https://www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-family-crypto
https://popular.info/p/deeply-conflicted-kushner-represents
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The Trump boys are Making Corruption Great Again
American politics has always had dynasties: The Adamses. The Kennedys. The Bushes. The Clintons. Each family used their association with the White House as a stepping stone to further office, with power begetting more power.
And lots of politicians have spun their clout into gold after leaving office. The Obamas are fascinating people, but they wouldn’t have a Netflix deal if he’d stayed a senator for Illinois.
But we’ve never had a president who used the White House as a real-time venture capital accelerator for his family. In Trump’s first term, his children at least pretended that they weren’t trying to profit off the presidency. This time around, they’re selling Trump-branded crypto tokens.
The Trump kids don’t want to ride their family name into political office. They want billions of dollars in cash — and they want it now.
Retail corruption
During the first Trump administration, the Trumps were in the hospitality business. The family slapped their names on golf courses and hotels, but said they weren’t entering into any new foreign deals for the sake of propriety. They still cashed in, of course, reaping a massive windfall from foreign governments, American politicians, and corporations looking to curry favor with the president.
In 2019, when Sprint needed FCC approval for its merger with rival T-Mobile, its managers parked themselves in Trump’s DC hotel and made sure to post photos of themselves in the lobby sporting branded pink T-shirts.
“Why wouldn’t I stay at his hotel blocks from the White House, so I can tell the new president, ‘I love your new hotel!’ Isn’t it rude to come to his city and say, ‘I am staying at your competitor?’” a foreign diplomat told the Washington Post.
But that corruption was essentially retail. Even “ghost bookings” at Trump properties could only put a few hundred thousand dollars at a time in the family’s pockets.
This time around the Trump kids have discovered crypto.
Printing money
In 2021, Trump told Fox Business’s Stuart Varney that “bitcoin seems like a scam.” Despite regular forays into the lucrative grift of NFTs, he grasped that digital monopoly money is inherently unstable and threatens the US dollar’s standing as the world’s reserve currency.
“I don’t like it because it’s another currency competing against the dollar,” he said.
But three years later, he vowed to make America the crypto capital of the world, and one of his first actions back in the White House was to sign an executive order creating a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and United States Digital Asset Stockpile.”
That was convenient for his sons, who had rebranded themselves as crypto bros.
Six weeks before the presidential election, Eric and Don Jr. announced their family’s new cryptocurrency venture, World Liberty Financial. Their partners include Alex and Zach Witkoff, the sons of Trump’s Middle East envoy Steven Witkoff, one of WLF’s original backers.
As with the family’s media company TMTG, the Trump family is the big draw and the biggest beneficiary. The Trump family owns 60 percent of WLF and is entitled to 75 percent of the net proceeds from the sale of a crypto token called WLFI and a stablecoin (which is pegged to the dollar) called USD1.
One of the earliest backers was crypto billionaire Justin Sun, who purchased $30 million of WLFI in late 2024 and raised his stake to $75 million in early 2025, after which the SEC dropped a lawsuit filed in 2023 accusing him of selling unregistered securities. WLF later froze Sun’s access, amid generalized concerns about market manipulation, leaving him powerless to sell his tokens, even as their value dropped by almost 50 percent.
But Sun’s investment was peanuts compared to the massive windfall of cash the Trump family netted thanks to the combined efforts of Emirati Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, chair of his nation’s sovereign wealth fund, and Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, founder of Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange.
Chips and pardons
As detailed by the Wall Street Journal, CZ and Tahnoon each wanted something from the US government.
Tahnoon, who heads an artificial intelligence company called G42, hopes to make the UAE an AI hub. For this, he’ll need ultra-fast microchips, most of which are processed by the American company NVIDIA. But US intelligence and national security agencies worried about G42’s ties to China, fearing that the company might serve as a conduit for critical technology to leak to our biggest rival.
In 2023, CZ and Binance pled guilty to money laundering, after allowing every sanctioned entity from Hamas to North Korea to trade on the platform, along with a whole barnyard of “pig butchering” scammers and arms dealers. CZ served four months at a low security prison in California and stepped down from his leadership role at Binance. Upon his release, he relocated to the UAE.
