Staff of The New York Times
Winning Work
World Liberty Financial has eviscerated the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in ways without precedent in modern American history.
By Eric Lipton, David Yaffe-Bellany and Ben Protess
The pitch from “ZMoney” arrived on the encrypted messaging app Signal just days before Donald J. Trump’s presidential inauguration.
“ZMoney” was Zachary Folkman, an entrepreneur who once ran a company called Date Hotter Girls and was now representing World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency firm that Mr. Trump and his sons had recently unveiled. Mr. Folkman was writing to a crypto startup in the Cayman Islands, offering a “partnership” in which the firms would buy each other’s digital coins, a deal that would bolster the startup’s public profile.
But there was a catch, The New York Times found. For the privilege of associating with the Trumps, the startup would have to make, in effect, a secret multimillion dollar payment to World Liberty.
“Everything we do gets a lot of exposure and credibility,” Mr. Folkman wrote, asserting that other business partners had committed between $10 million and $30 million to World Liberty.
The Cayman startup rejected the offer, as did several other firms that received a similar pitch from World Liberty, executives said. They considered the deal unethical, concluding that World Liberty was essentially selling an endorsement — and hiding the arrangement from the public.
World Liberty’s executives, who have maintained that they did nothing improper, were undeterred. They successfully pitched similar deals to other firms while also marketing their coin to buyers around the world, reaping more than $550 million in sales, with a large cut earmarked for the president’s family.
Mr. Trump’s return to the White House has opened lucrative new pathways for him to cash in on his power, whether through his social media company or new overseas real estate deals. But none of the Trump family’s other business endeavors pose conflicts of interest that compare to those that have emerged since the birth of World Liberty.
The firm, largely owned by a Trump family corporate entity, has erased centuries-old presidential norms, eviscerating the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in a manner without precedent in modern American history.
Mr. Trump is now not only a major crypto dealer; he is also the industry’s top policy maker. So far in his second term, Mr. Trump has leveraged his presidential powers in ways that have benefited the industry — and in some cases his own company — even though he had spent years deriding crypto as a haven for drug dealers and scammers.
He has filled his administration with sympathizers to the crypto cause, including by appointing a former adviser to industry players as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition, the Justice Department recently disbanded a crypto crimes task force, continuing a broader unwinding of Biden-era scrutiny of the industry.
A Times examination of World Liberty’s rapid ascent from fledgling startup to international force — and Mr. Trump’s conversion from crypto skeptic to industry cheerleader — highlights the range of conflicts of interest trailing the company:
World Liberty has directly benefited from Mr. Trump’s official actions, such as his announcement of a federal crypto stockpile that would include a digital currency the firm has invested in. The president’s announcement caused a temporary jump in the value of World Liberty’s holdings.
World Liberty has sold its cryptocurrency to investors abroad, including in Israel and Hong Kong, according to interviews and data obtained by The Times, establishing a new avenue for foreign businesses to try to curry favor with Mr. Trump.
Several investors in World Liberty’s coin managed firms that the federal government accused of wrongdoing. They include an executive whose fraud case was suspended after he invested millions of dollars in World Liberty. Other investors and business partners, some of whom haven’t been publicly identified before, are looking to expand in ways that will require the Trump administration’s approval.
World Liberty proposed swapping cryptocurrencies with at least five start-ups, and often used the Trump name to solicit steep payments as part of the deals. Even in an industry with a disreputable history, the deals raised alarm among veteran executives.
“It’s a black spot on our industry,” said Andre Cronje, a founder of SonicLabs, a crypto firm that turned down World Liberty’s pitch. Anyone who accepted would “obviously think they’re going to make money because it’s the officially endorsed Trump project.”
A spokesman for World Liberty, David Wachsman, disputed that any of the company’s deals constituted a “one-sided payment for services rendered.” But he acknowledged that the company has engaged in “mutual investment deals,” and said that its deal-making had resulted in “thoughtful, strategic exchanges between parties who stand to mutually benefit.”
