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Glass Empires investigates the architects of constitutional rot. Free subscribers receive every article. Devoted readers who became patrons sponsored today’s work. Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff Double as U.S. Envoys Inside a Racket That Meets Every Element of the UN Definition of Transnational Organized Crime
The Administration Extorts Nations From Zambia to Greenland, Allies Included, While the UN Security Council Warns of Global Conflict. “Then I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”
Photo credit: Carlin J. Green/USGS. Public domain. On October 8, 2026, the State Department signed a Zambia health agreement after a 10-month delay, during which U.S. negotiators pressed for mineral access. The Washington Post reviewed the final text and found that the administration had dropped a provision seeking greater U.S. access to Zambia’s mineral reserves. Health Policy Watch reported the same day that U.S. negotiators still pursue a separate minerals agreement with Zambia. By March 2026, the Trump administration had threatened HIV treatment funding for 1.3 million Zambians to win U.S. companies preferential access to Zambia’s minerals. Those patients relied on the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and lacked any role in mining negotiations. State Department negotiators nonetheless weighed cutting their daily treatment to pressure Zambia’s government. Health advocates leaked the terms of that undisclosed negotiation, a draft health agreement between the United States and Zambia. Zambia mines copper and contains cobalt, nickel, and lithium. On February 25, 2026, Reuters reported that U.S. negotiators proposed making health funding conditional on a separate minerals agreement, with an April 1 deadline. Section 6.2 of the draft health agreement terminated all funding if the two governments failed to agree on that minerals deal by April 1, 2026. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had first proposed the deal to President Hakainde Hichilema on November 17, 2025. Bureau of African Affairs staff drafted a memorandum urging Rubio to threaten health assistance. Stephanie Nolen of The New York Times reported the memo on March 16, 2026. The draft states that negotiators suspended health talks in December 2025 because Zambia had not entered mineral negotiations. The authors also proposed public aid cuts to warn other recipients against defying U.S. demands. According to the memo, then–Minister of Mines and Minerals Development Paul Kabuswe reversed course within days of the suspension. The same document says the minister then gave U.S. technical experts unprecedented access to Zambia’s mining database. On April 16, 2026, Senators Jeanne Shaheen, Chris Coons, and Brian Schatz wrote to Rubio challenging the reported threat. On May 4, 2026, Foreign Minister Mulambo Haimbe demanded separate negotiations for health funding and minerals. The foreign minister also objected to preferential treatment for U.S. companies, and he said the health offer reached $2 billion over five years. The final five-year agreement totals approximately $2.49 billion. The United States committed $1.52 billion, Zambia committed $975 million, and negotiators removed disputed patient-data and specimen-sharing provisions. Haimbe confirmed that the agreement separated health funding from continuing minerals negotiations. In January 2026, weeks after negotiators suspended Zambia’s health talks, the president’s family crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, applied for a national trust charter. Article 2(a) of the 2000 UN Palermo Convention sets the minimum at three persons acting in concert to commit serious crimes for financial benefit. President Donald Trump and his sons Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and Barron Trump co-founded World Liberty in late 2024. Special envoy Steve Witkoff, his son Zach Witkoff, Zak Folkman, and Chase Herro complete a founding group of at least eight people. Article 3 classifies an offense as transnational when planning or effects cross a border, and World Liberty’s largest outside shareholder operates from Abu Dhabi. World Liberty co-founders Zach Witkoff and Zak Folkman announced a Mesh partnership on October 7, 2026, to make USD1 spendable at millions of merchants worldwide. USD1, the venture’s stablecoin, had a $4.45 billion market capitalization on CoinGecko that day. Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould had granted World Liberty preliminary conditional approval for a national trust charter on August 14, 2026. A Trump family entity owns 38 percent of the stablecoin issuer, and President Trump personally owns 70 percent of that holding company. The president nominated Gould, and by April 2026 the charter applicant had paid him and his family more than $1.6 billion, Reuters calculated. Aryam Investment 1 bought 49 percent of World Liberty for $500 million on January 16, 2025, four days before the presidential inauguration. Trump family entities collected $187 million of that sum upfront, and Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Emirati national security adviser, backs Aryam. The sheikh leads MGX, a second Abu Dhabi fund, which used World Liberty’s USD1 stablecoin in 2025 to complete a $2 billion Binance investment. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao had served four months in prison on anti-money-laundering charges, and Trump pardoned him in October 2025, after the MGX deal. Former U.S. Pardon Attorney Elizabeth Oyer told 60 Minutes in November 2025 that the self-dealing in that clemency decision was unprecedented. Ten months after the sheikh’s vehicle paid Trump family entities $187 million, the administration approved over $1 billion in AI chips for his firm G42. Eight months later, the Commerce Department pledged favorable review for chips bound to MGX, the fund behind the USD1 deal. Federal bribery law imposes up to 15 years on officials who accept anything of value for official acts. Senators Jeff Merkley and Elizabeth Warren had warned in May 2025 that the USD1 deal may violate that law. