It's not that complicated. Elect a Democrat in 2028 who will nominate a strong AG, not a useless ditherer like Garland. What a disgraceful tenure he had. If he was going to take so long to bring charges he should have just avoided it. Instead he takes 3 years to bring all these charges which naturally look like election interference and as such are paused until they choke the election away and the new justice department kills all the cases.

Don't elect a geriatric compromise candidate. The current administration's excesses create a massive opportunity for a pendulum swing. It's really not that hard. Hold yourself, your neighbors, your family and your friends accountable for who they vote for. And as tempting as it is, don't give into cynicism. It will take work but change for the better is always possible, and really in America, is far less out of reach than it would often seem.

I think it's likely that they'll see justice in a chaotic way, ie not connected to the specific crime. Most likely outcome is that they make huge paper profits that are then absolutely worthless because the dollar collapses and the property rights that enforce the wealth they gained from these transactions disappear as the government is toppled. Another likely outcome is that they get in the habit of doing criminal things that piss people off, piss the wrong person off, and then get offed.

There was an AskHistorians post about the French revolution a few years ago that really stuck with me:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/w18qt5/what_...

> Stability had hardly been a hallmark of the Revolution til that point, and really what we have seen is a revolving door of men rising to the summit of power, only to realize that once your head is above the rest it's a prime target for the guillotine. Of the early years of the Revolution, virtually any man who had been considered a leader was either dead or in exile. The King was executed in January of 1793. The Girondin, formerly indistinguishable from the 'left,' went en masse to the guillotine in October 1793. Danton & friends (dubbed by Robespierre 'the indulgents'), the literal authors of the Insurrection of August 10th which overthrew the King and declared the Republic, the 'giant of the Revolution,' had been executed in April 1794. Interspersed with these prominent deaths were hundreds of individuals who had been important players in the Revolution, whether in national or local politics, and who had now paid the price for their notoriety

In times of crisis and scarcity, the usual outcome is that anyone whose ego is big enough to think that he can lead or profit finds that they become a target for elimination. The folks who survive are the ones who focus on, well, surviving. We're headed for one of those times of crisis now, though most people don't want to admit it, and a lot of the people who are profiting off ill-gotten gains now may find that they don't live to enjoy it simply because it gives them a taste for profiteering that eventually makes them take stupid risks.

Organize, organize, organize. With some luck, we can have trials for the crimes of the past few decades and purge our government of hostile actors.

Revolution, not election. We need a new governance framework in the US. I believe it’s genuinely silly to think this type of activity is limited to one party or one administration or that it is new.

I believe the Constitution and related artefacts should be stored in the British Museum with other historical documents. Civic religion needs to be done away with.

I have accepted that a lot of effort has been put into making sure these people never see justice and they probably won't. I put my energy into strengthening democracy and institutions for the next generation so they have the opportunity to do better than we have.

You are completely right. There are no avenues to seek justice here because the levers of power control the justice. And if the holders of power change, they won't spend political capital on this kind of thing. It's free crime.

Realistically I think it will come down to the aggrieved counterparties here. Who was on the losing side of the money, was it Joe Schmoe day trader or a bunch of funds who lost their shirt?

If it’s the hedge funds or institutional money, you can absolutely be sure this will come to a head. People don’t like being taken for a ride, and if they are repeatedly taken for a ride and they are organized market participants they will come around and make sure there is a comeuppance as a collective

Sometimes there is no justice. You just have to accept that bad people get away with bad stuff, usually at a significant cost to others.

> What's the path for that, really?

Record and wait. Justice is slow but has the power of the nation state. Once the leadership of this current government is gone and nobody is around to protect the offenders then its time to swoop in with the records and the justice system.

This is why its risky to join corrupt political movements led by old men, because they will use you to break the law, then die and you'll be on the hook. Much like the people who worked for the Soviets in the Baltics post war as young staffers, who administered the forced deportations and were eventually prosecuted ~50 years later for genocide or crimes against humanity.

i.e. everyone working for ICE today should be agitating for a pardon, given how racial profiling and warrentless raids are probably rather illegal in the long run.

