Executives Buy Record Stock in Their Own Uranium Company Days Before President Obama Shrinks the Monument Next Door

SALT LAKE CITY — Six days before President Obama signed orders cutting a southwestern national monument by more than ninety percent — opening nearly three million acres, including uranium-rich ground, to potential mining — the chief executive of the uranium company next door bought 74,000 shares of his own firm. It was the largest insider purchase in the company's history, expanding his stake by forty-one percent. The board chair bought his own tranche the following day.

The announcement then arrived, the acreage then opened, and congressional investigators would now like to discuss the calendar.

In a letter to the company, two House members asked the executives to explain whether they had received nonpublic information about the president's plans before investing. The company responded that its leaders did nothing wrong and that the boundary changes will not benefit the firm — a position that raises the separate question of why anyone made the largest purchase in company history to acquire more of a benefit that does not exist.

The Press notes for the record that it has covered this genre before, under multiple administrations, with the parties rotated. The well-timed trade adjacent to the well-timed policy is Washington's most durable form of weather: everyone discusses it, both parties denounce it, and it continues regardless of who controls the forecast.

Voters who spent previous administrations demanding trading investigations reviewed this one and found it partisan; voters who called previous investigations witch hunts found this one overdue. The two groups then exchanged scripts, as scheduled, without dropping a line.

The monument, reduced, had no comment. The stock, sources confirm, has one, and it is denominated in dollars.