Mr. Wachsman also said it would be “false, absurd and dangerous to suggest that investments or partnerships with World Liberty Financial were conducted as some sort of political quid pro quo.”
“Never has an investor or partner requested any political favoritism,” he said. “Nor would we ever entertain such a possibility.”
Still, the company’s deal-making benefits the president’s family. A Trump business entity owns 60 percent of World Liberty, according to the company’s website, and is entitled to 75 percent of certain revenue from coin sales, which could be converted into cash.
“It’s one of the more successful things we’ve ever done,” Eric Trump, the president’s son who runs the family business, said in an interview this month at the Trump Doral golf course in Florida.
He and his older brother, Donald Trump Jr., are actively involved in World Liberty, though they rely on three partners to oversee the daily operations. Two of them, Mr. Folkman and Chase Herro, have a mixed track record in crypto. The other is Zach Witkoff, the son of Mr. Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, who is also a World Liberty founder.
In recent days, Zach Witkoff, Mr. Folkman and Mr. Herro were in Pakistan meeting with the country’s prime minister, Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif, and other top government officials to discuss World Liberty. The trip, complete with limousines, a dance performance and police escorts, seamlessly blended the president’s business interests with the trappings of a state visit. (Mr. Wachsman said no U.S. government officials were involved in the meetings.)
President Trump has noted that conflict of interest laws do not apply to him, and that he has broad immunity for official actions he takes as president.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for President Trump noted that his “assets are in a trust managed by his children,” and that as a result, “there are no conflicts of interest.” (The trust still benefits President Trump directly.)
World Liberty’s supporters are unbothered by questions about conflicts.
“Trump wants to make a lot of money in crypto,” Konstantin Kuznetsov, a Russian citizen living in Miami whose Gibraltar-based firm bought $1 million of World Liberty’s coins, said in an interview. “We can join in this wave.”
Chief Crypto Advocate
As a businessman who made his name in the tactile world of real estate, Donald Trump never aspired to build a digital coin empire.
Indeed, at the end of his first term, Mr. Trump turned to social media to express disdain for cryptocurrencies.
They “are not money,” he warned. Their “value is highly volatile and based on thin air.”
By last year, his views had begun to shift.
His older sons had become enthusiastic crypto proponents after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol effectively exiled the family business from the mainstream financial system.
“We built and sold and held real estate forever. And for a long period of time, I had access to everyone in the world,” Donald Trump Jr. explained in a live video appearance at a crypto conference in Washington last month. “All of a sudden that became really difficult. And I sort of realized very quickly just how much discrimination there is in the ordinary financial markets.”
The change of heart also coincided with an influx of millions of dollars in campaign contributions from the crypto industry into the Trump re-election effort. Under the Biden administration, the industry had faced nearly 100 enforcement actions by the S.E.C., and crypto executives wanted a leader to champion their interests in Washington.
During his campaign stumps, Mr. Trump’s qualms about crypto appeared to vanish. At a Bitcoin conference in July, he vowed to turn the United States into the “crypto capital of the planet.”
Two months later, Mr. Trump completed his conversion, announcing that he and his sons would enter the crypto marketplace with a new venture called World Liberty Financial.
Mr. Trump delivered the news in a livestream at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, where he had gathered with Eric and Donald Jr., along with Mr. Herro and Mr. Folkman.
“Crypto is one of those things we have to do,” Mr. Trump said. “Whether we like it or not, I have to do it.”
Mr. Herro and Mr. Folkman were unusual choices to partner with a president.
Mr. Folkman, who has short curly hair and tattoos, ran a company in his 20s tutoring forlorn men on how to pick up women. In numerous podcast appearances, Mr. Herro has recounted his life’s redemption arc, describing a wild youth in which he was charged with marijuana possession and spent a couple of weeks in a Wisconsin jail.
The two men had worked together for years, selling everything from colon cleanses to get-rich-quick advice, before pivoting to crypto with uneven results.
