STILLWATER, Okla. — March 17, 2026 (The Oklahoma Post)
There is a certain quality to Washington’s institutional memory. It forgets everything inconvenient, remembers nothing useful and yet somehow always manages to find its way back to the same donors. On Tuesday morning, Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, became the first senior Trump administration official to resign over the war in Iran. He said Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States and that the conflict started because of pressure from Israel and its “powerful American lobby.” This is notable for several reasons, but perhaps most notable because Kent was one of the president’s own people, a Gold Star widower who deployed to combat 11 times, confirmed by a Republican Senate, writing a letter to the president from inside the government he served. He is not a member of the resistance. He is not a Democrat. He watched his wife Shannon die in what he called a war manufactured by Israel, and he is telling the president to his face that it is happening again.
While Kent was writing that letter Tuesday morning, urea prices at the Port of New Orleans stood roughly 32 percent above where they were on Feb. 27, the day before U.S. and Israeli forces struck Iran. Anhydrous ammonia, the nitrogen fertilizer that Oklahoma corn and wheat farmers cannot grow without, has jumped from roughly $850 per ton in mid-February to over $1,050 per ton. Oklahoma Farm Bureau President Stacy Simunek told reporters this week that farmers who have not already purchased fertilizer for spring cannot get delivery until April 1, which puts many past the application window entirely. Gas prices have surged 74 cents per gallon since Feb. 28, the largest monthly increase since Hurricane Katrina.
Someone is absorbing those price increases. Someone else is collecting them.
The Heritage Foundation and the Architecture of This War
The intellectual infrastructure for this conflict was not assembled last month. In May 2018, then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered his first major Iran policy address. He did not deliver it at the State Department, the National Press Club or the Council on Foreign Relations. He delivered it at the Heritage Foundation, Washington’s most prominent conservative think tank, where Heritage President Kay Coles James introduced him as a man who had “come home,” noting that Pompeo had spoken there as a congressman back in 2015. The 12-point ultimatum Pompeo laid out that day demanding Iran dismantle its nuclear program, end its ballistic missile development, withdraw from Syria and cease support for proxy forces; became the policy backbone of “maximum pressure.” It is also the framework this administration resumed upon taking office and escalated through June 2025, when U.S. and Israeli forces struck three Iranian nuclear facilities in Operation Midnight Hammer, and then again on Feb. 28 in what Heritage analysts have since branded Operation Epic Fury.
The Heritage Foundation’s influence on the current national security apparatus extends beyond think tank commentary. John Ratcliffe, now CIA Director, was a contributor to Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, the 922-page Heritage led blueprint for the second Trump administration. The intelligence community chapter of that document was authored by Dustin Carmack, Ratcliffe’s own former chief of staff, and cites a direct interview with Ratcliffe in which he criticized previous intelligence directors for “yielding to the preferences of the CIA and other agencies.” Ratcliffe now runs the agency he was quoted criticizing. At the Department of Homeland Security, Thomas Fugate, a 22-year-old former Heritage Foundation intern and Trump campaign worker, was appointed in 2025 to lead the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, the office responsible for nationwide counterterrorism and violence prevention efforts. ProPublica reported that counterterrorism professionals were alarmed by the appointment, with one longtime official calling the situation “reckless,” and that the office had been reduced from roughly 80 employees to fewer than 20 under the new administration. The man now heading the country’s domestic terrorism prevention infrastructure was, not long ago, an intern at the same institution whose Iran war framework Mike Pompeo unveiled in its auditorium in 2018.
Heritage has not been quiet about the war. Victoria Coates, the foundation’s vice president for national security, appeared on CNBC in February to argue the Iranian regime was “more desperate than ever,” and published a commentary on March 12 titled “All 4 Iran War Assumptions Dead Wrong” arguing that critics had misjudged the operation at every turn. Heritage visiting fellow Asher Fredman published “Operation Epic Fury Is Peace Through Strength in Action” on March 9, and followed it the next day with a piece arguing that a post-regime Iran, with the world’s third-largest oil reserves and second-largest natural gas reserves, could become a major U.S. energy partner.
