Welcome to the new age of insider trading. It’s not only for the Gordon Gekko–type Wall Street barons anymore; now it’s for the Jason Bournes, too, and potentially for everyone else. The big question moving forward is whether the Justice Department will choose to apply the law to the crooked Mayor Quimby–esque politicians who appear to be profiting the most.

Last week, the DOJ indicted Gannon Ken Van Dyke — a master sergeant with the U.S. Army Special Forces team that captured Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela in January — for insider trading and related federal crimes. In late December 2025, one week before the Maduro raid, Van Dyke allegedly opened an account on Polymarket, a leading online prediction market that enables users to place bets on anything from sports and politics to the existence of aliens (currently pegged at a mildly unsettling 20 percent likelihood by the end of 2026) and the return of Jesus Christ (trading at 4 percent).

In the days before the military operation, the indictment charges, Van Dyke placed a series of 13 Polymarket bets totalling more than $33,000 on the proposition that Maduro would be removed from power and that the United States would use military force in Venezuela by the end of January 2026. After the successful military operation, Van Dyke cashed out for more than $409,000, nearly all of which he promptly transferred to a foreign cryptocurrency wallet.

Although an insider-trading charge feels incongruous when applied to a soldier rather than a CEO, the facts seem to fit the law. The charged insider trading statute requires prosecutors to prove first that Van Dyke traded on “material, nonpublic information.” As a member of the U.S. Army’s Maduro raid team, Van Dyke surely knew about the plan in advance, and he plainly understood that that information was not only confidential but highly classified. Prosecutors also must show that Van Dyke had a “duty of trust and confidence” to protect the information. To that end, the indictment cites various documents in which Van Dyke acknowledged that he would be entrusted with classified information, and that he had a duty not to........

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