Someone provided confidential information to an external party. Trades for large gains were made before the information was made public through appropriate channels.

There is enough for an investigation. Whether it leads to criminal charges is a very different thing.

I guess my issue is that once it’s published by TechCrunch, it doesn’t feel like it’s nonpublic anymore.

If someone at TechCrunch were to trade on the information before releasing it then I guess that would probably count (and it certainly would breach whatever NDA there was). Similarly for someone who passed information on to an accomplice.

But just the article being released a bit early doesn’t really feel like insider trading (at least in the US). If a draft of the article were left in a coffee shop and someone found it and traded on it that wouldn’t be insider trading. And that situation feels a lot more nonpublic than this one. I don’t really see how TechCrunch would plan to gain from releasing their article to everyone at the same slightly early time.

Naturally it feels unfair but insider trading isn’t really about fairness in that more general sense.