After Bloomberg reported that a senior adviser to the chairman of the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission intervened in an oil insider-trading investigation, social media quickly turned to a familiar accusation: that well-connected traders may have used political access and derivatives positions to keep oil prices down.
Protos cited oil analyst Paul Sankey as saying that either the administration was leaking information or “somebody very close to the administration is insider trading.” Tim Skirrow, head of derivatives at Energy Aspects, offered a similar view, saying that “either someone got very lucky or knew something.”
The article also quoted a respondent to a Dallas Fed survey who argued that the oil paper market was being manipulated. In that comment, the respondent said the US Oil Fund ETF was up 151% year to date since before the war in Iran, yet should be much higher in the view of many skeptics. The respondent asked why oil was not at $200 and answered that “someone” kept dumping oil futures all night while the CFTC refused to investigate. The same comment added that even when insider trading appeared obvious, the agency had been told to “back off,” and did.
A withdrawn referral tied to trades placed before Trump changed course
The core development was Bloomberg’s report that Mel Gunewardena, a senior adviser to CFTC Chairman Michael Selig, told a CFTC supervisor to retract an insider-trading referral tied to oil futures. Selig was appointed by Donald Trump.
According to Protos, the referral covered oil bets placed minutes before Trump backed away from threats to strike Iran’s power plants on March 23. That presidential reversal had an immediate effect on oil prices and, the report said, delivered a profitable windfall to the suspicious traders within minutes.
More specifically, those traders had sold oil futures contracts representing more than 6 million barrels just before Brent contracts fell by as much as 14%.
Aitan Goelman, who served as the CFTC’s enforcement director until February 2017, said interventions of that kind weigh on staff trying to move legitimate enforcement actions against bad actors forward. “The rug can get pulled out from under them,” Goelman said, describing the effect of orders coming from above.
Truth Social API access and Trump trading activity also drew attention
Protos also pointed to the parent company of Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, saying it openly encourages active trading around Trump’s geopolitical statements. Access to the Truth API costs between $60,000 and $100,000 per month, according to the article. That feed delivers Trump’s posts early and is aimed at high-frequency traders.
The report added that Trump also has investment accounts that trade actively. Bloomberg counted nearly 28,700 trades by Trump or his money managers from 2025 through the first half of 2026. That was higher than the combined 22,200 trades recorded for all members of Congress over the same period.
There are also non-CFTC explanations for moderate oil prices
Even with the political and regulatory questions hanging over the story, Protos said there are several fundamental reasons oil may have remained in a relatively moderate range. The article cited Lakshmi Sreekumar, a former Capital One institutional analyst who sits on the Energy Advisory Council for the Dallas office of the Federal Reserve, as one of the most widely referenced voices explaining why oil stayed calm during a period of historic military action.
Her explanation did not mention covert futures selling or intervention in insider-trading enforcement. Instead, she attributed 37% of the re-routing around the Strait of Hormuz to pipelines, 33% to lower absolute oil demand, especially in China, 11% to inventory releases including strategic petroleum reserves, and 19% to tankers moving through Hormuz under special guard or with transponders switched off.
Sreekumar also said the drop in demand reached about 8 million barrels a day at its peak, led by cuts in Chinese consumption. Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, she said, can redirect 5 million to 7 million barrels a day depending on capacity at Yanbu port. Crude that would otherwise move through Hormuz can also detour toward Asia through the Bab el-Mandeb strait, or pass through the Strait of Gibraltar and then around the southern cape of Africa to reach Asian buyers.
She summed it up this way: “And that, my friends, is why oil prices are not $250.” In her account, the explanation was a global rebalancing of flows around Hormuz, driven by modestly elevated barrel prices, not a protected derivatives trader operating under the Trump administration.