Debi Smith

Israel Continues Strikes on Southern Lebanon as Trump Announces 3-Week Ceasefire Extension democracynow.org/2026/4/24/head…

This photo should be on the front page of every single newspaper in America today.

We promised Afghans who fought alongside our troops safety in the US. Instead, we’re dumping them in a war-torn country they have no connection to. This isn’t about security. It's about pushing Stephen Miller's unhinged, extremist vision for America. theguardian.com/us-news/2026/a…

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue. On April 21st, the left screen moved first. I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug. At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy. On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me. At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire. Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83. I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags. My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports. The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026: Reviewed. That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one. Let me show you my flags. March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it. March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it. April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it. April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it. April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it. That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one. The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March. Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012. Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence. Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets. The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade. I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email. The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action. One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared. One account is a coincidence. But there were six. Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000. My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger. March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes. The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event. The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting." Then the White House sent the email again. I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread. I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated. But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed. Zero prosecutions. As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations. I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations. The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still. In my field, we call this price discovery.

No drugs on the boat and no crimes committed by anyone except the United States government. Horrific.

I think the vast majority of Americans would agree

Not saying companies aren't due a tariff refund, but WHAT (TF) about their increased profits coming at the total expense of their customers??? Customers screwed to ♾️, and the companies making at least double bank, if not more. Am I looking at this #tariffrefund thing wrong?

Curious if my question here is legit. Companies who paid the illegal tariffs and then passed those on to their customers and then also wrote them off as cost of goods sold can now get refunds of the tariffs they already made their customers pay and also subsequently wrote off? 🤔

Walkinshaw: We’ve seen time after time strange trades and bets that folks have made just in advance of decisions that Trump makes. We need an outright ban on executive branch officials, members of Congress, and their staff participating in these markets on issues where they might have insider information.

“Service members… don’t make the same mistakes we did. Exercise your rights to get out now.” - CCW Executive Director @MikePrysner arrested alongside 60+ veterans protesting Iran War today

Veterans and military family members with About Face staged a protest in the U.S. Capitol, calling for an end to U.S. involvement in Iran. (with @VetsAboutFace)

Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, is shaping US foreign policy while simultaneously soliciting billions from the same foreign governments he's negotiating with. It's open, naked, brazen corruption. Kushner will come under oath and testify & accountability will not stop there.

More than 5.83 million Haitians are expected to face acute levels of hunger from March to June, representing more than half the country's population, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the leading international authority on hunger crises. to.pbs.org/4cLW69z

I questioned Secretary Bessent about this clearly corrupt scheme to steal $10 billion from the American people. He didn’t seem to care. This is a slap in the face to taxpayers and the rule of law.

This is what a broken healthcare system & rigged tax code looks like: Last year, CVS paid $0 in federal income taxes, raised premiums by nearly 20%, cut over 1,800 jobs, gave its CEO $21 million & made $6.57 billion in profit. Yes. We must tax the rich & enact Medicare for All.

Looking forward to speaking with my friend @Thom_Hartmann of the #ThomHartmannProgram today at 1pm ET. Topic--#ScienceUnderSiege & the escalating climate crisis. Please tune in: thomhartmann.com/radio/listen-l…

I'm now forcing votes on the U.S. Senate floor to block nearly half a billion dollars in bombs and bulldozers to Israel. U.S. taxpayers are tired of Netanyahu’s extremist and illegal behavior. Congress cannot write another blank check to war criminals. twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1…

Senator Bernie Sanders:

Senator Bernie Sanders:

This week, I will be forcing a vote to block nearly $500 million in bombs and bulldozers to Israel.  Enough is enough. U.S. taxpayers must not keep funding the Netanyahu government’s mass killing and displacement of civilians in Gaza, Iran and Lebanon.