The Heritage Foundation, according to a November 2017 analysis by Public Citizen, is connected to the State Policy Network, a Koch-funded constellation of conservative think tanks. The report placed Heritage at the edge of the Koch ecosystem rather than the inner circle, but the broader network overlap is documented.
What is not in dispute is that Pompeo himself maintained extensive ties to Koch Industries throughout his congressional career. Public Citizen’s report described him as the “Koch Brothers’ Congressman” and documented that Koch Industries invested in his firm Thayer Aerospace, that his company Sentry International partnered with Koch Industries through a Brazilian distributor and that Koch’s political action committee contributed to his campaigns. A 2016 High Country News analysis similarly documented those ties.
Pompeo: Where He Is Now and What He Is Saying
Pompeo was excluded from the second Trump administration. Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. played key roles in that outcome, with Carlson calling him a warmonger. Trump revoked Pompeo’s security detail on Jan. 22, 2025. He has since been named of counsel at Torridon Law, the firm co-founded by former attorneys general Bill Barr and Pat Cipollone. He co-founded Niobrara Investment Partners, a private equity firm. He was named senior executive director of Liberty University’s Center for Law and Government in October 2025. He joined an advisory board for Fire Point, a Ukrainian defense drone company. He writes for Fox News and appears regularly on television.
On Feb. 7, 2026, three weeks before the strikes on Iran began, Pompeo spoke at a “Free Iran” rally at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, declaring Iran had reached a “hinge point” and endorsing the National Council of Resistance of Iran as a democratic alternative to the current government. Days after Operation Epic Fury commenced, he published a Fox News op-ed calling the war “just and imperative” and endorsing full regime change: the Islamic Republic is “an entirely irredeemable governing entity” and “there will be no chance for peace or stability in the region until the ayatollah and his entire rotten regime are gone for good.”
The man who designed the policy framework for confronting Iran at the Heritage Foundation in 2018, who received campaign contributions from Koch Industries throughout his congressional career, is now a private citizen and Fox News contributor cheering for the war he helped architect, from a law firm, while Koch Industries’ two largest industrial subsidiaries are positioned to collect the windfall.
Pompeo joined USA Rare Earth as a Strategic Advisor in February 2023, per the company’s own PR Newswire announcement.
Koch Fertilizer: The Enid Connection, Epstein, and the Nitrogen Windfall
Koch Ag and Energy Solutions, doing business as Koch Fertilizer, is one of the world’s largest producers and marketers of fertilizer products, capable of marketing more than 13 million tons annually. Its flagship domestic production hub sits in Enid, Oklahoma, where the company has invested more than $1.5 billion since 2016 in a facility capable of supplying up to 1.8 million tons of ammonia upgrade products per year. That facility is 90 minutes from Oklahoma City. In August 2024, Koch Fertilizer completed a $3.6 billion acquisition of OCI Global’s Wever, Iowa facility, one of the largest nitrogen fertilizer plants in the world, adding 3.5 million metric tons of annual production capacity. Iowa lawmakers urged the Justice Department to block the deal, arguing Koch would control 75 percent of the U.S. nitrogen fertilizer market alongside three other firms. The DOJ allowed it to proceed.
Roughly one-third of global seaborne fertilizer trade passes through the Strait of Hormuz, including nearly 50 percent of global urea exports. Since the strikes on Iran began, QatarEnergy has declared force majeure on LNG exports. SABIC Agri-Nutrients and Industries Qatar have halted production. At least 21 ships carrying nearly a million metric tons of fertilizer are stranded in the Gulf. Urea prices at the New Orleans import hub jumped from $516 per metric ton on Feb. 27 to $683 on March 5, according to CSIS. Fitch Ratings senior director Guillaume Daguerre told The National that a protracted Hormuz closure “will have a significant impact on the fertilizer market, especially the nitrogen fertilizer market, which is a lot more reliant on the region.” CRU analyst Chris Lawson has said prices “could roughly double if the war drags on.”
