Tycoon Harold Hamm is one of the US’s most successful oilmen, the son of Oklahoma sharecroppers who hit it rich as a “wildcatter” and pioneered fracking techniques that drove the shale boom in 2008 that reversed declining US oil production. Donald Trump describes him as a “long time” friend and is said to have called him his “original oil guy” behind closed doors.
The Continental Resources founder has also faced scrutiny from climate advocates and groups and some Democratic lawmakers over his influence on Trump and role in pushing him to go all in on planet-heating fossil fuels and gut climate rules.
While Hamm was a key figure behind the lifting of the 40-year-old US crude oil export ban in 2015, a lucrative move for his company, in recent years advocates have mostly tracked Hamm’s influence at home. For instance, the 80-year-old helped organize the infamous Mar-a-Lago private fundraiser in 2024 at which Trump is reported to have asked oil executives for $1bn to help him get back into the White House. Hamm has donated more than $2m to Trump’s three presidential campaigns and an untold amount to help finance his new ballroom project.
But less attention has been paid to Hamm’s hardline views on Israel, Iran and US energy markets, which Trump echoed while justifying the war on Iran he launched in February and to downplay its impact on US oil and gasoline prices.
Hamm has been warning for years that Iran poses a threat to Israel and the US, championing the importance of US oil production in the context of the Middle East, while helping strengthen US ties with Israel.
In a 2018 essay he co-wrote for the National Review, Hamm argued that “Iran perpetuates the virulent rhetoric that has fueled” antisemitism and that “Iran must pay for its constant attempts to destabilize the Middle East.”
In the essay he also predicted the US would be “capable of providing enough oil to help stabilize the global market, no matter what happens in countries such as Iran” and that “[n]o longer is it the case that the flow of oil to the United States will be stifled if the Strait of Hormuz is shut down.”
Central to Hamm’s foreign policy push has been the Council for a Secure America (CSA), a Reagan-era non-profit he relaunched in 2012 and of which he remains co-chair.
The New York City-based non-profit, which declared Iran a “looming existential threat” in its founding mission statement is made up of US oil executives, former Israeli officials and former White House officials, including an intellectual architect of the Iraq war. CSA’s founding statement also argues: “America can be energy dominant, and when that takes place, our national security will be strengthened, freeing ourselves of foreign energy dependence.”
Registered as a public charity, CSA is legally barred from devoting a substantial part of its activities to lobbying or from campaigning for a candidate. It has described its purpose as educating “key audiences on the importance of domestic energy production and technologies to American and Israeli mutual national security interests”.
The scale of this work is significant.
CSA’s annual reports show that in the 30 months between Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel and the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran, the council held at least 300 briefings with lawmakers of both parties and their staff.
CSA also held dozens of “high-level” discussions with US and Israeli security experts, and a series of “off-the-record” meetings with US and global dignitaries. Among them was Chris Wright, the former fracking CEO who became energy secretary. Public records show CSA members also met privately with Doug Burgum, then North Dakota’s governor and now Trump’s interior secretary.
Council members met with Wright or Burgum on at least four occasions in the past three years, including at a private dinner in North Dakota in May 2024 hosted by Burgum.
Public records show that Hamm, Burgum, Wright and Wright’s wife made up half of those seated at the head table at that event, where guests dined on walleye cakes, a beef entree and peach cobbler, and drank alcohol supplied by Ron Ness, the president of a North Dakota oil group and a CSA partner. At least three other CSA members were also in attendance.
Wright’s last known meeting with CSA occurred at the Argentinian embassy in Washington DC in May 2025.
CSA did not dispute the details of this investigation or answer specific questions about its work. “CSA does not lobby for or against military actions,” its executive director, Jennifer Sutton, said in a statement provided by an outside communications firm. “CSA’s mission is to educate on the strategic importance of US energy security, including its role in strengthening domestic economic stability, reinforcing national security, and advancing peaceful geopolitical outcomes through economic prosperity.”
Public-interest advocates who have tracked Hamm say he has played a major role in Trump’s energy policy dating back to his first campaign. “Harold Hamm very publicly emerged as the oil whisperer in Trump’s ear on all things energy policy,” Tyson Slocum, energy director at Public Citizen, told the Guardian. “Hamm speaks a language Trump understands and he shares his general worldview. And I think at the end of the day, that has helped move Trump to places and positions that – if Hamm wasn’t here – Trump wouldn’t have ended up in.”
Among Hamm’s recent policy victories was the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision earlier this year to revoke the scientific finding on which nearly all climate rules rest – a move Hamm’s oil trade group, the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance, pushed for even as other oil and gas power players expressed second thoughts about the repeal, which might affect their efforts to quash climate lawsuits.
Since Trump returned to power Hamm has made at least two known trips to the Oval Office.