In 2022, Mr. Herro urged a roomful of crypto enthusiasts to invest in the currency TerraUSD, calling it “one of the coolest assets in history.” The coin imploded a month later, erasing billions of dollars in wealth. Mr. Herro’s most recent venture with Mr. Folkman was a crypto platform called Dough Finance, which was hacked in July, leading to the theft of $2 million.
It’s not clear exactly how the pair earned the Trumps’ trust. But Steve Witkoff said last year that he met them through his son, and then introduced them to the family.
On the livestream introducing World Liberty, Donald Trump Jr. hailed the men as first-class financial minds.
“You could put them in a boardroom at Goldman Sachs, and they’re going to smoke the people in the room,” he said.
In October, Mr. Herro and Mr. Folkman got to work on the company’s first initiative — selling a new cryptocurrency, which it called $WLFI, with the goal of $300 million in sales.
These coins would be different from $TRUMP — the so-called memecoin that spiked in January after Mr. Trump marketed it to his followers before it abruptly crashed.
World Liberty, at least according to its marketing pitch, eventually plans to operate as a new type of internet bank that would allow customers to borrow and lend money in various digital currencies. Anyone who bought the $WLFI coins would get to vote on certain bank business decisions like shareholders in a traditional company.
Mr. Trump was at the core of the pitch. The company published a 13-page “Gold Paper” that described its mission and leadership team. On the cover was a portrait of Mr. Trump, styled to look as if gold paint had been splashed across the page.
He would serve as the company’s “Chief Crypto Advocate,” the paper said.
When World Liberty launched, the Trump family and its affiliates were given 22.5 billion units of the crypto coins — a stash now worth at least $1.1 billion on paper, depending on the various prices used in recent sales.
Under the company’s rules, the Trumps and other World Liberty investors are not allowed to sell their coins on the open market, though the company has said it might eventually lift that restriction if other buyers of the coin agree.
Initially, there were few buyers. By the end of October, World Liberty had sold only $2.7 million worth of the coins, a tiny fraction of its goal.
Election Day was a game changer.
A Flood of Investors
With polls closed in most of America and Mr. Trump on his way to victory, the World Liberty account on X posted a celebratory message on Nov. 5: “Big things on the horizon.”
Soon a surge of investment flowed into World Liberty’s cryptocurrency.
Most crypto purchases are recorded on a public ledger called the blockchain, with the buyers and sellers largely anonymized. But World Liberty has said it performs extensive checks on investors in its coin, so it knows who they are.
An analysis performed for The Times by the forensics firm Nansen, drawing on crypto industry data, showed that many of the investors were based abroad in places like Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates.
Federal law prevents foreigners from donating to presidential campaigns or inaugural funds, but World Liberty’s coin sale offered a new, legal way to back Mr. Trump.
“The main reason for purchasing such a token was to support Trump’s inauguration, as he was the first crypto-friendly president of the United States,” said Keer Lau, chief strategy officer at Orbiter Finance, a Hong Kong-based entity.
Some investors, domestic and overseas, have managed firms that ran afoul of U.S. regulations. One was Yoni Assia, an Israeli who founded eToro, an online trading platform whose U.S. subsidiary reached a $1.5 million settlement with the S.E.C. last year for crypto-related violations. Troy Murray, a Puerto Rico-based investor, also bought World Liberty’s coin. Before that, he had helped create BarnBridge, which in late 2023 agreed to pay the S.E.C. $1.7 million to settle its own crypto-related accusations.
Since Mr. Trump took office, some World Liberty investors have pushed the government for regulatory approvals, or are poised to interact with the administration as they try to build or expand businesses in the United States.
In March, Mr. Assia’s company notified the S.E.C. that it intended to go public in the United States. DWF Labs, a crypto firm based in the United Arab Emirates, announced this month that it had bought $25 million of $WLFI — and that it was opening a New York office.
“Our visibility in the U.S. has been increased because of this deal,” Andrei Grachev, the managing partner of DWF Labs, said in an interview. “We would like to have direct dialogue with the policymakers.”
