Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is being questioned by the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee about insider trading between himself and his former firm, Cantor Fitzgerald.
Rep. Jamie Raskin penned a letter Friday inquiring about the financial company’s alleged conflicts of interest related to President Trump’s tariffs.
The Maryland Democrat argued that while Mr. Lutnick was “telling the American public to ’rest assured, tariffs are not going away,’” his son and successor, Cantor Fitzgerald Chair Brandon Lutnick, was reportedly betting millions of dollars that the tariffs would be invalidated in court.
Last week, the Supreme Court sided against Mr. Trump on the legality of his emergency tariffs.
Mr. Raskin contended that the company stands to “make extraordinary profits of millions of dollars at the expense of American taxpayers,” citing a Wired magazine report.
“This arrangement raises significant ethical, legal, and policy questions that demand a full public accounting,” he wrote in the letter.
Cantor Fitzgerald created a way for investors to bet that the president’s signature tariffs would be invalidated by the courts, offering to purchase importers’ tariff refund claims in exchange for the right to collect the full value of the refund if the tariff policy was struck down — including trade worth $10 million, Wired reported.
This was when the commerce secretary served as the “architect” of Mr. Trump’s tariff policy after leaving the company, wrote Mr. Raskin. The congressman said he was prompted to ring the insider trading alarm bell.
The company said it “has never executed any transactions or taken risk on the legality of tariffs,” pledging to reiterate this with Mr. Raskin.
“In July 2025, certain Cantor salespeople explored brokering tariff trades, but Cantor never executed any transactions. All reports to the contrary are false,” a company spokesperson said in a statement to The Washington Times.
Mr. Raskin said the commerce secretary “participated in the losing strategy of bypassing Congress to unilaterally impose these tariffs and thus have an insider’s view of the tariffs’ profound legal vulnerability, the Administration’s weak litigation hand, and the prospects that the tariffs would be struck down.”
“Was the Lutnick family’s cornering of the market in this doomed endeavor a mere coincidence or something more orchestrated?” he asked.
He requested all communications and documents between Howard Lutnick and any representative of Cantor Fitzgerald, along with all internal analyses and legal opinions on the tariff policy, with a March 9 deadline.
The minority party can send letters such as this one, but it can’t unilaterally initiate hearings or issue subpoenas, meaning the commerce secretary can ignore the letter with no consequences.
