1. United States
2. Ariz.
3. Letter

Congress must immediately investigate the suspicious oil futures trade that occurred minutes before President Trump's Iran policy announcement on Monday. Between 6:49 and 6:50 a.m., someone purchased 6,200 oil futures contracts worth $580 million. Twenty-four minutes later, Trump announced he was holding off on bombing Iran's oil fields. Brent crude prices then plummeted from $113 to $96 per barrel, generating massive profits for whoever made that trade. A trader with 25 years of experience at a major hedge fund called this trade "really abnormal" and noted it was "an unusually large trade for a day with no event risk." This wasn't luck. Someone with advance knowledge of a presidential announcement appears to have profited illegally from that information. This demands a full congressional investigation with subpoena power. We need to know who made this trade, who leaked the information, and how many other policy announcements have been exploited for profit. If administration officials are feeding classified information to traders, that's not just insider trading. It's corruption at the highest level that undermines public trust and enriches the connected at everyone else's expense.