Iran warned Vance about US negotiators exploiting talks for financial gain: Report
Iranian negotiators have reportedly warned US Vice President JD Vance that their American counterparts, regional envoy Steve Witkoff and US President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, were exploiting Tehran-Washington talks for financial gain.
Citing an unnamed Iranian official, investigative news outlet Drop Site News reported on Wednesday that a private message was conveyed to Vance through an intermediary during the Iran-US talks in Switzerland in late June.
Witkoff and Kushner were “abusing” the diplomatic process, “effectively disrupting the overall negotiating atmosphere,” he quoted the message as saying.
The pair were more interested in exploiting insider knowledge of the talks to profit in financial markets than they were in reaching an agreement with Iran.
The official said that Iranian negotiators also expressed concern about repeated leaks from Kushner to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In the weeks leading up to the signing of a war-ending deal, the official said, Iran presented written documentation to mediators of evidence that “individuals close to President Trump” were abusing the Iran war and diplomatic developments to manipulate financial markets.
“Even before the Islamabad talks kicked off [in April], we had already sent multiple messages to Trump through the Pakistanis, warning them about [Witkoff’s] overall destructive role in the previous negotiation,” he added.
The official said Iran calculated profits from insider trading on the war at $9 billion by June.
“During our negotiation rounds in Oman, it had become completely clear to us that this person [Witkoff] had zero connection to diplomacy or actually advancing the talks,” he noted, saying that the US's regional envoy had entirely misrepresented Iran’s positions on a range of issues.
In an X post, however, Vance denied receiving a message from Tehran, claiming that the idea Witkoff and Kushner are trading on insider information is “absurd”.
In an analysis last week, Responsible Statecraft (RS), the online magazine of the Quincy Institute, said that brokers representing Trump reportedly purchased in 2025 between $9.7 million and $24.3 million in stocks from arms manufacturers and other military contractors profiting from the illegal war of aggression against Iran.
The US and the Israeli regime waged their first criminal military assault against Iran, which lasted 12 days, in June 2025. Their second invasion began in late February and came to a halt in early April after 40 days.
In both wars, Iran's brave resistance and successful retaliatory operations forced the enemies to accept a ceasefire.
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