After Trump got reelected, both CZ and Tahnoon started cozying up to the Trump family. Just four days before Trump was sworn in, Tahnoon secretly bought a 49 percent stake in WLF for $500 million via his company Aryam investments. The Journal reports that half of the money was paid upfront, resulting in an immediate payout of $157 million to the Trump family and $31 million to the Witkoff family. The second $250 million payment was due in July 2025.
Meanwhile, CZ hired a team of lobbyists and lawyers close to the Trumps to secure him the pardon that would allow him to go back to running his company publicly. At the same time, Binance was providing back end support to WLF to launch its crypto coins and increase their popularity.
In May 2025, CZ and Tahnoon appeared to have hit on a winning formula. The Emirati royal family bought a $2 billion stake in Binance, via a company called MGX, and they paid for it in USD1. Essentially, WLF sold a pile of poker chips for $1 each along with a promise to redeem them at some future date for a buck. WLF got $2 billion in cash, which it will hold and collect interest on — roughly $80 million annually — until such time as Binance decides to cash in its USD1 chips.
The deal increased USD1’s market cap by more than 1,500 percent. And in a miraculous coincidence, the Trump administration granted the UAE access to 500,000 of the coveted AI chips that month. In October, CZ got his pardon, too.
“New digital Bretton Woods system”
The Trump family’s crypto bonanza has made them much richer than their hotel business ever did. Forbes estimates that Don Jr.’s net worth increased sixfold in 2025. His brother Eric has done even better and is now 10 times richer than he was when their dad was sworn in last year. Even Barron Trump, a college sophomore, has seen his net worth rocket to $150 million thanks to his own ten percent stake in WLF.
Last week, WLF hosted a crypto summit at Mar-a-Lago, AKA the “Winter White House.” The confab was attended by members of Congress, Trump administration officials, and the heads of major finance and crypto companies.
CZ attended a private VIP dinner with the Trump boys on Tuesday.
CZ 🔶 BNB@cz_binance
Listening to CFTC Chairman talk at WLF Forum in Mar a Lago. Learned a lot.
Liberty 🦅 @MoonLiberty_
@cz_binance in the room. 🇺🇸🦅 At Mar-a-Lago, the first World Liberty Forum brings together capital, policy, and crypto — and Changpeng Zhao is there. When the founder of Binance shows up, this isn’t noise. This is signal. World Liberty Financial $WLFI is not playing small.
12:30 PM · Feb 18, 2026 · 299K Views
303 Replies · 260 Reposts · 2.3K Likes
Zach Witkoff compared it to “a new digital Bretton Woods system” — which is hilarious for its economic illiteracy. And also not.
Eric Trump said “it’s like Davos — with better hospitality, better food, better weather, better group of people, less wokeness.” He also characterized it as karmic “retribution” for the family’s fall from grace when the patriarch tried to overthrow democracy.
Leave no dollar behind
With all this money raining down on them, one might expect that the Trump kids not to bother with the more prosaic forms of corruption. Why grub around for a million here and there when you can sit by the pool and let the cash come to you?
But the Trump boys make the time!
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) catalogued the many boards who recently realized that they’d benefit from Eric and Don Jr.’s expertise. They include drone maker Unusual Machines, which paid Don Jr. $2.8 million and got its biggest US government contract ever. Or the rare-earth magnets company Vulcan Elements, which solicited an investment from Don Jr.’s 1789 Fund and then got a $620 million loan from the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital. Or Dominari Holdings, which appears to have created an advisory board simply to hire Trump Organization officials. Forbes reports that Don Jr and Eric were each awarded $4.67 million in stock for “serving” an 11-week stint, with Trump Org executive VPs Ronald Lieberman and Lawrence Glick and chief legal officer Alan Garten rounding out the roster (although with lower compensation).
Of course this invites the comparison to Hunter Biden, whose seat on the board of Ukrainian company Burisma fueled years of outrage. Critics argued that he was paid for perceived access to his father, who was vice president at the time — which of course he was.
But the “scandal” relied on a baroque and easily disproven theory to establish a quid pro quo. In 2016, Vice President Biden made a public speech demanding that Ukraine fire a notoriously corrupt prosecutor, whom the entire US national security community along with their European counterparts wanted out. This was spun up into a plot to protect Burisma, which wasn’t even under investigation at the time.
