doesn't have a senator from Maine. It owns one. Her race against Troy Jackson is a dead heat and could decide the Senate. At the very least during this political dumpster fire era, Maine voters deserve a senator who's not racking up a fresh bribery scandal every other day. We're working to put every contractor dollar behind Susan Collins in front of the voters who can fire her.

Our tax dollars are doing the double duty of funding a genocide and enriching the worst people on the planet. Jared Kushner’s private equity firm is the largest shareholder in Phoenix Financial, an Israeli giant with at least $456 million parked across nine companies arming Israel's war machine. That includes $265 million in Elbit Systems, Israel's biggest weapons maker. And for good measure it has investments in firms building drone cameras, tank parts, warships, and the electronic fuzes on the shells falling on Gaza. Every one of those nine stocks skyrocketed last year. When he's not busy trying to steal Albanian islands for luxury resorts, Jared Kushner moonlights as Trump's lead negotiator for Gaza. He took the job as a "volunteer," which conveniently exempts him from the financial disclosures an actual government official owes the public. So the man drawing up plans to turn Gaza into a beachfront resort with 180 skyscrapers holds a billion-dollar stake in the war's suppliers. And in July he cashed out $340 million of it, a five-times return he calls his best investment. Not one office in Washington tracks this looting, so we're building the public tool that does. Kushner’s corruption is headline news but nobody in Congress will touch him because they are part of the corruption loop themselves. Warhawks in both parties vote for ever-fatter Pentagon budgets. Defense contractors turn those budgets into profits, and the Israel lobby pours tens of millions into keeping Congress bankrolling the bombs. Those bombs level Gaza for Israel's genocidal colonial ambitions, and the seized land goes to developers like Kushner and his 180 skyscrapers Then the profits flow back as donations to the same politicians who approved the budgets, and the snake swallows its own tail again. Both parties ride this gravy train, so nobody with subpoena power will ever pull the brake. You pay for it at the pump and the grocery store while the first family banks billions off war crimes and human misery. Voters who can see the whole machine can do what Congress won't and put these blood-soaked monsters out of power.

Susan Collins helped a donor bilk taxpayers out of tens of millions of dollars, and the only reason we know is that the guy who paid her got caught and spilled everything to the FBI. His name is Martin Kao, and he ran a defense contractor that figured out a shortcut. He wired $150,000 to Collins' super PAC through a shell company, and a few weeks later her office committed to landing him $32 million in Navy contracts. The Navy got stuck funding research it never wanted and a boat it didn’t need. Collins deserves every bit of the hell she's catching, and then some, because the FBI probe that was closing in on her got snuffed out when Trump took office and fired the investigators. But Kao didn't stop at Collins, and Washington didn't either. He handed the FBI 50 pages naming dozens of lawmakers, staffers, and lobbyists from both parties who helped him turn roughly $900,000 in donations into $40 million a year in contracts. One of his own executives described learning how the town works as realizing it's all for sale. Every bit of it. Deals like these close every day in Washington, and the sole unusual feature of this one is that somebody confessed. The FBI was gearing up to chase all those names until Trump purged the anti-corruption unit and gutted the DOJ office that prosecutes crooked politicians. That leaves the public watching, and the public needs tools that show who paid whom and what it bought. Tracker PAC is building those tools.