Two press-freedom organizations sued President Donald Trump on Wednesday over a much-criticized subscription service that sells trading firms and other paying customers faster access to his posts on Truth Social, arguing that it represents an opportunity for Trump to reap the profits from official government announcements before the public can see them.
The Intercept Media and the Freedom of the Press Foundation filed the complaint in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, asking a judge to block the program.
As covered by the BBC, CNBC and other media outlets, the plaintiffs – represented in part by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington – argue the service, called Truth API, violates the First and Fifth Amendments by giving paying customers preferential access to statements from a sitting president.
Trump's frequently bombastic posts on the platform he owns, which often take aim at those not aligned with him, have repeatedly moved markets, and the API sells a head start on reading them. Trump Media, Truth Social's parent company, has said it is charging up to $100,000 per month for advance access to his official government announcements on the social media platform.
Filings reviewed by the Associated Press add that the plaintiffs believe the president stands to gain financially by giving "market-moving" information to those willing and able to pay his personal company.
“There is no legitimate interest, let alone a significant one, in permitting President Trump to profit from selling government information,” the lawsuit says/
CREW, which is supporting the litigation, has said the case is meant to establish that the scheme violates the First and Fifth Amendments and to bar the president and his staff from continuing it.
Trump Media & Technology Group introduced the product in mid-July, framing it as a licensed, machine-readable feed built for trading firms that need to react to news within milliseconds.
On an earnings call reported by CNBC, Trump Media chief executive Kevin McGurn described the service as delivering machine-readable feeds of publicly available Truth posts from the platform's top accounts in milliseconds.
“Our customers will get published and publicly available posts fractionally faster,” McGurn said.
McGurn said the company had already signed more than a dozen customer agreements, generally priced between $60,000 and $100,000 a month, and that it was in talks to expand distribution to news organizations and LLM developers. Beyond that, he said the API is anticipated to feed into news feeds, financial data terminals, and specialty publications.
A federal complaint covered by Quiver Quantitative notes that early subscribers reportedly include financial news organizations and high-frequency trading firms, and that the service extends beyond Trump's account to other senior officials.
Late last month, Senate Democrats Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to examine whether the product violates securities law, arguing in a letter that the arrangement enriches Wall Street firms at the expense of ordinary investors.
"This appears to be an outrageous abuse of the President's office for his personal benefit that undermines everyday investors and the integrity of our markets, while enriching Wall Street and other wealthy insiders," Warren and Schiff said in a letter to SEC Chair Paul Atkins, as reported by Reuters.
Trump Media spokesperson pushed back on that framing, saying critics were conflating public and nonpublic information.
Separately, Senator Ron Wyden, who sits as the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, spoke out against the original launch, warning it would financially benefit the Trump family and "make Wall Street traders rich."
Robert Frenchman, a partner at New York-based law firm Dynamis, told Reuters in July that the API service may test the boundaries of fairness, but tech platforms are within their legal rights to offer tiered information services.
"It certainly does not seem fair, but yes, a tech platform can tier its distribution of information without violating federal securities laws,” he told the news outlet.
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