Donald Trump Stock Trades

Three things a congressional filing does have and this one does not. They are facts about the form, not gaps in our data.

A notification date

The form carries a Yes/No box (“Notification Received Over 30 Days Ago”) rather than the day the filer learned of the transaction, so there is no date to show.

An owner code per line

The form has no such column. A House filing marks every line as the member’s, a spouse’s or a dependent child’s; this one does not.

The transactions themselves

Every page of every document in this collection is a scanned image. We hold the pages exactly as filed and read nothing out of them, so no amount, band, security or transaction type appears on this page.

The reading the source puts under its own scans is not a way round this. OGE lays a text layer under some of the documents, and it is demonstrably unreliable: in the cleanest one it renders the name of its own form correctly 39 times and garbled 25 times, and it recognises 6 of the form’s 11 amount bands literally against 6,925 amount-like strings. In no document do the words Purchase, Sale and Exchange all three turn up. A band lifted out of that reading would be a figure of ours, not one the register reports.

And that is why these transactions are not ours. We measured it on the filings themselves: in the one document where the source had put its own text layer under the scan, 0 of 59 amount cells landed on a band of the form exactly. Strip the stray spaces and 28 of them “recover” — but among those recovered is a band made of two neighbouring cells glued together by the scanner, one whose lower edge comes from one row and whose upper edge comes from the next. It reads like a perfectly ordinary band and exists on neither ladder of this form. That is the whole argument in one line: a wrongly read band is worse than no band, because it looks exactly like a right one. Thirty-one of the 59 do not land on a band even after cleaning.

An absence here is not a zero. The Office of Government Ethics does not require a negative report, so an absence of filings means only that no filing exists in the collection — never that no transaction took place.

The clock. A periodic transaction report is due within 30 days of the filer learning of a transaction and no later than 45 days after it took place; annual reports follow their own calendar. The date on each row is the one the source puts on it. OGE records a time alongside it, but nothing in the source says what that time marks, so this page shows the day and leaves the hour out rather than implying a precision it cannot back up.