President Donald Trump is refusing to promise that his staff didn’t engage in insider trading.
While speaking with reporters on Air Force One Friday, Trump was asked about a report that people inside the White House had given Wall Street executives a heads-up about an impending trade deal with India.
“Can you commit that that did not happen?” one reporter asked.
“I can commit to myself. That’s all I can commit, you know, I have thousands of people that work for me,” Trump replied. “But I can’t imagine anybody doing that. I have very honorable people, that I can say. So I can’t even imagine it.”
Trump’s insistence that he hires “only the best people” has become something of a running joke, but now it seems that the president won’t even bother to vouch that his staff isn’t breaking the law.
Even if Trump claims he did not engage in insider trading, it’s clear that the president is intrigued by some level of market manipulation. Earlier this month, he openly bragged about how much money his friends made off his abrupt 90-day pause on most retaliatory tariffs—an announcement that caused stocks to shoot up. Bloomberg reported that the day of this announcement was the “best day ever” for billionaires, as the world’s elite collectively made $304 billion when the markets went back up.