At an early stage of its investigation, perhaps before SEC officials were fully aware of the implications, the SEC did recommend that the FBI investigate a number of suspicious transactions. We know about this thanks to a 9/11 Commission memorandum declassified in May 2009, which summarizes an August 2003 meeting at which FBI agents briefed the Commission on the insider-trading issue. The document indicates that the SEC had passed on the information about the suspicious trading to the FBI on September 21, 2001, just ten days after the attacks.xl
Although the names in the cases are censored from the declassified document, thanks to some nice detective work by Kevin Ryan we know whom (in one case) the SEC was referring to. Ryan was able to fill in the blanks because, fortunately, the government censor was not 100% efficient, and inadvertently left enough details in the document to infer the name of the suspicious trader. His identity, it turns out, is a stunner and should have been prime-time news on every television network, world-wide.xli
The trader was none other than Wirt Walker III, a distant cousin to then-President G.W. Bush. Several days before 9/11, Walker and his wife Sally purchased 56,000 shares of stock in Stratesec, one of the companies that provided security at the World Trade Center up until the day of the attacks. Notably, Stratesec also provided security at Dulles International Airport, where AA 77 took off on 9/11, and also security for United Airlines, which owned two of the other three allegedly hijacked aircraft. At the time, Walker was a director of Stratesec. You can’t get more inside than that. Incredibly, as if this were not shocking enough, president Bush’s brother Marvin also sat on the board.