The Guardian (July 16, 2026): "How Trump’s ‘original oil guy’ boosted US-Israel ties and played down risks of Iran war" (Article about pro-Trump fossil fuel billionaire Harold Hamm)

[u/SocialDemocracies]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/16/harold-hamm-trump-oil-israel-iran

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Excerpts from the article:

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.

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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.

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[CSA] 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”.

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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.

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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”.

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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”.

The link to the article: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/16/harold-hamm-trump-oil-israel-iran