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and special envoy for peace, negotiates with Iran alongside Witkoff while his firm, Affinity Partners, manages about $6.16 billion. House Judiciary Democrats reported in April 2026 that Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari sovereign funds lead the foreign investors who supplied 99 percent of that money. Affinity raised $1.2 billion of the total in the 12 months before the April 2026 report, while Kushner negotiated for the administration. Donald Trump Jr.’s venture fund, 1789 Capital, where he serves as a named partner, joined Vulcan Elements’ $65 million Series A round in August 2025. The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital followed in November 2025 with a $620 million conditional loan, carrying equity warrants, to the magnet maker. The administration added $50 million under the CHIPS and Science Act, which lifted federal support to $670 million. Bloomberg reported in January 2026 that investors discussed a Vulcan valuation near $2 billion. Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. invested in Skyline Builders through a Dominari Securities vehicle in August 2025. Skyline agreed on October 31, 2025, to pay $20 million for 20 percent of Kaz Resources, a Cove Capital portfolio company. Six days later, on November 6, 2025, Cove Kaz announced a joint venture with Kazakhstan’s national mining company. The Export-Import Bank and Development Finance Corporation had issued letters of interest of up to $1.6 billion for the venture’s tungsten mines. Skyline, the Trump-backed shell, agreed on April 30, 2026, to merge with the two tungsten companies under the planned Nasdaq ticker KAZR. “I want the equivalent of like $500 billion worth of rare earth.”— President Donald Trump, on Ukraine, February 10, 2025 Public Citizen’s Melinda St. Louis told the Ways and Means Committee on September 2, 2026, that public records confirmed 27 of 38 claimed minerals deals. The administration has not published some agreement texts or named every participating country. On July 22, 2026, the Democratic Republic of the Congo convened a day-long UN Security Council debate on critical minerals and armed conflict. Secretary-General António Guterres told the 15 members, “No more exploitation. No more plundering.” Colombia, which signed a U.S. minerals framework seven weeks later, warned against repeating the extraction costs of the colonial era. The Security Council adopted zero binding resolutions or plans of action. The administration practices the same plunder at home that Guterres condemned abroad, on sacred Apache land and across protected public land. On March 13, 2026, federal officials handed Oak Flat, a San Carlos Apache ceremonial site in Arizona, to Resolution Copper. Rio Tinto and BHP, the venture’s owners, project up to 40 billion pounds of copper from the deposit over 40 years. The Ninth Circuit conceded that the mine will destroy sites sacred to the tribe, then lifted the injunction blocking the handover. Trump approved the 211-mile Ambler Road on October 6, 2025, and the road cuts 26 miles through Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. The administration took a 10 percent stake that day in Trilogy Metals, the Canadian company developing the mining district at the road’s end. The stake makes the federal government a part-owner of the miner that stands to profit from the road through protected parkland. Andrónico Luksic, the Chilean billionaire whose family controls the mining company Antofagasta, rented his Washington house to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump in 2017. Trump’s Interior Department renewed the leases of Antofagasta’s subsidiary, Twin Metals, in May 2019. On April 27, 2026, Trump signed a resolution lifting a 20-year mining ban near Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The repeal reopened the Superior National Forest to Twin Metals for copper and nickel mining. Trump cut Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, two Utah monuments created to protect more than 100,000 ancestral sites, by about 90 percent in July 2026. Kimmerle Mining staked claims inside the former Bears Ears boundary within 24 hours, weeks before the land legally opened to claims on September 11. Sixteen more claims followed once the protections expired, and the Grand Canyon Trust calls the early claims illegal. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”— President Donald Trump, asked what limits his global power, January 7, 2026 Mob outfits threaten to cut off a contractor’s concrete, a restaurant’s linen deliveries, or a site’s labor until the owner pays protection money. Bosses burn one holdout’s business so every owner on the block pays, and they demand a cut of companies they never built. Mob leaders also put sons and nephews on no-show payroll jobs and bribe the prosecutors and judges who can stop a case. Federal prosecutors charge those shakedowns as Hobbs Act extortion and racketeering conspiracy, and each count carries up to 20 years in federal prison. Article 2(b) sets the treaty’s serious-crime threshold far lower, at a maximum sentence of four years or more. Nine Democratic senators and independent Bernie Sanders introduced the Ending Presidential Corruption in Banking Act in August 2026, and zero Republicans signed on at introduction. Zhao’s Bank Secrecy Act conviction, the offense Trump pardoned, carried a statutory maximum of 10 years, two and a half times the Article 2(b) threshold. A crime syndicate with 3,700 nuclear warheads exploits the vulnerabilities of sovereign nations, from Zambia’s dependence on HIV aid to Ukraine’s war with Russia. The envoys hand each target a mob boss’s ultimatum: surrender rare earths or face punishing tariffs and American troops. China refines most of that ore and controls roughly 600 nuclear warheads, so one shakedown over the supply can trigger a third world war. Rare earths form the Republican crime syndicate’s most nefarious racket, because collecting them could kill millions in a nuclear war. *Editor’s note: A country-by-country list of the administration’s mineral pursuits appears in the addendum following the sources. Sources
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