By Sharon Zhang
This article was originally published by Truthout
The incident raises alarm over officials’ moves to insulate insiders from anti-corruption enforcement.
A Trump administration official intervened against an insider trading investigation into suspiciously timed oil sales made just minutes before a critical announcement by President Donald Trump related to the Iran war this March, new reporting finds.
Analysts within the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the federal government’s regulator against abuses in derivatives markets, had made a referral to the agency’s Division of Enforcement on a series of advantageous large-volume trades made on March 23, Bloomberg reported this week.
These trades were highly profitable. That day, Trump announced that he was backing off, for now, on his threats to strike Iranian power plants — a move that would drastically escalate the war and undoubtedly cause Iran to double down on their closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Just 15 minutes before Trump’s announcement, traders made billions of dollars’ worth of transactions predicting that oil would fall and the S&P 500 would rise. These bets paid off nearly immediately.
CFTC workers in the Division of Enforcement are typically responsible for determining whether the agency would launch a full insider trading investigation that could potentially lead to an enforcement action. But, breaking with precedent, an official within the agency told the Division of Market Oversight to retract the referral. Instead, the official — Mel Gunewardena, a top adviser for Trump-appointed CFTC chair Michael Selig — said that further investigation into the incident would be done under his purview.
The incident, reported by Bloomberg on Wednesday, raises concerns about Trump administration insiders using non-public knowledge to make trades related to the Iran war. It also raises questions about whether the administration is installing Trump-friendly figures within agency watchdog roles in order to grant impunity for illegal activities like insider trading.
The trades were among a few of numerous well-timed trades made in March and April that agency officials have flagged, with a particular focus on the March 23 transactions. Analysts scrutinized those trades in particular because, in just two minutes, traders sold 8.5 times the volume of oil that had been traded in the same time over the prior week.
The forensic analysts are still looking into the trades, but they are siloed off from the rest of the agency as a result of Gunewardena’s intervention, Bloomberg found; the supervisor who Gunewardena ordered to retract the referral left the agency, and other members of that team resigned or were reassigned. Instead, Gunewardena “assembled his own team to conduct a new analysis of the trading,” the publication found.
The incident is another instance of the Trump administration’s interference in the CFTC’s regulatory role. The agency only carried out 13 enforcement actions in fiscal year 2025 — a major decline from 58 actions in 2024 and 96 in 2023.
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