Senate Democrats called Tuesday for federal regulators to look into the possibility of insider trading by Carl Icahn, the billionaire investor and outside adviser to President Trump.
Eight Democrats called on the Environmental Protection Agency and the two agencies that regulate financial markets to investigate whether Icahn used his influence within the Trump administration to reap profits in the market for renewable fuel credits, writing that “the publicly available evidence is troubling.”
Icahn has faced criticism that his unusual outside adviser arrangement with the administration falls afoul of lobbying rules. In March confirmation hearings for Jay Clayton, now the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., first tried to get Clayton to commit to investigating Icahn’s trades.
Now Warren and seven colleagues want the SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission to join the EPA in probing Icahn’s trades related to renewable fuel credits. Icahn owns CVR Energy, a refiner that is in the market for credits, and in 2016 he bet against the price of the credits. Subsequent actions by the Trump administration served to push prices down, leading the senators to question whether Icahn influenced the administration’s policy or if he had inside knowledge of how policy would be shaped.
For his part, Icahn has called the accusation that he has illicitly lobbied the administration on the credits a “witch hunt.”