The crypto executive with perhaps the most to gain from his affiliation with World Liberty is Justin Sun, a Chinese billionaire who founded the crypto platform Tron.
Mr. Sun gained global attention late last year, when he spent $6.2 million at an art auction to buy a banana that had been duct taped to a wall. Not long after, Mr. Sun made another headline-grabbing maneuver: He spent $75 million on $WLFI coins.
The investment drew widespread criticism given that Mr. Sun had a clear incentive to gain favor with the Trump White House. During the Biden administration, the S.E.C. sued Mr. Sun, arguing that he had fraudulently inflated the price of a Tron cryptocurrency.
Mr. Sun has denied the S.E.C.’s charges, and in a text message to The Times last year, he said his World Liberty investment was simply a vote of confidence in the Trump family’s “excellent project.”
In late February, the S.E.C. asked a federal judge to halt proceedings in Mr. Sun’s case: The agency said it was exploring “a potential resolution.” The judge granted the stay.
The Stars Align
Justin Sun gave World Liberty a big lift. But Mr. Trump’s company wanted more money. Much more.
So World Liberty executives soon announced what they called “a transformative initiative” to partner with other crypto outfits and invest in their coins. The strategy, the executives said in February, would leverage World Liberty’s growing clout to help their lesser-known partners.
“It’s like taking care of your brother in the space,” Mr. Herro said at a crypto event in New York that month.
But World Liberty’s public pronouncements omitted a key aspect of its private pitch to several crypto startups, executives at these companies told The Times. World Liberty wanted to sell its own coin — not just to invest in others’. It was proposing a currency swap.
Here is the deal World Liberty offered, according to executives at three crypto firms approached by the company: The startups would spend between $10 million and $30 million on a large chunk of World Liberty’s coins. In return, World Liberty would buy a smaller amount of each startup’s own cryptocurrency. World Liberty would keep the rest of the money for itself — a premium as high as 20 percent.
World Liberty’s purchases would signal to the market that Mr. Trump’s firm had deemed the startups worthy of investment. But the market would have no way of knowing that World Liberty had been compensated for that endorsement. Some details of a similar pitch from World Liberty were previously reported by Blockworks, an industry news outlet.
“They kept telling us, ‘We’re like, we’re super close to Trump,’” said Mike Silagadze, the chief executive of Ether.Fi, a crypto startup that World Liberty approached.
“We immediately rejected,” said Dominik Schiener, who founded the IOTA Foundation, a Berlin-based group that also received the pitch. “It’s a very dishonest approach.”
In his statement, Mr. Wachsman, the World Liberty spokesman, said The Times’s reporting contained “fundamental misunderstandings about standard industry practices” and called the company’s business arrangements “not only common in the blockchain industry but essential for creating lasting economic alignments in business, generally.”
“These arrangements establish skin in the game for all parties,” he added.
The benefits of a partnership were enough to attract at least five crypto firms to strike other deals with World Liberty, without disclosing details of the financial arrangements, The Times found.
In one deal, the Sui Foundation, a U.S.-based group, announced that World Liberty would buy an unspecified amount of its cryptocurrency, prompting Sui’s price to jump more than 10 percent. As part of the arrangement, the foundation was slated to receive World Liberty’s coins in return, said two people familiar with the deal who requested anonymity to discuss private negotiations.
Other World Liberty partnerships have shown how Mr. Trump is mixing his official role with his business. In December, the company announced that it would use technology designed by a startup based in Lisbon, Ethena Labs. It also bought more than $5 million of Ethena’s cryptocurrency.
One of Ethena’s investors is Arthur Hayes, a crypto entrepreneur who pleaded guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act in 2022 and was sentenced to six months of home detention. Last month, Mr. Trump granted Mr. Hayes a pardon. (A spokesman who represents both Ethena and Mr. Hayes declined to comment.)
Another World Liberty partner is Ondo Finance, a New York-based startup backed by Founders Fund, the conservative billionaire Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm.
