Cancer drug Revlimid is one of the bestselling pharmaceutical products of all time, with total sales of over $100 billion. It’s also extraordinarily expensive, costing nearly $1,000 for each pill, even though that pill costs just 25 cents to make. The company that makes Revlimid defended its pricing and cited the cost of developing drugs and its expansive research efforts as reasons for the high cost.

After ProPublica’s David Armstrong was diagnosed with cancer, he set out to understand why a single pill of Revlimid costs the same as a new iPhone. He’s covered high drug prices for years, but what he discovered shocked even him. 

Back in 2020, during the first weeks of the pandemic, NPR reported that before shutdowns began, then-Sen. Richard Burr had given a VIP group a much more dire preview of the economic impact that the coronavirus would have than what he had told the public. As a senator, he had been receiving briefings in the weeks before. I saw that story and thought, “Hmm, wonder if he traded on that information.” I looked up his trading records and discovered that before the coronavirus stock market crash, he had sold off massive amounts of stock. That ended up being a huge story. 

When Trump began causing dramatic swings in the stock market with his tariff announcements, I wondered if anyone in government was trading ahead of those announcements. To start, I needed the disclosures for executive branch officials, and I learned my soon-to-be co-reporter Brandon Roberts was already requesting those forms. We enlisted reporter Pratheek Rebala, who is based in Washington, to gather congressional trading records. 

We reached out to everyone named in the stories, and they either said they had no advance knowledge of the tariff announcements, have an investment manager who makes their trades or didn’t respond to questions. Bondi and the Justice Department have said nothing about her trades to us or other outlets. We know from her disclosures she had to sell by early May. But why she sold on April 2, the very day of Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement, remains a mystery. 

No cases have ever been brought under the law. And some legal experts have doubts it would hold up to scrutiny from the courts, which in recent years have — not always, but generally — narrowed what constitutes illegal insider trading. That said, the law has still been impactful. It required the kinds of disclosure rules that made journalism like the kind we’re talking about here possible.

Burr has consistently denied any wrongdoing, and both the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission closed investigations into him without further action.