North American nitrogen producers using cheap domestic natural gas face none of the supply disruption and all of the price upside. Jefferies upgraded Nutrien to Buy this month, citing exactly that structural position. Koch Fertilizer, the largest private nitrogen producer in the country, occupies an identical position. Because Koch, Inc. is privately held, no public earnings data exists. No statement from Koch Fertilizer or Koch Ag and Energy Solutions about the war’s market impact was located. The company does not report financial results publicly.
Oklahoma farmers are not in an identical position. “We cannot grow without it,” Simunek told a Nexstar reporter this week. “There is absolutely no way you get around it.”
The Epstein Files and a Name in a Black Book
The Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law Nov. 19, 2025, has resulted in more than 3.5 million pages of DOJ documents being released, along with 2,000 videos and 180,000 images. The release has led to resignations, criminal investigations and, in the case of former Prince Andrew, the stripping of royal titles.
David Koch, who died in 2019, appears on page 31 of Epstein’s personal contact directory, with two phone numbers listed. That directory, first made public in 2015, contains approximately 1,700 names. Koch’s name was not among the roughly 50 circled by former Epstein house manager Alfredo Rodriguez as potential material witnesses to Epstein’s crimes. So? We do know Charles Koch went to great lengths to cover up his own involvement. According to a search of available DOJ documents, Koch’s name appears in approximately 13 documents in the 2026 release. The nature of those references is not fully characterized in available reporting.. The late Koch and Epstein shared the Palm Beach social circuit; being in the same contact book as 1,700 other people is a different thing than being implicated…but, we do know that Charles Koch will lie to a sitting Federal Judge, so why would the little old man be truthful about his minor on Epstein island and his social connections that are making him wealthy at this time.
The accountability question this raises is narrower than it may appear. The institutions that shaped the political conditions for this war and the institutions that will benefit financially from it share personnel, funding networks and decades of common infrastructure.
What the Epstein files also expose is a factual error embedded in how the Koch network has been discussed publicly for years. Charles and David Koch were not estranged from each other. They were the closest pair in the family. The estrangement ran the other direction entirely: Charles and David on one side, brothers William and Frederick on the other. In 1983, Charles and David purchased William’s and Frederick’s interests in Koch Industries for $1.1 billion and ran the company together as co-majority owners for nearly 35 years, until David retired due to illness in 2018. They built one of the largest private companies in American history, side by side, out of Wichita. Federal and foreign investigators have had access to Epstein materials longer than the public has. The released files are not the complete picture. What has emerged publicly confirms David Koch’s presence in Epstein’s network. What has not been released publicly may say considerably more.
The argument that Charles Koch would be unaware of what was in his brother’s contact directory is difficult to sustain. These were not distant relatives sharing a last name. They were co-majority owners of a $100 billion enterprise who coordinated its political, legal and financial operations together for decades. The same organizational infrastructure that built Americans for Prosperity, funded the Heritage Foundation and placed operatives throughout two Republican administrations was built and maintained jointly. Organizations do not develop the kind of sustained, multi-decade political presence that the Koch network has assembled without institutional knowledge of what they are protecting. The Heritage Foundation does not publish commentary branding every U.S. military strike on Iran “peace through strength in action” because it has an abstract ideological commitment to the phrase. Koch Fertilizer and Flint Hills Resources are, at this moment, positioned to record some of the most profitable quarters in their histories.
The Kochs pollute everything they touch, and they have touched a great deal. Koch Industries has paid hundreds of millions in environmental penalties across multiple states, fought process service across jurisdictions and built a political apparatus specifically designed to insulate the company from the regulatory consequences of its industrial footprint. The Heritage Foundation is part of that apparatus. So is the pipeline of personnel that runs from Heritage’s Davis Institute for National Security through the CIA directorship and into a 22-year-old intern’s appointment to run domestic counterterrorism. The war in Iran is profitable. The think tank that branded it Operation Epic Fury is funded by the network that profits from it. The people now running the intelligence apparatus that shapes how the war is understood were trained, vetted and placed by the same institutional machine. That is not a coincidence to be explained away.
