Trump Crypto Corruption and the Failure of Lawfare

Petty corruption was a recurring theme of the first Trump presidency. Donald Trump’s vast business empire presented inherent, unfixable conflicts of interest: you can’t put your assets in a blind trust when those assets are skyscrapers, hotels, and golf courses with your name written on them in huge gold letters. It was easy enough for foreign governments and potentates to seek favor with Trump by staying in his hotels and giving preferred treatment to his business interests abroad, and Trump cannot have been unaware of that. As I argued at the time, the square peg of commercial transactions with a preexisting legitimate business of the president’s didn’t quite fit the round hole of the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause, but it was still ethically shady. Because it was generally done through preexisting legitimate businesses — in most cases by nominal exchange for legitimate services such as renting hotel rooms — however, it was not nearly as brazen as the naked influence-peddling of the Biden family in exchange for nothing but access to the Bidens. It was, more or less, what Americans reasonably expected Trump to do when he was given the job, and his voters didn’t care.

That was then; this is now. Andy McCarthy has written a tremendous five series (see part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5, plus a postscript) on World Liberty Financial (WLF), pulling together reporting on the story by the Wall Street Journal and other outlets. The short summary of a sprawling saga:

• WLF is a cryptocurrency business, put together in September 2024 and launched in March 2025 — a new venture in a new field, well outside the traditional real estate businesses of the Trump family and the family of Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff.
• WLF issues a species of crypto called “stablecoins,” which are supposed to operate like money market funds: buyers of the stablecoin give money to the issuers, who invest the money and are supposed to use the returns to ensure that the stablecoin maintains a fixed dollar value.
• WLF is principally run and owned, at least formally, by Eric Trump and Witkoff’s son Zach, both of whom sit on its board of directors. Neither is an experienced or established player in cryptocurrency, and certainly not in investment-backed crypto such as the stablecoin.
• Why would anyone bankroll this venture? WLF’s promotional materials unsubtly tout the founding roles of Trump and Witkoff père.
• What did Sheikh Tahnoon offer? Four days before Trump’s inauguration, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan (“Sheikh Tahnoon”), the brother of the king of the United Arab Emirates and the UAE’s national security and intelligence chief, invested $500 million in WLF as seed money (in exchange for a 49 percent stake in WLF and a two-seat minority on its board). And in May 2025, Sheikh Tahnoon poured an additional $2 billion into the business in the form of stablecoin purchases — 20 times all the other buyers of WLF’s stablecoin put together.
• Tahnoon, who controls over a trillion dollars in sovereign and personal wealth, was already a business partner of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner since the Biden era, after Kushner no longer had a government post. (In other words, Kushner was cashing in on his public service in the more conventional way common to swampy D.C. insiders: make contacts while in office, then money from those contacts later.) The Kushner-Tahnoon business saw assets under management increase by 60 percent between 2023 and 2024, largely because of infusions from the UAE and Qatar.
• What did Tahnoon want? The UAE has many interests touching Trump’s Middle East policy and Witkoff’s diplomatic missions (it was an early participant in the Abraham Accords), one of which is that it is trying to develop an AI business, but the U.S. government has resisted giving the UAE access to advanced chips because of UAE links to communist China.
• What did Tahnoon get? The Trump administration has lavished favor on the UAE. The day after his inauguration, Trump announced that the UAE would be part of Stargate, a U.S. AI infrastructure project. A UAE delegation led by Tahnoon was fêted by Trump at the White House. Trump’s Treasury Department launched a UAE-desired program that would fast-track approval of foreign investments in the United States. Trump went to Abu Dhabi with Witkoff to hammer out a UAE purchase of advanced U.S. microchips, and he later approved a deal to sell advanced Nvidia chips to the UAE.
• What did Changpeng Zhao offer? Key expertise in getting WLF off the ground was provided to the venture by someone who knows the crypto world: Changpeng Zhao, a Chinese-born Canadian billionaire (with a Chinese citizen wife) who ran Binance, an international crypto exchange, and now lives in the UAE. Zhao reportedly sent more than a dozen engineers to help WLF get started. In December 2025 and January 2026, Binance gave favorable new trading terms to WLF’s stablecoins, 85 percent of which trade on Binance.
• What did Zhao want? A presidential pardon for a 2023 money-laundering conviction, which would not only wipe his record but also allow him to clear regulatory hurdles to do business in both the U.S. and the UAE. Sheikh Tahnoon’s $2 billion in stablecoins were invested on the Binance exchange.
• What did Zhao get? Trump pardoned him in October 2025, claiming that his prosecution had been a “Biden witch hunt.” The UAE royal family had lobbied for the pardon.
• What did Trump and Witkoff get? Just from the initial $250 million of Tahnoon’s investment in WLF, $187 million went to the Trump family and $31 million to the Witkoff family. WLF generates around $80 million a year in investment income, from which the company’s owners profit. Trump’s net worth increased by an estimated $3 billion since his inauguration — a sharp departure from his first term, when it was estimated that his net worth declined by more than a third while he was in office — although about half of that increase has gone back down because of fluctuations in investments. Andy estimates that the president’s net worth might be as high as $8 billion.

In short: the corruption isn’t petty anymore. There are sound reasons of state for some of the favors to the UAE, given its key role as a facilitator in moving parts of the Sunni Arab world away from austere jihadism and toward Trump’s vision of a wealthy regional commercial hub. And Witkoff’s effectiveness in brokering deals around the region is probably enhanced by his being a business partner of the Emirati royal family. This is a form of corruption that oil sheiks understand in ways they never understood Bush-era anti-terror and pro-democracy crusaders, Obama-era Iran sympathizers, or the Biden-era obsession with the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. But the vast financial benefits for Trump and Witkoff would in any other circumstance demand that they recuse themselves from UAE-related decisions. Instead, they have been neck-deep in them and have advanced UAE interests at every turn. The pardon of Zhao is the most obviously rotten piece of this whole story.

Will this saga resonate? This is where the story’s complexity can be a problem for Trump critics, as was the Whitewater scandal for Clinton critics. Moreover, the long, failed train of anti-Trump lawfare has built up a good deal of immunity for Trump among his supporters and the public at large, while eroding the credibility of his critics and limiting the legal and political tool kit available to them. It’s the classic “boy who cried wolf” problem — if you have enough failed witch hunts, eventually people stop listening to your warnings about actual witches. Moreover, the sense of impunity on the part of a second-term Trump who no longer needs to face the voters is undoubtedly encouraging him to be much more brazen, no doubt calculating that he can get away (as Biden did) with pardoning everyone involved from any federal charges on his way out the door.

Character, as they say, is destiny. We never had a really big Trump financial corruption scandal during his first term. Now, it’s out in the open. The cry of wolf will be raised once again. Will anyone listen?