Donald Trump has one big advantage over many other members of the administration: He will be long dead before the justice system can act on him.

Also something to keep in mind in the future: Old people have no reason to fear prison, they will die before they can get convicted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47496508

The thing with justice is that when you look past it in one place, you don’t really get to ask for it in another. I’m talking about Gaza - it set the precedent that the U.S. and its client state, Israel, can get away with anything. Nothing is out of bounds, criminality is normalized, and accountability is dependent on the identity of the victim. Now that the victims are people affected by the stock market manipulation (people in the West), suddenly we’re interested in justice.

I think one of the things that goes unmentioned in these discussions is that while the US gets a lot of attention for this kind of activity, it has also (historically) been in the forefront of criminalization and prosecution. I may be wrong, but don't know of any other jurisdiction that prosecuted insider trading before the Eighties, and the US has had a pattern of investigating and regulating this since the 30s.

I don't think that this is a particular form of exceptionalism, beyond the US having a longer tradition of widespread, retail-owned shares, and law-making around that fact.

But sometimes I wonder when people are criticising the US as a culture, they're often choosing as the baseline that should be respected standards that were also defined in a US cultural context. What this sometimes means is that in internal US culture these points are seen as something that is heavily discussed, because there was a point where it was democratically decided and therefore could be undecided in the same way, like corporate personhood, or money-as-speech. In the case of the criminalization "insider trading", there is lively debate about whether this is actually a "good thing". That can sound horrific externally, because of course insider trading is a bad thing. But someone decided to make that a bad thing, and -- for historical accident reasons -- the edges of that debate was largely defined within the US.

(This is mostly just barely-informed speculation: sometimes issues like this emerge in international fora, or start in another culture and quickly spread. But the cultural and financial dominance of the US in the last century or so really makes these things often a point of debate in American terms, and a fixed point elsewhere. I speak here as an immigrant to the US and also someone who is dipped in global policy work, rather than someone who is stating this as a good or a bad thing.)

Less power to the government.

Congressional hearings combined with SEC regulatory incursions.

There will never be an investigation while Trump is president, but, it's entirely feasible to force some action in the time being to enable a case later.

FYI it may not be technically illegal it depends on all sorts of things.

If trade were made public it could be very damaging.

Getting rid of the delusion of American exceptionalism in how politics is conducted. In other words, do something about the two party system, or the pardon power or any number of things, the possibilities are endless. But doing anything about it would require admitting that the USA is something other than perfect, so it’ll never happen. Too bad really.

At least the USA is only 4% of the world’s population so the world economy will just find other financial hubs and currencies, no big loss.

For starters, you're not alone in this feeling. A lot of us are very hungry for justice, and a lot of the Trump administrations current tactics are openly grappling with the reality of jailtime and restitution if they lose power. These are unusual times, and so people who are not usually inclined toward retribution are hungry for it.

That said, it's hard to reconcile that with the fact that Democrats continue to be the opposition party, and failed to even imprison Trump over four years for the things he'd done. And even in the best case scenario, we wouldn't expect Trump himself to live long enough to face much justice.

The optimism left in me hopes that this era can serve as an enduring cautionary tale for future societies.

> What's the path for that, really?

Elect people who will make justice a priority.

The last 10 minutes of The Sum of All Fears.

Sure, we should ban all insider trading of any kind; including people in congress which have done this repeatedly without any consequences.

Elections and a collectively demonstrated will for justice.

Elections.

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Zero when the president has the power to issue blanket pardons to his family and inner circle. Hell, he might even extend it fully to ICE. There's precedent too since the previous president pardoned his son for all crimes committed over a period of time.

"The Treasury just declared the U.S. insolvent. The media missed it" - https://fortune.com/2026/03/23/us-government-insolvent-fisca...