It also sounds like the FBI drove the investigation more than the SEC, I suspect because the embargoes in question are with departments of the federal government. Hypothesizing about the motives for the leak, my take is a combination of CYA (“we’re aware of this and being thorough”) and a not so subtle warning to Bloomberg, Reuters, and Dow Jones that they better toe the line.

Imagine the uproar if it did emerge that a few selected organizations were routinely gaming the embargo system to provide government economic reports to their data feed subscribers before the general release – even by a few seconds. I can write the summary of the Gretchen Morgenson column or Jesse Eisinger article: “All taxpayers fund the Labor Department to gather statistics about the U.S. economy. Hedge funds and investment banks then pay data providers for early access to get an edge over small investors.”

You need to dig deeper into insider-trading law, Felix.

An embargo agreement between a source and journalistic organization might create a duty on the journalistic organization to not leak or profit from that information contrary to the embargo agreement. If that information is, in fact, MNPI, and the journalists sell that information to third parties in violation (even for 2 seconds) of the duties created by that embargo agreement, that a lot of courts would call that insider trading.

I don’t think it’s as simple as you think it is.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insider_tr ading#Misappropriation_theory , and United States v. Carpenter, where a journalist was convicted of insider trading for profiting on information he received for a column he wrote, even though he wasn’t an insider at the company in question, and had no direct fiduciary or other duties to the company in question.