George Conway, the husband of Trump White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, believes that President Donald Trump may have committed a "criminal violation" by fabricating a phone call between American and Chinese officials.
Pointing to a recent CNN report in which Trump aides admit that the president lied about having a call with Chinese officials to resume trade talks as a way to calm down the stock market, Conway says that the president's actions are a textbook example of illegal market manipulation.
"What this describes is, quite literally, market manipulation that constitutes criminal violations of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934," Conway writes on Twitter.
Jennifer Taub, a professor at Vermont Law School who specializes in financial market regulation and white-collar crime, chimed in to say that Conway's analysis of the president's actions was "correct."
According to CNN's report, Trump aides have "privately conceded the phone calls Trump described didn't happen they way he said they did" and instead said that "Trump was eager to project optimism that might boost markets, and conflated comments from China's vice premier with direct communication from the Chinese."