World Liberty made its first purchase of Ondo’s coins in December, buying more than 130,000 of them. The transaction at least briefly helped drive up the price of Ondo’s coin, drawing headlines in crypto news sites celebrating World Liberty’s bet.
In January, Ondo donated $1 million to Mr. Trump’s inauguration, securing an invite to a candlelight dinner at the National Building Museum in Washington, where the guest list included several of Mr. Trump’s cabinet nominees. Ondo also helped sponsor an inauguration event called the Crypto Ball. Soon after, Donald Trump Jr. and World Liberty’s management team were headliners at a conference Ondo organized in New York.
“This is a moment we weren’t sure was gonna happen,” Ian De Bode, Ondo’s chief strategy officer, said from the stage. “But sometimes the stars align.”
‘Thank Me Later’
In February, Eric Trump passed along some investment advice to his followers on Elon Musk’s social media platform, X: “In my opinion, it’s a great time to add $ETH.”
It was the ticker symbol for a digital coin called Ether. “You can thank me later,” he added, before deleting that line.
His advice proved prescient.
The next month, his father announced the creation of a “U.S. Crypto Reserve” — a Fort Knox-like repository of cryptocurrencies intended to help bolster the industry.
Mr. Trump’s announcement included a list of digital currencies to go into the stockpile. Along with Bitcoin, he included Ether, saying it would be “at the heart of the Reserve.”
Ether’s price surged more than 13 percent.
The spike had an immediate beneficiary: World Liberty. Over the previous few months, the company had bought $240 million worth of Ether, according to Arkham, a crypto data firm.
The day the president announced the crypto reserve, the value of World Liberty’s Ether stash rose by $33 million, assuming it had not sold any of its holdings. That gain was later lost as Ether declined in value.
That same pattern — Mr. Trump making policy pronouncements or posting messages that intersected with World Liberty’s business interests — occurred again in March.
In a video feed at a crypto conference in New York, Mr. Trump called on Congress to pass legislation governing stablecoins, a type of crypto designed to maintain a value of $1.
Both the Senate and the House have introduced bills that would make it easier for firms issuing stablecoins to operate in the United States. In his remarks last month, Mr. Trump said that the rise of stablecoins would “expand the dominance of the U.S. dollar.”
A week later, World Liberty announced it was releasing its own stablecoin, USD1. “The future is here, and it is so bright!” Zach Witkoff wrote on X.
Jordi Alexander, a crypto executive who helped World Liberty with its plans to launch its stablecoin, said in an interview that the company had already secured commitments of at least $1 billion from investors to buy the stablecoin once it hits the market. On Tuesday, Zach Witkoff confirmed that World Liberty had reached that mark.
The new venture will only compound World Liberty’s ethical conflicts. The company plans to offer USD1 on a platform developed by Binance, a giant exchange that settled criminal charges with the Justice Department in 2023. This week, Mr. Witkoff, Mr. Herro and Mr. Folkman met with Changpeng Zhao, Binance’s founder and former chief executive, in Abu Dhabi.
Mr. Zhao, who served four months in federal prison for money-laundering violations, has been seeking a pardon from the Trump administration, according to people familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. The pardon effort was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The overlap between Mr. Trump’s policy pronouncements and his business interests have alarmed congressional Democrats, who moved recently to amend the pending stablecoin legislation to bar the Trump family from issuing one.
The amendment failed, and none of the concerns about World Liberty have disrupted its momentum.
Last month, Mr. Witkoff was among a group of executives invited to the White House for a first-of-its-kind industry summit.
After the meeting, Mr. Witkoff posted a photograph on social media of him smiling outside the White House next to Mr. Herro and Mr. Folkman.
“Thank you Mr. President,” Mr. Witkoff wrote.
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
A lucrative transaction involving the Trump family’s cryptocurrency firm and an agreement giving the Emiratis access to A.I. chips were connected in ways that have not been previously reported.