Flint Hills Resources: Refinery Margins and the Price at the Pump
Flint Hills Resources, Koch’s refining subsidiary, operates more than 700,000 barrels per day of refining capacity across facilities in Rosemount, Minnesota and Corpus Christi, Texas. The Pine Bend Refinery in Rosemount alone processes 375,000 barrels per day, making it the 14th largest refinery in the United States. Koch has invested more than $9 billion in Flint Hills capital projects and acquisitions since 2002.
The refinery business does not work the way most people assume. Refiners do not simply buy crude and sell it at a fixed markup. They profit on the “crack spread,” the margin between the cost of crude oil and the price of refined products. When Middle East refining capacity is damaged and global oil prices rise faster than domestic crude prices, that margin widens dramatically. The 3-2-1 crack spread, which was roughly $20 per barrel before the conflict, has approached $40 per barrel since the strikes began. U.S. crude from the Permian Basin, Alberta and the Bakken, which feeds Flint Hills’ facilities, has not risen as steeply as Brent crude, giving domestic refiners a purchasing advantage on top of the margin expansion.
Analyst commentary has been unambiguous. “The Iran war is likely to reshuffle the earnings landscape for Corporate America in 2026,” Benzinga wrote on March 12. “A sustained military conflict in the Middle East could trigger a windfall of an entirely different kind: a historic boom for America’s oil refiners.” NPR reports that gasoline prices have been rising every day this month and are now at their highest level since October 2023. Diesel has gained $1.24 since Feb. 28.
Flint Hills processes more than 700,000 barrels per day. At a $40 crack spread, the implied gross margin approaches $28 million per day, or roughly $10 billion annualized. The company does not report these figures. No statement from Flint Hills about the conflict was located.
USA Rare Earth: The Oklahoma Taxpayer’s Ongoing Investment in a Company With Zero Revenue
This publication has been tracking USA Rare Earth since before its SPAC merger with Inflection Point Acquisition Corp. II closed on March 13, 2025. The company’s 310,000-square-foot facility in Stillwater houses the only sintered neodymium magnet manufacturing equipment in the Western Hemisphere, purchased from Hitachi in 2020. In January 2025, the company produced its first batch of sintered permanent magnets in its Innovations Lab. Commercial production has not yet begun. The company has generated zero revenue after five years of promises. A TIF development deadline of March 31, 2026 is approaching, with $7 million in local taxpayer investment and $1.2 million in state subsidies subject to clawback provisions.
On Jan. 26, 2026, USAR announced a letter of intent with the U.S. government for $1.6 billion in funding. On Jan. 29, 2026, it closed a $1.5 billion PIPE financing with Cantor Fitzgerald as lead placement agent. Democratic senators sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Feb. 25 noting that Cantor Fitzgerald, now run by Lutnick’s sons Brandon and Kyle after he transferred his stake through family trusts, profited as placement agent on the PIPE that was required to unlock Commerce Department funding Lutnick’s own agency issued. We have reported on this conflict of interest in detail.
The Iran war has amplified the rare earth narrative considerably. The South China Morning Post, citing anonymous sources, reported last week that the U.S. has roughly two months of rare earth inventory for military purposes, and that China’s leverage over those supplies would dominate Trump’s scheduled April meeting with Xi Jinping. Rare earth elements are essential for missile guidance systems, fighter aircraft and radar technology. Iran itself sits on significant rare earth deposits in Yazd Province, which complicates the strategic picture further. A company with a Stillwater magnet facility and West Texas mining rights is a better story in a rare earth supply crisis than a company with a Stillwater magnet facility and West Texas mining rights in a quiet market. The war does not make USAR’s undelivered jobs any more delivered, but it has made its government subsidies easier to justify in public.
