U.S. President Donald Trump attends an event to announce a deal with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk on to reduce the prices of GLP-1 weight‑loss drugs during an event in the Oval Office at the White House.
President Donald Trump is making endless news with tales of corruption, grift and self-dealing, but Protect Democracy leaders Justin Florence and Justin Vail say there are already tools in place to snatch away Trump and his family’s ill-gotten goods, even before he’s found guilty of it.
“Simply put, under a legal principle called disgorgement, you don’t get to keep what you stole,” they told MS NOW.
Disgorgement, they say, has “deep roots in moral tradition and American law.” The Securities and Exchange Commission’s disgorgement authority, at issue in the Supreme Court this term, lets the government recover the money that fraudsters make through securities fraud — which includes the possibility of crypto or prediction market scams.
What funny, of course, is that when confronted with the disgorgement argument, Trump’s own government attorneys bought into it and supported the notion.
“The issue before the court is whether the government needs to prove that the wrongdoer hurt specific people. The administration said ‘no’, arguing: ‘Disgorgement is a remedy designed to strip ill-gotten profits from wrongdoers,’ so ‘SEC disgorgement under current law is not conditioned on a showing of pecuniary harm to victims,’ said Florence and Vail. “In short: Those who profited through fraud have to give up the money, and it goes to the American people.”
It’s doubtful that Trump’s attorneys had Trump and his family and cohorts in mind while voicing these arguments before the court, but the argument stays, and it’s strengthened by the administration’s own endorsement.
“All the pilfered money actually belongs to the American people,” they argue. “Those seeking payouts from the new Trump fund should not expect to keep that money if their claims cover up evidence of crimes such as attacking the Capitol — that would trigger the False Claims Act and enable disgorgement. Crypto profits built on insider knowledge of a presidential announcement? Claw them back. The foreign government ‘deals’ that blur the line between statecraft and self-enrichment in which the president and his relatives rake in billions? The coerced corporate donations and prediction market winnings? It’s time to get the money back.”
And Trump’s pardons can’t stop any of this, they argue. Nor can the Roberts Court’s wild grant of criminal immunity in Trump v. United States. After all, this is an argument not of guilt but of money, and those in Trump’s orbit “who cross the line should know: Even with a promised pardon, the law can come for what they’ve taken from the American people.”