By Eric Lipton, David Yaffe-Bellany, Bradley Hope, Tripp Mickle and Paul Mozur
This summer, Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East envoy, paid a visit to the coast of Sardinia, a stretch of the Mediterranean Sea crowded with super yachts.
On one of those extravagant vessels, Mr. Witkoff sat down with a member of the ultrarich ruling family of the United Arab Emirates. He was meeting Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a trim figure in dark glasses who controls $1.5 trillion of the Emiratis’ sovereign wealth.
It was the latest engagement in a consequential alliance.
Over the past few months, Mr. Witkoff and Sheikh Tahnoon had become both diplomatic allies and business partners, testing the limits of ethics rules while enriching the president, his family and his inner circle, according to an investigation by The New York Times.
At the heart of their relationship are two multibillion-dollar deals. One involved a crypto company founded by the Witkoff and the Trump families that benefited both financially. The other involved a sale of valuable computer chips that benefited the Emirates economically.
While there is no evidence that one deal was explicitly offered in return for the other, the confluence of the two agreements is itself extraordinary. Taken together, they blurred the lines between personal and government business and raised questions about whether U.S. interests were served.
In May, Mr. Witkoff’s son Zach announced the first of the deals at a conference in Dubai. One of Sheikh Tahnoon’s investment firms would deposit $2 billion into World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency start-up founded by the Witkoffs and Trumps.
Two weeks later, the White House agreed to allow the U.A.E. access to hundreds of thousands of the world’s most advanced and scarce computer chips, a crucial tool in the high-stakes race to dominate artificial intelligence. Many of the chips would go to G42, a sprawling technology firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon, despite national security concerns that the chips could be shared with China.
Those negotiations involved another key White House official with ties to the tech industry and to the Middle East: David Sacks. A longtime venture capitalist, Mr. Sacks serves as the administration’s A.I. and crypto czar, a newly created position that has allowed him to shape tech policy even as he continues to work in Silicon Valley.
The Times found that the agreements were intertwined in ways that have not been previously reported and that they provoked concerns about conflicts of interest even from staff members in the Trump administration.
The Times reviewed correspondence and interviewed more than 75 people, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive matters, to reveal new details that show how the deals got done:
Steve Witkoff advocated to give the Emirates access to the chips at the same time that his and Mr. Trump’s family business was landing the crypto investment, despite an ethics rule intended to prohibit officials from participating in matters that could benefit themselves or their relatives.
Mr. Sacks was a key figure in the chip negotiations, raising alarm from some Trump administration officials who believed that it was improper for a working venture capitalist to help broker deals that could benefit his industry and investors in his company. He received a White House ethics waiver allowing him to participate.
A senior executive based in the U.A.E. worked simultaneously for World Liberty and Sheikh Tahnoon’s G42, creating a link between the two companies as the Emiratis were pushing to gain access to A.I. chips.
Some Trump administration officials tried to limit the chips deal, but an unexpected intervention by the conservative agitator Laura Loomer changed the power dynamic within the White House in the U.A.E.’s favor.
Representatives for the White House and World Liberty both denied any connection between the two deals, with an administration spokeswoman calling the crypto transaction “totally unrelated to any government business.”
World Liberty said in May that Mr. Witkoff was fully divesting from the company. A disclosure document made public on Saturday showed that, as of August, he still had a financial interest in the firm, though it did not reveal the value. The White House spokeswoman said in a statement that Mr. Witkoff was “still in the process of divesting.”
Asked whether Mr. Witkoff violated federal ethics rules, the spokeswoman responded that Mr. Witkoff was “working with ethics officials and counsel to ensure he is in full compliance.”
The White House statement also said that Mr. Sacks had acted appropriately. “Mr. Sacks has no financial interest in the U.A.E. chip deal,” the statement said.
And a spokesman for G42 said the company was “grounded in integrity” and committed to safeguards, auditing, and coordination with the Americans to ensure that U.S. technology does not get into the wrong hands.
Already the two deals have been transformative.
The first instantly propelled World Liberty into one of the world’s most prominent crypto companies, giving it a revenue stream that could be worth tens of millions of dollars annually.