Pompeo himself joined the company as a Strategic Advisor in February 2023, describing the role as helping build ‘a fully integrated, U.S.-based supply chain for rare earth elements and permanent magnets.’ He held that position when the company went public through the SPAC merger in March 2025,
Where They Are Now
Marc Short, former president of the Koch network’s Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce and Mike Pence’s chief of staff, is now board chairman of Advancing American Freedom, founding partner at Advance Strategies and executive director of the Coalition to Protect American Workers. He is a regular contributor on NBC News and CNBC. Freedom Partners, which reported nearly $450 million in grants since 2011 before being dissolved in 2019, placed Short in a central position in the pipeline between Koch political infrastructure and the White House. He has not made a public statement on Operation Epic Fury that was located in reporting through publication time.
Mick Mulvaney, who received $35,000 in Koch Industries PAC contributions during his congressional career and met with Koch lobbyists in July 2017 while serving as budget director, is now the executive director of a coalition opposing unregulated prediction markets, a 2025-26 policy fellow at Cornell University’s Brooks School of Public Policy and a contributor to NewsNation and CNBC. He has criticized Trump’s tariffs on Canada and expressed uncertainty about the Gaza conflict. No statement on the Iran war was located.
Scott Pruitt, who as Oklahoma attorney general coordinated with Koch-affiliated groups on environmental regulation rollback before leading the EPA, submitted an amicus brief to the Oklahoma Supreme Court in July 2025 defending ballot initiative petition reform and has maintained a largely private presence in Tulsa. He ran for U.S. Senate in Oklahoma in 2022 and lost in the primary. He has not made public statements about the Iran war that were located.
Mike Pompeo is at the Heritage Foundation’s favorite podium, at Fox News, at law firms, at Liberty University and at drone company advisory boards. He is not in the government. Pompeo joined USA Rare Earth as a Strategic Advisor in February 2023, per the company’s own PR Newswire announcement. He is among the war’s loudest public champions.
Joe Kent has resigned. Koch and the so called Heritage Foundation of war hawks remain.
Writing By: Robbie Robertson | Editing by Robbie Robertson
Editor’s Note:
Sources
Joe Kent resignation letter and reporting: Axios, CNN, CBS News, NBC News, NPR, Al Jazeera, Rolling Stone
Strait of Hormuz fertilizer impacts: CSIS, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Council on Foreign Relations, The National, NBC News consumer, Christian Science Monitor
Oklahoma farming impact: Oklahoma Farm Bureau via Yahoo News, High Plains Journal
CNBC fertilizer market and refinery margin analysis: CNBC fertilizer, CNBC oil prices, Sahm Capital refinery analysis
Oil and gas prices: CNN Business, NPR gasoline prices, Texas Tribune
Koch Ag and Energy Solutions / Koch Fertilizer: Koch Fertilizer Wever acquisition, PR Newswire, Agriculture Dive acquisition analysis, Oklahoma Department of Commerce Enid expansion
Flint Hills Resources: Flint Hills Resources website, Pine Bend Refinery
Mike Pompeo background and current activity: Axios, Torridon Law, Liberty University, Fox News op-ed, Wikipedia biographical background, DeSmog, Koch-Pompeo ties
Heritage Foundation: Operation Epic Fury commentary, After the Deal, 2018 Pompeo speech, Iran war assumptions
Koch network background documentation: Public Citizen, “The Koch Government,” November 2017, High Country News, “Trump’s Cabinet Choices Reflect Deep Koch Influence,” December 2016
Rare earth and Iran: South China Morning Post, Mining.com
USA Rare Earth: The Oklahoma Post, $73M minority buyout and zero revenue, The Oklahoma Post, senators confirm conflict of interest, Oklahoma Manufacturing Alliance, first magnets
Epstein files: Epstein Files Transparency Act text, Congress.gov, Epstein files Wikipedia, NBC News Epstein fallout tracker, Epstein connections Wikipedia
Marc Short: Advancing American Freedom, Worldwide Speakers Group
Mick Mulvaney: Cornell University Nixon Fellowship, SBC Americas, prediction markets coalition
Scott Pruitt: Read Sludge, 2022 Senate run
Dark money and Heritage network: Democracy Defender Substack
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