On April 2, 2025, President Trump announced the tariffs he called "Liberation Day." The stock market fell hard. For the next two weeks, ordinary people watched their retirement accounts drop and had no idea what to do about it.

Jefferson Shreve knew exactly what to do. He traded.

Between April 7 and April 17, 2025, Shreve made more than 140 individual stock purchases and sales — worth between $3.44 million and $9.45 million — according to a review of congressional disclosure records by Dave Levinthal at NOTUS. Over the longer stretch from mid-January through mid-April, the count was more than 320 purchases, sales and exchanges.

That is more than a dozen trades a day, on average, during the exact stretch when tariff news was moving markets by the hour.

Some of it was in companies his committee oversees

Shreve sits on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee — the panel with jurisdiction over trucking, railroads, aviation and shipping.

Here is a partial list of what he traded during that window, from the same records:

• Bought Uber, Schneider National (trucking) and CSX (rail) — up to $50,000 each
• Sold GE Aerospace, Norfolk Southern (rail), Harley-Davidson, Carnival and Brunswick Corporation — up to $50,000 each
• Traded UPS shares worth between $65,000 and $150,000

Tariffs are a transportation story. They change what crosses a border, what moves on a rail line, what gets loaded on a plane. The member of Congress positioned to hear about that first was buying and selling the companies that do the moving.

His biggest trades that spring were elsewhere: Microsoft ($250,000 to $500,000), Meta ($115,000 to $300,000), Apple ($100,000 to $250,000), Intuit ($100,000 to $250,000).

Members of Congress only have to disclose trades in broad ranges, which is why every number here is a span rather than a figure. That's not Shreve's doing — it's the law he could vote to change.

"He hired a professional"

Asked about the trades, Shreve's spokesperson Hannah Benfield told NOTUS:

"Congressman Shreve relies on a financial advisor to conduct trades. He hired a professional to ensure compliance with all transaction reporting requirements for members of Congress."

Read that carefully. It answers a question nobody asked. The concern isn't whether the paperwork was filed correctly. It's whether a sitting member of Congress should be trading millions of dollars in individual companies at all — especially companies his own committee regulates, during a policy event his own party created.

"A professional does it" is the same defense used by everyone who has ever been asked this question. It is not a firewall. The advisor works for the member.

He did eventually stop — quietly, and only partway

In June 2025, two months after the NOTUS story, Shreve directed the asset manager of his charitable remainder trust to divest from individual stocks, NOTUS reported that December. His spokesperson framed it as transparency: "The congressman wants to be transparent and clear that the trust assets will go to charity."

Good. It is a real change and worth saying so.

But note what he did with the money. He bought between $5 million and $25 million in 13-month structured notes from the Bank of Montreal, and a five-year "barrier note" from JPMorgan worth another $5 million to $25 million — complex bank products, not an index fund.

And note what he still hasn't done: signed the discharge petition that would force a House vote on banning congressional stock trading. A personal decision to stop is not a rule that stops anyone else. Shreve made the first choice and declined the second.

Why this lands differently for his district

Shreve sold his Storage Express self-storage company for $590 million in 2022. He is one of the wealthiest people in Congress. Nobody is required to apologize for being rich, and we're not asking him to.

But the tariffs he was trading around are the same tariffs his constituents pay at the register. Indiana's 6th District is not a district of people with a financial advisor executing 140 trades in ten days. It's a district where 24,310 people are projected to lose health coverage because of a bill he voted for, and where 26,579 households rely on SNAP to buy groceries.

When the market fell in April 2025, those households absorbed it. Their congressman managed it.

He's not alone, and that's the problem

Pennsylvania's Rob Bresnahan dumped Medicaid company stock and then voted to cut Medicaid. Utah's Blake Moore broke the stock disclosure law 70 times in his first six months and paid a $200 fine.

The through-line isn't that any one of them broke a law. It's that the rules are written so they mostly don't have to. Disclosure in ranges, weeks after the fact, with a fine smaller than a single trade.

Congress could fix that. There is a bill, and there is a discharge petition sitting there waiting for signatures to force a vote on it. Shreve solved the problem for himself and left the petition unsigned.

Source

One of Congress' Wealthiest Members Made Stock Trades Worth Millions After Trump Announced Tariffs — Dave Levinthal, NOTUS, May 13, 2025. Photo via NOTUS/AP.