Approximately 6,200 oil futures contracts worth $580 million traded between 6:49 and 6:50 a.m. on March 24, 2026. Fifteen minutes later, Trump posted on Truth Social announcing “productive” talks with Iran and postponing his threatened strikes for five days. Oil prices fell sharply after the announcement.
A portfolio manager told the Financial Times: “My gut from watching markets for 25 years is this is really abnormal. Somebody just got a lot richer.” Trump's post contained typos (“I AM PLEASE TO REPORT”). Iran's foreign ministry denied negotiations were happening.
The White House scrambled to downplay the allegations. Spokesperson Kush Desai called them “baseless and irresponsible” while insisting the administration “does not tolerate any administration official illegally profiteering off of insider knowledge.” White House counsel David Warrington told Axios the president has “no involvement in business deals that would implicate his constitutional responsibilities.”
But the oil futures trade was not an isolated incident. The Daily Beast documented a pattern: on January 2, 2026, an anonymous Polymarket bet converted $32,000 into over $400,000 on Nicolas Maduro's capture. On April 9, 2025, multi-million-dollar options bets preceded Trump's tariff pause announcement. Over 150 Polymarket accounts placed four-figure bets predicting U.S. strikes on Iran before operations occurred.
Meanwhile, the agencies that would investigate such trading have been gutted. The DOJ Public Integrity Section has been reduced from 36 to just 2 full-time lawyers. The SEC enforcement chief recently resigned after clashing over Trump-related cases. And 159 enforcement actions have been frozen against 166 companies with administration ties. Someone is profiting from advance knowledge of presidential decisions, and the people whose job it is to investigate have been fired or sidelined.