Trump Praised 25 Gas Stations as One “Freedom Fuel” Brand. The Records Show They Don’t Share an Owner.

The brand’s own legal scaffolding is thin, recent, and deliberately anonymous. Three primary records, each of which we retrieved directly, establish the timeline. ^[8][9][10]

The domain came first. According to the registrar’s own RDAP record for freedomfuelnetwork.com, it was created on June 13, 2026 through Squarespace. Every registrant field is privacy-redacted — name, street, everything — with a single exception: the state, which reads NJ. ^[8]

Ten days later came the company. Delaware’s Division of Corporations lists Freedom Fuel Network, LLC, File No. 10671921, formed June 23, 2026. Its registered agent is The Corporation Trust Company at 1209 Orange Street, Wilmington — the “Corporation Trust Center,” a single building that a 2012 New York Times count found served as the registered-agent address for more than 285,000 companies. Delaware does not require, and this record does not contain, any owner or member name. ^[10]

On July 1 — the same day as the Truth Social post — the brand acquired a trademark application. The USPTO record for serial 99917821 lists the mark FREEDOM FUEL NETWORK, owned by that Delaware LLC at the same Orange Street shell address, filed by a retained attorney. One detail is quietly telling: it was submitted on an intent-to-use basis — the applicant’s sworn position that, as of filing, the mark was not yet in use in commerce. ^[9]

Three anonymizing layers, then, in the space of eighteen days: a privacy-shielded domain, a Delaware LLC behind a mass-registration agent, and a trademark held by that same shell. The attorney who filed it, Anna Vishev of Staten Island, is exactly what the record says she is — retained filing counsel, not a principal — and told ABC News she was “not authorized to disclose any information” beyond the public file. ^[6] Nothing about her filing implies she owns or runs anything; a lawyer filing a trademark is the most ordinary transaction in the record.

The brand’s own website completes the picture. We pulled its live locations page: it lists all 25 stations by address and discloses no owner, no company, no management, no named contact, not even a phone number. The only way to reach whoever runs it is an anonymous web form. ^[11] A commercial brand a sitting president is promoting names no human being anywhere on its own site. The paperwork, in short, consistently precedes the publicity: domain June 13, LLC June 23, the Truth Social post and the “intent-to-use” trademark both July 1, then the rebranded pumps in the days after. ^[8][9][10]

The finding that reframes the entire “who owns Freedom Fuel” question is that the 25 stations do not share a common owner. The companion open-records investigation, using county parcel data, state tank-registry records and business filings, resolves them to several independent operator groups plus a set of standalone dealers, unified only by the new brand on the canopy. ^[17] We did not re-pull every county GIS record, so we attribute that taxonomy to that investigation rather than claiming it as our own.

But our independent checks are consistent with a many-owners picture, from three directions. First, Snopes lists the stations’ prior brands as United, Valero, Shell, Gulf, Sunoco, Phillips 66, Gas N’ Go and Karco — eight different fuel brands, which is not how a single company’s footprint looks. ^[1] Second, individual suppliers publicly cut ties: Shell said it “is not affiliated with the Freedom Fuel Network,” and Valero said it “no longer supplies this site” — though that reporting rests on a single outlet. ^[6] Third, as the next section shows, the one institutional player we can document in the records touches only a subset of the stations, not all of them.

A note on precision, because it cuts against overreach. Some accounts describe the prior brands as including Exxon. Snopes’ list contains no Exxon; the Exxon reference traces specifically to ABC News, which frames a shorter set of stations as “associated with national fuel companies … including Shell, Sunoco, Gulf Exxon, Phillips 66 and Valero.” ^[1][6] Two different lists doing two different jobs — not a contradiction, but worth pinning down rather than blending.

Where the records get concrete is real estate. A cluster of the former-Sunoco stations sits on land held by Mountain Portfolio Owner NJ, LLC and its Pennsylvania sibling — and that entity is not a mystery. It is an active litigant, and we confirmed two federal cases directly against the court record. ^[12][13]

In Mountain Portfolio Owner NJ, LLC v. Sunoco – 6801 Tilton Road, Egg Harbor Twp. (No. 1:24-cv-07055, D.N.J., filed June 2024), the landlord moved against a Sunoco operator’s site; a second case, Mountain Portfolio Owner NJ, LLC v. Fams Petro LLC (No. 3:24-cv-07685), was remanded to New Jersey Superior Court as a landlord-tenant matter. ^[12][13] Both are ordinary possession disputes.

Two things here advance the story past the companion investigation. One is a correction: the defendant in the first case is captioned as the Sunoco operator at 6801 Tilton Road plus “AK Auto & Tire Repair,” not an entity literally named “6801 Tilton Rd Inc.” ^[12] The other is a verified address match: 6801 Tilton Road, Egg Harbor Township, appears on Freedom Fuel’s own current locations list and is the site the landlord moved to evict in 2024; the same holds for the Little Egg Harbor site tied to the Fams Petro case. ^[11][12][13] In plain terms, at least two stations now flying the Freedom Fuel banner were, two years ago, the subject of their landlord’s possession suits.