Here, the Trump family is taking in billions of dollars from foreign governments, corporations, and individuals who have a wish list of asks of the Trump administration. And the Trump kids will take payment in any currency! Heck, if you can’t be bothered to fake a board seat and you’re not interested in Trump-branded monopoly money, you can just pay $500,000 to join Don Jr.’s private membership club. It’s called Executive Branch.
That’s not the quiet nepotism of a board appointment at a regional energy company. That’s converting the presidency into an asset class. And it’s a whole lot more lucrative than signing up to run for office based on your family name.
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Deeply conflicted, Kushner represents the U.S. in high-stakes negotiations with Iran
Today in Geneva, Switzerland, Jared Kushner will represent the United States in meetings with Iranian officials — a last-ditch effort to avoid war. Kushner, however, has serious financial conflicts that could make reaching a deal more difficult.
Kushner has played a central role in all of the most important foreign policy negotiations during Trump’s second term. He has been at the table representing the United States in talks concerning the future of Gaza, the war in Ukraine, and now Iran.
Today’s meeting comes at a critical time. Trump has ordered a large military buildup and publicly said he is considering attacking Iran. It is not clear exactly what Trump wants from Iran, but his demands include new limitations on Iran’s nuclear program. (Notably, Trump claimed that his attack on Iran in June 2025 “completely obliterated Iran’s nuclear capability.”) According to reports, if Trump’s new demands are not met, a U.S. attack on Iran could come as soon as this weekend.
Kushner, however, only works as the chief U.S. foreign policy negotiator in his spare time. His main job is as the founder and CEO of Affinity Partners, an investment firm that has raised billions of dollars from foreign governments. Three of the firm’s largest clients are the governments of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar. Kushner collects tens of millions in management fees annually from these countries.
Before Trump returned to the White House, Kushner publicly acknowledged that this was a debilitating conflict of interest and pledged not to be involved with the incoming Trump administration.
In a February 2024 interview with Axios, Kushner stated that he would not resume his role as an adviser if Trump were to win the presidency again. Kushner told Axios’ Dan Primack that he made commitments to run his investment firm “for the long term” and “my commitment is to my investors, to my firm, to my employees, [and] to my partners.”
Pressed by Primack, Kushner said he would not accept a role in the new administration even if asked by Trump. “I’m an investor now,” Kushner said. “I served in government, and I think my track record is pretty impeccable. Now I’m a private investor.”
Kushner’s conflicts could make a deal with Iran less likely. Any Iran deal is likely to involve Iran agreeing to restrictions on nuclear development in exchange for the relaxation of economic sanctions. The biggest carrot on the sanctions side is removing sanctions on Iranian oil.
Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar — Kushner’s clients — are all significant oil producers. A relaxation of sanctions on Iranian oil would increase supply and potentially lower oil prices. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are part of OPEC, an organization that works to keep oil prices elevated by restricting supply.
Saudi Arabia is Kushner’s first and largest investor, committing $2 billion in 2021. In August 2026, Saudi Arabia will have the right to renegotiate its agreement with Affinity Partners or withdraw its funds, giving the country considerable leverage.
Kushner’s central role representing the Trump administration in multiple foreign policy negotiations while accepting tens of millions of dollars in fees from foreign governments may be illegal.
The Trump administration has tried to avoid legal issues by classifying Kushner as a “volunteer” rather than a government official. But a seminal 1977 opinion by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) found that “an identifiable act of appointment may not be absolutely essential for an individual to be regarded as an officer or employee in a particular case where the parties omitted it for the purpose of avoiding the application of the conflict-of-interest laws.” The OLC found that an individual “engaging in a governmental function” and “working under the direction or supervision of the President” should be considered an SGE.
In Geneva today, Kushner is engaged in activities that can only be conducted by government officials. The Logan Act bars private citizens from engaging in negotiations with foreign governments without authorization. Kushner is acting in an authorized capacity, under Trump’s direction, which creates a host of legal issues. As a de facto government official, the millions in fees Kushner is collecting from foreign governments violate the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution.
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