Washington D.C. – An Accountable.US review
of Q1 2025 SEC filings posted this week for Cantor Fitzgerald –
billionaire Trump Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s family-run
financial services firm – reveals that while Lutnick was playing a
leading role in President Trump’s national Bitcoin reserve effort,
Lutnick’s family business empire dramatically deepened its investment in
Microstrategy (now called Strategy), the largest corporate holder of
Bitcoin in the world. From Q4 2024 to Q1 2025, Lutnick’s family-run
Cantor Fitzgerald increased its holding of regular Strategy stock by
$304 million, to a total of $1.3 billion, even amid being publicly criticized for the egregious conflict of interest.
Including puts and calls, Accountable.US found Cantor boosted its total
investment by over $568 million to over $2.1 billion, representing
44.5% of the firm’s portfolio.
“President Trump’s billionaire Commerce Secretary has been playing the ultimate Washington insider game to pad his family’s riches,” said Accountable.US Executive Director. “From the White House, Howard Lutnick has played a leading role in orchestrating Trump’s Bitcoin reserve policy at the same time his family company was pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the biggest corporate Bitcoin holder in the game – pushing up their stake by at least $300 million. While both the Lutnick and Trump families seem to be self enriching from positions of power with their massive crypto interests, their bumbling tariff policies and harsh budget plans stand to leave millions of working people with less health and financial security.”
Accountable.US has previously documented billions of dollars of interests Cantor Fitzgerald is involved in that could directly benefit from Lutnick’s role as Commerce Secretary – including urging a national television audience to “buy Tesla” stock in March
while his family-run firm Cantor Fitzgerald reported holding nearly
$840 million in Tesla Inc. in its most recent holdings report.
Conveniently, Lutnick’s appeal to would-be average investors came on the
same day Cantor Fitzgerald analysts upgraded Tesla to a “buy” rating.
https://newrepublic.com/post/195324/trump-administration-crimes-jail-time
A weekly review of the rogues and scoundrels of American politics
What’s in the water in the state of Maryland? Whatever it is, it’s certainly more invigorating than the sewage that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his grandchildren have been swimming in. A few weeks ago, one of the Old Line State’s senators, Chris Van Hollen, dropped his gloves to take on President Donald Trump’s unlawful banishment and imprisonment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. This week, his House colleague Kweisi Mfume was responding to an administration flirting with suspending the habeas rights of its citizens in stark, but welcome terms. “It’s a damn shame to continue to see what is happening to our nation under the guise of this Trump administration and his Department of Government Evil,” he said. “He and Elon Musk, really in my opinion, deserve to be arrested and charged with assault on the Constitution.”
One of the more unfortunate realities of the Trump era is that to speak the plain truth about it requires you to get over the feeling that you’re being shrill or alarmist. “I know that might sound crazy and ludicrous,” Mfume said, commenting on his call to arrest the president and his pet oligarch. As someone who’s spent the past few years issuing Cassandra-like warnings only to watch so many of my ostensible industry peers take a dive, I can relate. But the thing about Cassandra is that she’s correct, and so is Mfume. Trump isn’t a president. He’s the head of a criminal syndicate, and he should be treated accordingly—now and, even more importantly, when he and his accomplices are finally out of power.
Trump 2.0 has been a remarkable speedrun into lawlessness, a testament to the fact that there might have actually been some adults in the room during his first term. (During which time he still fomented an insurrection and got impeached twice!) Now, freed from those guardrails that were once upstanding, he’s rocketed into a new level of infamy. I once held that George W. Bush’s reign was much more costly than Trump’s. No longer; his return has truly been a thing apart. As TNR’s Alex Shephard documented this week, Trump’s trip to the Gulf States has been a vertically integrated grift, in which the president has racked up more corrupt enterprises than most politicians manage in their whole careers.
This week’s skullduggery is, of course, just one brief crime spree among many. Over at The Nation, Jeb Lund lays down the lengthy rap sheet that Trump has written for himself in his first 100 days. The Trump administration has heisted the private data of millions of Americans, unlawfully terminated thousands of federal employees, extorted law firms and businesses and broadcasters; they’re gaming the markets, raking in corrupt money with crypto-tokens, kidnapping people and exiling them to foreign prisons without due process, and much much more. As Lund notes: “The question is not whether Trump and his people committed a crime while you read that last sentence but how many.”
It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the Trump administration is canceling the FBI’s investigations into white-collar criminals. But if these sorts of crimes aren’t dramatic enough for you, we could also simply stick with good old-fashioned manslaughter. As TNR’s Matt Ford reported this week, one of the hallmarks of Trump’s public health policies is that they will kill a lot of children—probably not a surprise given that the aforementioned Kennedy is well known for directing officials in Samoa to run an open-air eugenics experiment that killed 83 kids. “The net effect of these policy changes,” Ford writes, “is to make this country a more dangerous place for Americans to give birth and grow up.”
