In mid-September 2024, Donald Trump had plenty on his plate. He was the Republican Party’s presidential nominee in a competitive race with roughly seven weeks until Election Day; he had just lost a debate against then-Vice President Kamala Harris; and he was maintaining an active travel and media schedule.
But on Sept. 16, literally one day after an apparent assassination attempt, Trump did something unheard of in American politics: He launched a cryptocurrency business, called World Liberty Financial.
Controversies soon followed. Trump faced awkward questions, for example, about the curious group of business partners with whom he had linked arms. A year later, in one of the most scandalous presidential pardons in American history, Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the convicted founder of the crypto exchange Binance, which just so happened to have struck a lucrative business deal with World Liberty Financial.
The broader story, however, hasn’t hit rock bottom just yet. The Wall Street Journal reported:
Four days before Donald Trump’s inauguration last year, lieutenants to an Abu Dhabi royal secretly signed a deal with the Trump family to purchase a 49% stake in their fledgling cryptocurrency venture for half a billion dollars, according to company documents and people familiar with the matter. The buyers would pay half up front, steering $187 million to Trump family entities.
The deal with World Liberty Financial, which hasn’t previously been reported, was signed by Eric Trump, the president’s son. At least $31 million was also slated to flow to entities affiliated with the family of Steve Witkoff, a World Liberty co-founder who weeks earlier had been named U.S. envoy to the Middle East, the documents said.
The deal, the Journal added, “marked something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company” — which, at the time, “had no products.”
Although the reporting wasn’t independently verified by MS NOW, a spokesperson for World Liberty Financial confirmed the investment to The New York Times.
The Journal added that the investment “was backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, an Abu Dhabi royal who has been pushing the U.S. for access to tightly guarded artificial intelligence chips.” Tahnoon, brother to the United Arab Emirates’ president, is also sometimes referred to as the “spy sheikh.”
The UAE had initiated related efforts to obtain AI chip information during the Biden administration, which resisted for national security reasons, including concerns about the technology reaching China. But at about the time that the UAE struck a deal with the Trump-owned company, the Trump administration also approved an export deal for the AI technology the Emirati government wanted.
Imagine that.
The latest details led Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland to argue: “Foreign countries are bribing our president to sell out the American people.”
Ian Bassin, a veteran of the Obama administration, added: “I was a White House ethics lawyer. I used to advise people not to even accept a free cup of coffee from someone who had interests before them. And staff followed those rules. I can’t even find the words to describe the scale of Trump’s corruption here.”
In the president’s first term, there was considerable interest in the emoluments clause and foreign interests renting rooms at Trump-owned properties. In his second term, the seeming corruption is spectacularly worse.
On ABC News’ “This Week,” host George Stephanopoulos asked Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche about the burgeoning scandal. Blanche, a former Trump defense counsel, replied: “I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before, as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche, referring to the Journal’s reporting, added: “Look, I saw that article. I don’t have a comment on it beyond President Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons.”
There are a few elements to this that are worth keeping in mind. First, never in American history has a foreign country bought a stake in a company owned by the American president, even as the president negotiated foreign policy matters with the other country. The idea that Joe Biden did “exactly the same thing” is plainly ridiculous.
Second, if Trump had been “completely transparent” about all of this, the Journal’s reporting would have been old news. It wasn’t — because all of this had been secret from the public up until now.
And third, let’s not overlook the fact that Blanche was offered an opportunity to offer his best possible defense of the president. Evidently, he couldn’t think of anything persuasive.
I guess that’s not too surprising, given how difficult it is to defend the indefensible.
