In a recent session of the House Appropriations Committee, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick found himself defending his record as lawmakers questioned the scope of the administration’s trade agenda. During the exchange, Representative Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania pressed him on whether the investment firm he formerly ran—now operated by his sons—could benefit from a tariff regime that President Donald Trump had pursued and Lutnick had publicly supported.
“You and the president illegally imposed the highest tariffs on the American people since the Great Depression, and your sons figured out how to profit from the high tariffs by buying up refund rights, pennies on the dollar, just as you were out there cheerleading the tariffs,” Dean told Lutnick last week. “As a result, federal taxpayers like my constituents may now owe your family tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. I wonder if President Trump is concerned about you and your family profiteering off the illegal tariffs.”
“You know that that is false. Here’s reporting. I’d like to put it in the record,” Lutnick responded, brandishing a printed version of a February 20, 2026, article in Semafor titled “Howard Lutnick’s old firm did not, in fact, profit from Supreme Court tariff ruling.” Dean pushed back, telling Lutnick, “I hope you recognize how fundamentally wrong and corrupt this is. I hope you take accountability and have the decency to resign before you are fired.”
Dean’s accusations may have been forceful, but they’re nothing new. Lutnick—and the investment group he used to lead, Cantor Fitzgerald—have been fending off similar allegations about tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) since they first surfaced in a July 2025 piece in Wired. The report charged Cantor’s banking subsidiary with “creating a way for investors to bet that President Donald Trump’s signature tariffs [would] be struck down in court.” It cited a letter seen by Wired in which a Cantor representative stated that the firm had the capacity to trade several hundred million dollars’ worth of a financial product giving investors the rights to tariff refunds if the IEEPA tariffs were found unlawful, and that it had “already put a trade through representing about ~$10 million of IEEPA Rights.”
Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether Cantor Fitzgerald actually participated in such trades. The firm did not respond to a request for comment from The Dispatch.
Although Lutnick resigned from his posts as chairman and CEO of Cantor and divested his stake in the firm when he was confirmed as commerce secretary, he remains tied to Cantor through his sons—Brandon, who serves as chairman, and Kyle, who is the firm’s executive vice chairman. Howard Lutnick’s direct equity was also moved into trusts benefiting Brandon, Kyle, and two of Lutnick’s other children. Thus, even in the absence of Lutnick’s direct financial stake, it would create a significant conflict of interest if Cantor stood to gain from a tariff policy over which Lutnick wielded considerable influence.
According to Wired’s reporting, Cantor Fitzgerald might have stood to gain from Trump’s IEEPA tariffs through a form of litigation finance often called a “claims trade.” In this arrangement, an importer could choose to sell its right to a tariff refund in exchange for an upfront payment, should a refund occur. For instance, if a company paid $10 million in IEEPA tariffs to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, it could later receive a refund if a court ruled the tariffs unlawful. Instead of waiting for an uncertain judicial outcome, the company could sell its refund claim to another party—such as a hedge fund—for a discount, say $2 million or $3 million. These claims trades aren’t unusual, and the market for IEEPA refund claims grew substantially in 2025 and early 2026, before the Supreme Court’s February 20 ruling that declared the tariffs beyond the law’s reach. Cantor itself has facilitated such trades in the past, including during the 2022 collapse of the crypto exchange FTX. Acting as intermediaries to facilitate these complex transactions is the role of firms like Cantor in investment banking.
Regardless, Cantor Fitzgerald has repeatedly denied involvement in claims trades tied to IEEPA refunds. In the Wired piece, Cantor spokeswoman Erica Chase stated that “Cantor is not in the business of positioning any risk or taking views in litigation claims including tariffs.” Department of Commerce press secretary Kristen Eichamer added that “Secretary Lutnick knows nothing about this decision because he has no insight or strategic control over Cantor Fitzgerald.” The Department of Commerce did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.
In August 2025, roughly a month after Wired’s report and a day after Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts sent a letter to Lutnick requesting details on the “tariff refund agreements,” Bloomberg reported that Cantor had considered and discussed facilitating trades on such products but ultimately decided against moving forward before any trades were executed. Several anonymous sources cited by Bloomberg said Cantor had “received a client inquiry about possibly facilitating such trades, which are handled by larger Wall Street banks, and some staff discussed with potential clients about arranging them before the idea was rejected.”
Dean’s claim that Cantor could be owed tens or hundreds of millions of dollars now that the Supreme Court ruled Trump’s IEEPA tariffs unlawful is also questionable. Even if Cantor had helped arrange trades on tariff refund claims, the firm would most likely have acted as an intermediary rather than a principal investor. Cantor’s role, like that of other Wall Street firms in this market—such as Jefferies Financial Group, Stifel Financial Corp., and Oppenheimer Holdings—would be to connect importers selling claims with hedge funds seeking to buy them, earning a fee rather than taking a directional bet itself. Sources who spoke to Bloomberg emphasized that Cantor does not take positions on brokered trades and only earns a commission when it matches buyers and sellers. Therefore, even if Cantor did facilitate trades in the tariff-refund claims market (which Cantor has denied), the firm would not itself be entitled to the refunds on tariffs.
On the exact day the Supreme Court ruled that IEEPA does not authorize the president to impose tariffs, Semafor corroborated Bloomberg’s account. The piece, citing a senior banker familiar with the matter, said Cantor had contemplated facilitating trades on tariff refund agreements but decided against it after weighing the political sensitivities. It also claimed that a Cantor salesman misinterpreted the firm’s position and believed the business would be approved, leading him to search for counterparties to the trade.
The described scenario—that a marketer of investment products went ahead of the firm and pitched a product that was only under consideration—strikes some as plausible. Yet the leap to claim that this salesman acted with firm authorization and that the trade had already cleared—without senior bankers’ approval—has drawn skepticism.
Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, is among the critics. A week after the Semafor report, he sent a letter to Howard Lutnick and Brandon Lutnick demanding that both the Commerce Department and Cantor Fitzgerald disclose all documents, communications, and information related to tariff-refund trades. “Now that the Supreme Court has finally rejected President Trump’s brazen and unlawful power grab, the firm reportedly stands to make extraordinary profits of millions of dollars at the expense of American taxpayers,” Raskin wrote. “This arrangement raises significant ethical, legal, and policy questions that demand a full public accounting.” The letter requested all materials by March 9, but there has been no public confirmation from the Commerce Department, Cantor Fitzgerald, or the Judiciary Committee that those records have been provided. The House Judiciary Committee did not respond to The Dispatch when asked whether the requested records had been received. Representatives from Sen. Warren and Sen. Wyden’s offices, who together had issued a similar records request last year, also did not respond to a request for comment from The Dispatch.
Until those records are made available, whether Cantor’s account is fully accurate remains uncertain. To date, neither side has released the trade confirmations, counterparties, or settlement records that would settle the dispute.