Abroad, Trump administration policies have the same eugenicist bent. As TNR contributor James North chronicled, the gutting of PEPFAR—the Bush-era HIV/AIDS intervention that has saved countless lives in Africa and one of the most highly regarded U.S. policies the world over—“has already sentenced tens of thousands of people in Africa to death, and with each week that passes with the program stuck in limbo, many thousands of needless deaths will follow.”
The administration’s approach to PEPFAR is of a piece with a range of policy decisions that will, in the best-case scenario, cede soft-power space to China and others to secure the developing world’s regard for stepping into a vacuum and providing humanitarian assistance. The worst-case scenario is, naturally, millions of needless deaths. Back in March, The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof attempted to quantify the harms done by the Trump administration’s decimation of foreign aid agencies in terms of lives lost. Here are his calculations: 1.65 million deaths from AIDS, 500,000 from lack of vaccines, 550,000 from lack of food aid, and approximately 300,000 each from lack of malaria and tuberculosis prevention, respectively.
This all raises an interesting question: How many people have to die before the word holocaust is in play? I’m not gunning for shock value here, at least not solely. I want to suggest that there is a certain necessary logic to what has to follow corrupt misrule of this kind: tribunals, trials, punishment, prison, and the running to ground and defunding of the entire Trump syndicate.
It’s an undertaking that will require no small amount of courage, and it will break with a long-standing status quo that has favored the absolution of numerous mortal sins, from the Bush administration’s unlawful torture network to Wall Street’s ruination of the economy to the many costly foreign misadventures that have feathered the nests of the military industrial complex over the years. The “look forward, not backward” ways etched into the civic firmament have served us poorly; in retrospect, what we had to look forward to was this exact moment with this perfidious administration.
Real accountability is not something I expect will be popular with the rotted mass media and its grotesque aversion to good governance or the wholly out-of-touch pundit class, whose opinions on Trumpian corruption tend to lag years behind most functional adults’. This is where the avatars of “Let the bad guys off the hook and move on” obtained their intellectual cover over the years. Suffice it to say, they’ll like a better world wrought from taking these criminals down and locking them up just fine. But those who want to pursue justice for all those wronged by this administration should expect to be branded as heretical.
We hear so much about the “rule of law” these days. So many people are concerned about it! They just don’t know what’s going to happen to it. Even among the gravely worried, there is this sense that the “rule of law” is like a machine someone turned on at some point in the past, which runs in the background of American life like some sort of ambient presence. What the rule of law really is, it turns out, is the sum total of our deeds—and our inaction. The rule of law lives or dies on our willingness to act—occasionally with grim resolve. It’s time for people who value justice to screw their courage to the sticking place.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
yeah - just like his voters put their trust in a half-assed candidate
Remember, remember! The fifth of trumpvember
the 40 days of trumpmas - a serial poem
for 40 days the trumpeter reigns,
his lies and hate on whom he disdains,
but election day will come so soon,
we'll no longer hear the orange baboon;
in 39 days full of world wide problems.
we could elect him to get rid of the muslims,
but as he'll rant on trivialities of his presidential life,
what could be worse? - you could be his wife;
in 38 days just what will you do?
the donald has said he likes lgbtq,
but as he bullies his women and all his men too,
if youre questioning, what stops him from bullying you?
in just 37 days, some people are saying,
(or pleading or hoping or some even praying)
the duke of prunes will dye his forelock purple my friend,
and thus make america grape again,
our days are down to just 36,
before our problems the don will fix,
he will on day one do what hes said - true,
he'll wall out our enemies - and fat women too!
on the 35th day of trumpmas
yes just seven weeks remain!
will the polls and tallies deliver us
donald with his golden mane?
34 days and the vice-pipers have piped,
though pence didnt say why donalds suit shouldnt be striped,
he wouldnt defend his master's string pulling,
to make america great? - who do they think they're fooling?
just 33 days till the macho tornado,
unless its blown away by hurricane machado,
with women and voters he has so much to loose.
keep your mouth shut donald (unless youre changing your shoes)
32 days and we’ve been hit by the big blowhard,
donald spoke here in fla (oh, we had a hurricane too)
this administration gives us playing the race card, a weak economy, and unemployment
but if you want a job you could be donald’s campaign manager (unless youre a jew)
31 days, just a month, remains;
will the donald say hes sorry, and his baser impulses restrain?
or keep blaming bill clinton for our moral demise;
when trump speaks to us, our NO votes must be our replies!
election comes this time (in 30 days) each 4 years,
time for praise and tears and fears;
as polls will open in many states,
vote early, please dont vote late!
down to 29, just a leap february,
and theres still the donald quite
contrary;
donald donald, how does your garden grow?
quoth the master debater, "with pretty maids groped in a row"
just 28 days - later or soon,
and the zombies will rise, led by the big goon;
unless everyone gets a reality inoculation,
i might have to move to canada for a well deserved vacation;
now just 27, less than 4 weeks,
no time for you to say 'yikes!' or 'eeeks!'
obama wants to go to mars and colonize it for man,
lets send trump tomorrow! and colonize it for orangutan!