In January, Hamm took part in a roundtable of US oil leaders following the military action Trump ordered in Venezuela that toppled Nicolás Maduro. At the meeting Trump called Hamm an “amazing energy person” and asked him if there was truth to a story that “he can look at a piece of land, put a straw into the land and oil pours out”.
Hamm has backed Trump’s intervention in Venezuela – but the oil billionaire, and CSA, has been more focused on Iran and the Middle East.
Following Hamas’s 2023 attacks, CSA began issuing “War Reports” that highlighted Iran’s ties to Hamas and Hezbollah and warned that Iran’s proxies might commit acts of terrorism on US soil. In 2024, CSA began commissioning polls in red states showing support from “American voters” for “US military engagement in the region”. After the US and Israel bombed Iran in June 2025, CSA’s executive director declared the conflict “a defining test of Western resolve in the face of authoritarian aggression”.
A self-described “alliance between the American oil and gas industry and the pro-Israel community”, CSA members include the American Petroleum Institute senior vice-president, Dustin Meyer, an intellectual Iraq war architect and longtime GOP national security adviser Elliott Abrams, former Trump secretary of state Mike Pompeo, former Democratic US senator Evan Bayh and Yossi Kuperwasser, an Israeli reserve brigadier general who previously led research for his country’s military intelligence.
Hamm rebooted CSA in 2012 after it had fallen dormant having successfully protected federal drilling tax breaks in the 1980s. It quickly began taking oil executives on trips to Israel to meet with government officials. During one such trip, in February 2013, Hamm and his group visited the Western Wall, toured a military base, and met with the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, as documented by local reporters and photographs previously hosted on the CSA website.
CSA has also cultivated an informal roster of what it calls “CSA friends” and “CSA family”, four of whom serve in the current Trump administration, including Wright.
Wright and Burgum are longtime allies of Hamm, who has hailed their roles as Trump’s top energy advisers as “a dream team of unimaginable proportions”. Before the war, both Burgum and Wright echoed Hamm’s prediction it would not have an impact on US energy prices.
Speaking at a DC thinktank in fall 2025, Burgum recounted how Trump asked before launching strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities that summer what impact they would have on US energy. “You know what the advisers had an opportunity to say?” Burgum said. “‘Nothing.’ Nothing at all. It’s not going to change the price of the pump, because guess what? The US, we don’t get any oil any more out of the strait of Hormuz.”
Trump struck the same note after starting the war in February, declaring, “We don’t use the strait – the United States, we don’t need it.”
The White House declined to comment on the record about whether Hamm ever spoke directly with Trump about Iran but said that the president was “the final decision-maker” and “has been remarkably consistent for years [that] Iran can never be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon”.
“President Trump makes all policy decisions based on what is best for the American people – which includes unleashing American energy dominance to lower prices for Americans and strengthen our country’s national security,” spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a written statement. “The media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible and reinforce the public’s distrust in what they read.”
In January, as US oil prices neared post-pandemic lows, Hamm announced his company would stop drilling new wells in North Dakota. It would be the first time this century that Hamm would not have an active rig in the state where he had made his fortune. “There’s no need to drill it when margins are basically gone,” he said.
But Hamm soon changed his mind. He announced in May that Continental would instead boost spending to capitalize on rising energy prices. It was the first time a US oil company declared publicly that it would increase production because of the war. “We’re not giving it away now,” Hamm said as US crude hovered around $100 per barrel, up more than 60% on the year.
Oil prices briefly returned to pre-war levels in the wake of last month’s temporary US-Iranian truce, but then rose again after both sides continued to exchange military strikes. The war has already had a significant economic impact in the US. Americans have paid an additional $67bn and counting for fuel because of it, Brown University researchers estimate, while US oil companies have reported windfall profits this year.
The reason US oil prices have moved largely in line with global ones since the war began is because US oil is sold on the global market, experts say. “You cannot extricate the US from the global petroleum economy,” Michael Klare, a Five Colleges professor emeritus who has written extensively about oil and US foreign policy, told the Guardian.
“If there’s a severing of oil to the rest of the world, even if the US still has plenty, it has consequences that blow back on to the US with higher prices [at home], as well as strategic consequences for US allies.”
Hamm’s critics say he should be well aware of that given his role in lifting the ban on US oil exports. “‘Energy dominance’ never actually meant cheaper prices for American consumers – it meant giving Harold Hamm more oil to export to foreign countries,” Aaron Weiss, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities, said.
“And the Iran war has finally laid that lie bare in a way that Donald Trump cannot explain.”
Continental did not respond to a request for comment.
Hamm has said that he was unbothered by the price spikes and expressed indifference toward Americans who paid more at the pump. “I really don’t feel bad,” he said in May. “These folks are driving down the road with the $80,000 F-150 and we’re at about $4 gas.”
Hamm, whose estimated net worth is $20bn, added: “It’s all relative.”
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This story is in partnership with Fieldnotes, an investigative non-profit focused on the oil and gas industry, which has published a longer version.
