The $2.6 Billion Heist: DOJ Probes "Impossible" Oil Trades Linked to Trump’s Iran Leaks
Federal authorities are probing whether traders with advance knowledge of classified White House decisions made massive bets on falling oil prices and won, repeatedly.
The U.S. Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into a series of strikingly well-timed oil market trades that generated billions of dollars in profits in the moments before major announcements by President Trump about the war in Iran, sources told ABC News Wednesday.
The DOJ, alongside the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, is probing at least four trades in which traders collectively bet more than $2.6 billion that oil prices would fall, right before they did. The pattern, repeated across nearly a month of geopolitical announcements, has alarmed federal regulators, market experts, and lawmakers who say the timing defies any innocent explanation.
Neither the DOJ nor the CFTC has publicly commented. No individuals or entities have been charged, and no one has been publicly named.
The Trades: A Timeline
ABC News obtained data on the four trades from the London Stock Exchange Group. The sequence reads less like coincidence than like a script:
On March 23, fifteen minutes before Trump announced on Truth Social that he would delay threatened strikes on Iran's power grid, traders placed more than $500 million in bets that oil prices would fall. Between 6:49 a.m. and 6:50 a.m. that morning, approximately 6,200 Brent and West Texas Intermediate futures contracts changed hands, trading volume that was roughly nine times the average for that hour. Oil prices tumbled sharply when the announcement landed minutes later.
On April 7, in the hours before Trump announced a two-week ceasefire with Iran, a move that sent oil prices plunging approximately 15%, traders placed a bet estimated at around $950 million on falling crude prices.
On April 17, roughly twenty minutes before Iran's Foreign Minister posted that the Strait of Hormuz would remain open, another $760 million trade was placed anticipating a price drop. And on April 21, approximately fifteen minutes before Trump announced an extension of the ceasefire, traders placed a further $430 million bet on falling oil.
The Investigation
The CFTC is leading the probe into trading of oil futures contracts on platforms belonging to CME Group and Intercontinental Exchange, with both exchanges asked to hand over data.
"Nothing is more important than market integrity," a CME spokesperson told CNBC, adding that "any review of market behavior must include all venues, including prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi that list related products with little to no visibility."
Investigators are focused on a central question: did whoever placed these trades have advance, non-public knowledge of presidential decisions — information that, if leaked, would constitute one of the most serious cases of government insider trading in American history?
"The massive spike in volume of trades right before that post is certainly enough to raise eyebrows, and I think to launch an investigation into what was behind that," said Stephen Piepgrass, a partner specializing in futures trading at the law firm Troutman Pepper Locke.
Political Firestorm
The investigation has ignited fierce debate in Washington. Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Sheldon Whitehouse prompted early scrutiny in a letter to CFTC Chairman Michael Selig, highlighting what they described as a recurring pattern of suspiciously prescient trades during the Trump administration — not only in oil futures but also in equity options and prediction markets ahead of significant policy decisions.
Congressman Ritchie Torres called the activity "highly unusual and suspicious," arguing that "the integrity of U.S. financial markets depends on the principle that no market participant trades on material nonpublic information."
Torres also noted that the agencies tasked with policing such conduct have been significantly weakened, the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, created after Watergate to prosecute corrupt officials, has been reduced from 36 lawyers to two.
The White House pushed back firmly. "Any implication that administration officials are engaged in such activity without evidence is baseless and irresponsible reporting," spokesman Kush Desai told CBS News. White House counsel David Warrington added: "The President has no involvement in business deals that would implicate his constitutional responsibilities."
Core reporting has not alleged any direct links to Trump or his family, the focus remains on unknown traders who appeared to anticipate the announcements.
A Pattern Bigger Than One Probe
This is not the first time anomalous trading has surrounded major Trump announcements. Similar irregularities were flagged ahead of Trump's Liberation Day tariff pause in April 2025 and U.S. military action in Venezuela earlier this year.
Amid mounting concern, the CFTC recently launched a proposed rulemaking process focusing in part on what actions prediction markets should take to prevent insider trading, a process that experts say could have broad implications for commodity markets as well.
The investigation is in its early stages. Subpoenas have been issued, data is being reviewed, and no charges are imminent. But the scale of what is being examined, billions of dollars, four separate trades, a month-long pattern tied directly to classified government decisions, means the pressure on federal authorities to produce answers will only grow.