26 days are all that remain,
will our democracy and economy go down the drain?
if we all keep listening to the blustering oaf,
will he give jobs and prosperity? - or just half a loaf
25 days - will more women speak?,
of the antics of donald who the presidency seeks,
dating 14 year old girls or groping their mothers,
how did the gop pick him over the others?,
24 days - were down to two dozen,
the next woman who speaks just might be your cousin,
or mother or sister, aunt, niece, even daughter,
describing the circumstance in which donald caught her,
23 days left and trump doesnt yet have as many accusers,
as cosby, but he assures us that they are all really losers,
sent by bankers or hillary with secret agendas,
to disrupt our election of him - our defender!,
22 days and we know charity begins at home,
but donalds attention is so prone to roam,
his gift that disappeared to 911 survivors from his foundation?,
oops! maybe donald spent it on a vacation,
21 days and trump says the election may be rig-ly,
if hes not the winner and his total's not big-ly,
tremendously higher than hillary gets,
he warns his supporters may all lose their wits,
20 days left and while george zimmerman still walks free,
the man who shot at HIM got 20 years - while trayvon got eternity,
trump wants us to support our cops and maintain law and order,
he'll put all the inner city dwellers in jail, and send the immigrant criminals far across the border,
19 days left till we all go to pretend,
to elect someone to lead us, as if on it our lives depend,
but wise man, donald trump, already really knows,
who we really voted for - a wolf in president's clothes?,
18 days and we bad hombres demand a rebate,
on the ill feelings left since the comments of one candidate,
the debaters have met in their final grudge match,
but only donald can say from whose hands victory will be snatched,
17 days and our government is corrupt with quid pro quo,
did you take latin at wharton? is that how you know?,
donald wants us to fire at them all - the bureaucrats lined up in rows,
and believe me, corruption is a subject. that donald really knows,
16 days - lets set term limits on all our office holders,
and put all our women in binders - or maybe in folders,
donalds endless complaints are becoming a sour whine,
have a little cheese with that, from wisconsin, where
hillary's doing fine,
15 days and on stocking covered thighs did linger,
two miniature hands with two thumbs and eight tiny fingers,
they belonged to the donald who believed that he owned,
any thing that he wanted - or anyone he got alone,
14 days yes only two weeks,
till the duke of orange assends to the throne he seeks?,
to rule all americans, the strong and the weak?,
and dominate the globe with power that's peak?,
the 13th day to go - does that seem unlucky?,
not for donald whos lately been appearing quite plucky,
claiming media, polls, and parties are against him,
and rallying his multitudes with wit waxing dim,
on the 12th day of trumpmas donald awoke with a jerk,
promptly fired his latest campaign manager (who considered that a perk),
if youre "AAAfroAAAmurikan" and unemployed i can put you to work,
barked donald the businessman from behind his sly smirk,
it's the 11th and engineer casey trump is in the caboose,
i hear some of you saying oh no! what's the use,
our campaign will probably just go off the tracks,
but donald says its ok - cause he's got "the blacks",
just ten days left yes only one-zero,
til donald is hoping that he'll be your hero,
as new hillary emails come under investigation,
donald hopes to rename camp david to camp donald for
his vacations,
like a cat has nine lives we're left with only 9 days,
till we're subject to donald? and his old wicked ways,
on foreign affairs he says he'll save us from isis,
but his domestic affairs are misogyny and crisis,
our days are numbered - yes only eight,
till once again we make america great,
by getting rid of candidates who have nothing to add,
goodbye donald you wont make america sad,
just one week to go - its day minus seven,
till america's lifted above - to trumpty dump heaven?,
where for rich folks like donald opportunity abounds,
and we keep the working poor with a wall that surrounds,
how the time it does fly its already day 6,
till americans problems the donald will fix,
his solutions begin on trumpday number one,
dont you like them? they'll come at the barrel of a gun,
Five days to go, baby, One in five,
No one here gets out alive, now,
david dukes not opposed to all jews,
he backs trump - who are you going to choose?,
only 4 days left till the armaged-don,
he'll seize power by the horns once he has won,
and donnie will be what he longs for - a winner,
using the FBI to wreak havoc on hillary the sinner,
only three left, just a triad of days,
and the donald his supporters continues to amaze,
with hoopla and folderoll made up in his head,
his winning temperament will leave us all dead,
just a pair of days - 2 - till trump paradise,
since these words you're reading please heed my advice,
the creatures that surround us are beginning to bite,
'blacks for trump' fear the Illuminati so lets turn out their light,
just a single day left till our thanksgiving,
deliver us from donald and preserve the living,
forget sanity and disgard your misgivings,
but pray hard to your gods that they'll be forgiving,
since we've got the nukes why can't we use'em?,
on the road to 2016 why couldn't we lose HIM?,
and trumpmas now has finally come,
the tallies will count up to a winning sum,
unless the earth is struck soon by a cataclysmic comet,
to elect a candidate who just makes you want to vomit?,
we wish you a merry trumpmas at this time each 4 years,
if you have'nt voted you've lost the chance to mitigate your fears,
cause donald duck is ready to lead, forget your crocodile tears,
so you'd better get the vaseline and lubricate your rears!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YlCTjGCH20
