There now have been multiple instances in which somebody has placed large monetary bets just before the rest of the world found out about some new major White House policy or action. The latest, and largest, was a billion-plus dollar burst of futures trading mere minutes before Donald Trump (seditionist criminal etc.) announced on social media that he was putting his threatened war crime of destroying Iranian power plants on hold.
Markets immediately rallied after Trump's post, with the S&P500 soaring and oil prices dipping, and whoever made the $1.7B bet made off with a fortune in the span of 15-20 minutes. It would have been an insanely risky betâif you didn't know that Trump was in the middle of thumb-typing a post that would, for certain, move the markets the moment he pressed send.
The consensus of nearly all market observers has been these bets have been run-of-the-mill acts of treason from White House insiders or hangers-on. Sure, placing a sudden half-billion dollar bet on whether Iran's Supreme Leader was about to die just before a surprise new U.S.âIsraeli war against the country became publicly known or a bet that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro would be toppled only hours before an American military incursion captured himâthose have exposed about-to-happen U.S. military actions and stood a good chance of exposing the troops involved to more danger.
And that's especially true now that the whole world's intelligence agencies know that watching the markets and online betting sites can semi-reliably give advance notice of U.S. military plans.
The reason the consensus has congealed around the idea that somebody either inside the administration or with access to the administration is using their knowledge of upcoming U.S. strikes or strategies to work the markets is because, well, look at them. Go around that big cabinet meeting table and argue, if you can, that there's a single person seated there that wouldn't endanger U.S. troops for a bit more cash than they currently have. You can't do it. The Secretary of "War" would probably do it for a keg of beer.
So rather than disputing that somebody or multiple somebodies around Trump are engaging in a bit of light treason-for-profit, most of the speculation has instead been around who the actual culprit might be. Is it Trump himself? What about rich Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent? That Lutnick fella? It's gotta be someone who's rich enough to throw around that kind of money, and it's got to be someone with the ethics of a blood-sucking leech. But I repeat myself.
My own bet would have to be on Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. Not just because he matches the criteria of being Trump-adjacent, rich as snot, and apparently completely soulless; those characteristics are shared by half Trump's cabinet. Jared, however, has the additional complication of having been handed several billion dollars in "investment" money by the Saudi royal family, and most conspicuously the member of the Saudi royal family now infamous for having people who've pissed him off killed and chopped into pieces for easier disposal, and Jared has so far mostly puttered about with all that Saudi money with nothing to show for it.
Placing bets on U.S. military actions would feel like small potatoes, when you've got Prince Bonesaw thumbing through your latest quarterly and not liking what he sees.
That, then, is the current consensus opinion: Somebody close to Trump is treasoning. Again.
But it's also not the only possible explanation. And the second explanation, if it proved true, would actually be worse. A lot worse.
WASHINGTON, March 27 (Reuters) - Iran-linked hackers on Friday claimed they had accessed âFBI Director Kash Patel's personal email inbox, publishing photographs of the âdirector and other documents to the internet.
On their website, the hacker group Handala Hack Team said Patel "will now find his name among the list of âsuccessfully hacked victims." The hackers published a series of personal photographs âof Patel sniffing and smoking cigars, riding in an antique â convertible, and making a face while taking a picture of âhimself in the mirror with a large bottle of rum.
Oh, you say an Iranian-allied hacker group successfully broke into our FBI director's personal email and is releasing embarrassing photos he took? Listen pal, around here we call that your average Friday.
Those of you who've still got vaguely functioning brains even after having your noggins roasted by 14 months of nonstop scandals, at least 80% of those scandals being so egregiously stupid that thinking too hard about any one of them risks an aneurysm, might remember one of the very first big scandals of Trump 2.0.
It was dubbed Signalgate, because nobody has any imagination these days, and the scandal was Pete Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and other top leaders getting caught sharing ultra-classified updates on an active U.S. military operation in Yemen. (Also Pete group-texted missile strike details to his family and his lawyer, because that's how the Department of War rolls these days, baby. Warfighters are always briefing random family members to make sure they know all the operational details.)
That one was soon followed by a new scandal when a press photographer caught ex-national security adviser Mike Waltz using his damn smartphone under the table during a Trump cabinet meeting, like a damn middle schooler, in a photo which revealed Vance, Marco Rubio, Tulsi Gabbard, and others were chatting with each other using a not-even-secure Signal clone.
So to say that there has been a distinct indifference to operational security in this crowd would be an understatement; add Trump himself, who has been notoriously hostile to suggestions that he maybe not use his unsecured personal devices for presidenting and whose idea of a "secured military command center" is a goddamned black curtain tied up around some available corner of a Mar-a-Lago club room, and it becomes farce.
So I'm going to instead propose an alternative explanation for the massive cash bets on upcoming U.S. strikes and/or strategic announcements: I'm going to propose, here, that all of these people's personal devices have already been hacked by multiple world governments and/or any of a dozen organized crime groups, granting realtime access to whatever White House decisions happen when they're thumb-typing in their fake Signal apps during important White House meetings, and instead of the pre-military-strike bets being acts of treason from the gormless knobs of Trump's inner circle it is instead evidence of the most successful espionage campaign against the United States the world has ever produced.
Who says it's a member of Trump's White House placing these bets based on up-to-the-minute knowledge of what U.S. troops are or aren't doing in yet-to-be-disclosed tactical strikes? There's probably a half dozen overseas hacker groups who have the same damn knowledge, and overseas hacker groups gotta make cash somehow.
Of the world governments capable of pulling off the feat of turning multiple cabinet member's phones into their own personal wire services, China, Russia, Israel, and Iran all stand out. So do organized crime groups, which in several of those countries amount to the same thing; the technical hurdles in breaking into a government official's personal devices are insignificant, when those officials are themselves indifferent to even trying at security protocols. I imagine Kash Patel's phone has the battery life of a ripe potato, with multiple international hacker groups constantly fighting inside it to push their own software while kicking out all their competitors. He probably has to use oven mitts when picking it up each morning.
Suppose you're in charge of a loosely government-affiliated hacker group in one of these countries. Wouldn't you want to make a bit of not-very-quiet cash on the side, whenever you read something on cabinet member's cracked phone that was sure to shake the markets.
It wouldn't be costless, mind you. You'd still need enough funds to make the bets. And for every intercepted message about invading Venezuela or killing the Iranian leader, you'd have to suffer through approximately 1,000 pictures of Pete Hegseth chugging a beer, or Kash Patel chugging a beer, or Pam Bondi chugging a beer, or Robert Kennedy chugging a OH MY GOD WHAT THE HELL IS THAT.
It'd wear on the soul. Making a few million bucks on the side would not wear on the soul, and would probably keep your own team in cheap beer for a good long time.
That's what I'm throwing out there, then. Everyone is just presuming Donald Trump or somebody around Donald Trump is using advance knowledge of White House announcements to play the markets, because they're all soulless grifting monsters who would absolutely do that, even if it meant giving the world advance notice of an about-to-be-unleashed military operation.
But that's not the only possible explanation. We could be selling them short; it might not be that they are working the markets based on their advance knowledge of Trump's decisionsâthey could be innocent!
Instead, we may just be seeing the results of a White House so riddled with security lapses that half the governments in the world have to-the-minute knowledge of what Trump is deciding during any given White House or Mar-a-Lago meeting.
That would just be a historically unprecedented national security crisis, instead of a historically unprecedented national security crisis. You can see how that's different, right?
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