Who is that landlord? The trail runs to a large institution. The Mountain Portfolio Owner entities are net-lease vehicles in the orbit of Oak Street Real Estate Capital — the Chicago sale-leaseback manager that Blue Owl Capital (NYSE: OWL) acquired in December 2021, per Blue Owl’s own newsroom. ^[14] The specific tie between the Pennsylvania and New Jersey entities and Oak Street rests on a chain — a shared Chicago headquarters address across sibling “Mountain Portfolio Owner” entities, a global LEI record, and co-party court filings naming Blue Owl’s real-estate arm alongside the family — rather than on a single formation document we could load. We label that link inferred, and keep the hedge.

One firewall has to stay bright, because it is where a careless version of this story would go wrong. A landlord that owns the ground is not a funder of the gasoline. A net lease means the operator pays rent to Blue Owl’s vehicle; it says nothing about who absorbs a below-cost fuel promotion. Blue Owl’s involvement is as a real-estate holder on some parcels — full stop. It is not evidence of any connection to the discount, and we draw none.

Which leaves the real story where the national coverage left it, only sharper. If the stations sell below cost, someone is absorbing the loss — and every on-the-record fuel analyst says the pricing cannot hold. GasBuddy’s Patrick De Haan said the stations “cannot sustain the model over time”; the National Association of Convenience Stores’ Jeff Lenard said there is “no way those stations could operate … without at least breaking even on fuel”; Gulf Oil’s Tom Kloza likened it to “jumping off a cliff.” ^[6][7]

So who pays? We looked for the two mechanisms that would leave a paper trail — a subsidy or a fuel-supplier arrangement — and found neither in any record we could reach. There is no documented subsidy in public filings; the only external-funding statement of any kind is the White House’s denial of one: “The Administration is not involved in the company, nor has the Administration given the company any funding. There is no other entity or person subsidizing the lower gasoline costs.” ^[2][3] And the operating company that would name a backer is, as the paper trail showed, an anonymized Delaware shell. ^[10] A competing station owner told CNN that if Freedom Fuel is getting “financial support from the government or supporters of the Trump administration, it’s very unfair.” ^[7]

Here we have to be as careful about what we don’t know as what we do. The companion investigation reports that a Pennsylvania UCC-lien search surfaced no fuel-supplier financing against the operators it identified — only ordinary bank and SBA loans — consistent with a self-funded, short-term promotion rather than a standing outside subsidy. ^[17] We could not independently run that lien search (the state portal blocks automated access), and one analyst’s theory that operators simply eat the loss to draw convenience-store traffic is a hypothesis, not a documented fact. The honest formulation is the uncomfortable one: there is no public evidence of a subsidy, and that is not the same as proof there is none.

One more data point complicates the “discount” itself. According to a MeidasTouch finding carried by The Independent and Yahoo News, the flagship station was a Sunoco selling gas at $2.99 a gallon in November 2024 — which would make today’s $3.47 not a cut but a year-over-year increase at that site. That rests on a single outlet and a street-view image, so we flag it as reported rather than verified; but it is reason to treat the headline number skeptically. ^[15]

The distinction matters because the concealment is doing real work. A domain that hides everything but a state; an LLC behind a 285,000-tenant mailbox; a trademark that admits the brand isn’t even in use yet; a website that names no one. That architecture is not what an ordinary regional discount promotion looks like. It is what it looks like when someone has decided the public should see the price on the sign and nothing behind it.

Reporting this out means being precise about the boundary between the two.

Established on primary records we re-pulled: the domain, LLC and trademark dates and shell addresses (RDAP, Delaware, USPTO); the trademark’s intent-to-use basis; two 2024 federal landlord-tenant suits by Mountain Portfolio Owner NJ, LLC; Blue Owl’s 2021 acquisition of Oak Street; a Freedom Fuel address (6801 Tilton Rd) that matches a 2024 eviction site; the brand’s own site disclosing zero ownership; the White House denial; and the analysts’ “unsustainable” verdict. ^{[1][2][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]}

Still unresolved or unverified: who organized the rebrand across independent dealers (no record names them); who funds the below-cost gas (no subsidy or supplier deal in any reachable record); the PA/NJ landlord entities’ specific tie to Oak Street (inferred, not on a loaded formation document); and the full operator-group taxonomy (reported by the companion, not re-pulled by us). One more correction belongs here: a reported Saddi, LLC Chapter 11 is a real bankruptcy, but its claimed link to the “Karco” operator group is unverified — we found nothing in any primary record tying them, and drop the connection. ^[17]

In tracing the operators and their principals, we reviewed federal and state campaign-finance records. Where we found a lawful political contribution unrelated to the Freedom Fuel arrangement, we chose not to publish it. It sheds no light on who organized or who funds the network, and surfacing it would only invite a connection the records don’t support. We name its existence here only to be transparent that it was found and deliberately excluded — no party, no amount, no name.

This report was built by independently re-pulling primary public records rather than relying on any summary of them. A companion open-records investigation mapped much of the property and operator structure first; we treated it as a set of leads to check, never as a source to cite, and it is scored accordingly below. ^[17] No individual is accused of any wrongdoing; on the record, everyone named is an ordinary station owner, operator, landlord or retained professional. The news interest is the concealment of who organized and who funds the network — not any conduct by the people named.

The result is a story with a documented spine and an honest hole at its center. Freedom Fuel is real, its stations are real, and — on the record — the people behind them are ordinary station owners and operators, accused here of nothing. What is unusual is not any one of them. It is the care someone took, in the three weeks before the president’s post, to make sure that when the country looked at the $3.47 on the sign, it could not see who put it there, or who is paying to keep it that low.