Even if crypto makes your head hurt, you’re going to be hearing a lot about this in the months to come.
Even if crypto makes your head hurt, you’re going to be hearing a lot about this in the months to come.
Author’s note: This is the first in a series of five posts on the financial ties that have publicly emerged between President Trump and the regime of the United Arab Emirates.
I t’s a long story, but let’s cut to the chase.
In autumn 2024, when it had become clear that he’d likely win back the White House in about six weeks, Donald Trump and his friend Steve Witkoff founded a crypto business called World Liberty Financial (WLF).
WLF was (and remains) an ideal vehicle for leveraging political power in search of financial gain. Crypto is shrouded in mystery and intrigue. The public generally doesn’t understand it. The Federal Reserve says just 2 percent of Americans used crypto to pay for something in 2024. The “value” that investors promote and customers purchase is vague. Hence, a crypto business — whether in tokens, currency, or other iterations — is an ideal way to disguise political payoffs as financial transactions. And, because they have sons who do not hold government positions and could ostensibly run the crypto business, President Trump and his Middle East envoy, Witkoff, would be poised to claim that WLF is a private enterprise, walled off from Trump’s political influence — even though that influence was the magnet for foreign investment and consumer purchases.
Reportedly, and predictably, a Chinese-born Canadian billionaire felon named Changpeng Zhao, who ran a corrupt international cryptocurrency exchange called Binance and was desperately seeking a presidential pardon, contributed invaluable technical expertise for building WLF’s infrastructure. So did Zhao’s close associate, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan, the top intelligence operative and the second-highest-ranking royal family member of the United Arab Emirates, a tiny, rich Gulf monarchy. The UAE had big ambitions to become an AI powerhouse but had been blocked by Washington from access to cutting-edge American chip technology because of its extensive ties to the Chinese Communist Party. The UAE also wanted a pardon for Zhao, who lives in Dubai and could move Binance to Abu Dhabi if regulatory complications from his felony convictions were removed.
Four days before Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, the UAE began pouring what is now publicly known to be at least $2.5 billion into the Trump crypto enterprise. Before Trump’s first year in office was over, Zhao had his pardon. And the UAE had its chips, in addition to being feted at the White House, inflated into a nation of real consequence in Middle East geopolitics, included in the Trump administration’s Stargate project to build global artificial intelligence and super-computing capacity, and given an ownership slice of TikTok when the president — after a year of flouting a congressional statute mandating divestiture of China’s stake — cut a deal to preserve the platform’s operation in the U.S.
Before we get into the gory details, it’s worth observing that, at National Review, we extensively covered the Biden family business of corruptly profiteering off Joe Biden’s political power and influence. So did congressional Republicans. Indeed, three investigative committees, led by Representative James Comer (R., Ky.), who is still the Oversight chairman, spent hundreds of hours gathering evidence, interviewing witnesses, and threatening to hold President Biden’s son, Hunter, in contempt.
House Republicans even opened an impeachment inquiry, which generated a scathing report on the “conspiracy to monetize Joe Biden’s office of public trust to enrich the Biden family.” The sum generated over several years of Biden self-dealing — “over $27 million” — flashed in neon throughout the report’s 291 pages. Republicans were especially incensed because the Bidens practiced their harlotry on foreigners — in particular, agents of China. Family avarice, rather than the national interest, drove United States government policy. The House impeachment report thundered:
Joe Biden has exhibited conduct and taken actions that the Founders sought to guard against in drafting the impeachment provisions in the Constitution: abuse of power, foreign entanglements, corruption, and obstruction of investigations into these matters. The Committees [sic] investigative work has revealed that the Biden family — with the full knowledge and cooperation of President Biden — has engaged in a global influence peddling racket from which they made millions of dollars.
You know what the difference is between the Biden family business and the Trump family business? You’d have to add two digits to the sum of Biden abuses of power, foreign entanglements, and corruption alleged in the report to get near what Trump has raked in just from the UAE.
Of course, Trump can’t be faulted for obstructing congressional investigations. There haven’t been any. Comer is busy tangling with the Clintons, the better to take the Epstein heat off a president whose poll numbers have declined as this year’s midterm elections beckon. Now that self-dealing has achieved heights so astronomical that $27 million would barely be a rounding error, Republicans have lost interest.
The lid was blown off the sordid Trump-UAE story by a blockbuster Wall Street Journal report last week. By then, we’d already learned about President Trump’s shocking pardon of Zhao after Zhao helped orchestrate the UAE’s $2 billion purchase of the Trump crypto enterprise’s start-up stablecoin; and thanks to prior WSJ reporting, we also knew that Zhao had contributed Binance expertise to help WLF’s crypto infrastructure.
The new reporting reveals that Sheikh Tahnoon and the UAE were silent partners in the WLF venture from the start, seeding WLF with $500 million and technical expertise (much of it provided by yet another agent of the UAE regime) just before Trump took office, and a few weeks before WLF launched its stablecoin venture.
In this series of posts, I will try to demystify crypto while recapping what we knew prior to the new reporting — the characteristics that make cryptocurrency suitable for corrupt commerce, the relevant features of stablecoin, the establishment of WLF, and facts relevant to the president’s pardon of Zhao. In subsequent posts, we will focus on Sheikh Tahnoon: on how the UAE’s Big Tech ambitions were frustrated during the Biden era by security officials and congressional Republicans, who worried about its China ties; on how Tahnoon perceived Trump’s second term as an opportunity to reverse government policy; and on how he went about it — quite successfully — by shoveling billions into the Trump–Witkoff WLF enterprise. Finally, as Democrats mobilize — and they are already using the word impeachment, just as Republicans did in their crusade to expose Biden’s influence peddling — I’ll lay out a timeline of relevant events.
Even if crypto makes your head hurt, you’re going to be hearing a lot about this in the months to come. It’s important to grasp what happened and why it matters.