The White House warned staff against using confidential information to place bets in futures markets after suspicious oil trades ahead of President Donald Trump’s March 23 Iran announcement, Reuters reported.
According to Reuters, an internal White House email was sent on March 24, a day after Trump ordered a five-day delay in attacks on Iran’s energy infrastructure. The warning followed a roughly $500 million bet on Brent and West Texas Intermediate crude futures placed in a one-minute burst shortly before Trump’s announcement, based on Reuters calculations from exchange data. Oil prices fell about 15% after the policy shift.
The episode intensified scrutiny over whether officials or politically connected traders profited from nonpublic information tied to military or policy decisions and has added momentum to efforts in Washington to tighten rules around prediction-market trading. An amendment to the Commodity Exchange Act—the STOCK Act amendment—prohibits federal officials, members of Congress, executive staff and judicial officers from using non-public information derived from their positions to trade commodity, futures or options markets. That amendment was signed into law on April 4, 2012.
Cointelegraph has approached the White House for a copy of the internal email.
Lawmakers have also increased scrutiny of prediction markets after well-timed bets tied to military and political events raised similar insider-trading concerns. Polymarket traders reportedly netted around $1 million by correctly betting on when the US would strike Iran.
In response, Representative Adrian Smith and Representative Nikki Budzinski introduced the bipartisan Preventing Real-time Exploitation and Deceptive Insider Congressional Trading Act (PREDICT Act) on March 25, aiming to ban members of Congress and federal officials from prediction market trading. On March 26, Representatives Todd Young, Elissa Slotkin, John Curtis and Adam Schiff unveiled the bipartisan Public Integrity in Financial Prediction Markets Act of 2026 to curb insider trading by government officials in prediction markets. That same day, Senator Jeff Merkley introduced the End Prediction Market Corruption Act to ban event-contract trading by government officials with “material non-public information,” including the president, vice president and members of Congress.
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