The second is still pending, with final details under discussion in the White House. But it is poised to be a monumental victory for the Emirates. The Trump administration agreed to exponentially increase the U.A.E.’s access to one of the most important inventions in modern history.
The back-to-back deals violate longstanding norms in the United States for political, diplomatic and private deal-making among senior officials and their children, according to three ethics lawyers interviewed by The Times. And they have generated alarm among some former government officials.
“If you’re the president of the United States, you want to be making national security decisions in the American interest — not the commercial interests of the people involved,” said Brad Carson, a former Army under secretary who runs a bipartisan nonprofit that advises the government on A.I.
In the middle of both deals was Mr. Trump, a president who has used his power to enrich himself in ways that have little modern precedent, at least in the United States. It is more reminiscent of business customs in the Persian Gulf, where moneymaking and governance are blended in the hands of the ruling families.
“We really need to take a page out of His Highness’s and the Emirates’ book,” Zach Witkoff said at the Dubai conference. “They are just an amazing example of how you can lead with innovation while also maintaining your family values.”
A Blurring of Lines
Sheikh Tahnoon, 56, has long had an air of mystery. Because of an eye condition, he is rarely seen without a pair of shades, even when meeting with world leaders.
For years, Sheikh Tahnoon has served as the U.A.E.’s national security adviser, surrounding himself with comrades who include a British ex-spy and the former prime minister of Lebanon. He became embroiled in a spying scandal in 2019, when it emerged that operatives hired by the Emirates were targeting human rights activists including Ahmed Mansoor, whose baby monitor they hacked to spy on his family.
By 2023, Sheikh Tahnoon had also taken on a new role, as the key orchestrator behind the royal family’s sovereign wealth. With more than $1 trillion of government money at his disposal, Sheikh Tahnoon was intent on turning his tiny oil-rich nation into a technological powerhouse.
The riches financed G42, a sprawling enterprise that Sheikh Tahnoon personally controls with an A.I. business and cutting-edge ventures in genomics and cloud computing.
But as advances in A.I. technology became a phenomenon, it was clear that G42 lacked a crucial tool: the world’s most powerful computer chips. This technology is designed primarily by U.S. companies, particularly Nvidia. The United States had export policies that limited sales to certain foreign countries to prevent the technology’s misuse.
Sheikh Tahnoon approached the Biden White House, seeking access to these chips. The outreach included a high-level meeting with Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary for President Joseph R. Biden, on the sheikh’s luxury yacht, according to two former U.S. officials.
Nvidia was enthusiastic about selling its products in a new market. But Mr. Biden’s national security staff and some U.S. intelligence officials had serious doubts.
The Emirates had performed joint exercises with the Chinese military, and G42 had formed wide-ranging business partnerships with Chinese tech companies. U.S. officials worried that China might gain access to Emirati data centers, accelerating its efforts to build A.I.-enhanced weapons that could someday be deployed against American soldiers.
Alan Estevez, who was an under secretary of commerce in the Biden administration, recalled telling Sheikh Tahnoon that he could not share technology with both the United States and China.
“You’re going to have to make a choice,” Mr. Estevez recalled saying.
In the end, all the U.A.E. could extract from the Biden administration was a government-sanctioned deal with Microsoft that gave G42 access to a small number of the high-powered chips, with rules that limited what the Emirati firm could do with them. G42 also agreed to eliminate certain Chinese technology from its operations.
Mr. Trump’s election victory in 2024 opened new doors.
Suddenly Sheikh Tahnoon had allies in Washington who loved making deals. Among them was Steve Witkoff.
Mr. Witkoff, 68, met Mr. Trump about four decades ago as a young lawyer working with bigwig real estate executives in New York. They became golfing buddies and close confidants.
Two months before Election Day, they went into business together. Mr. Witkoff, Mr. Trump and their sons appeared on a social media stream to announce that they were starting World Liberty. An investor prospectus showed that the Trump and the Witkoff families would own large amounts of the company’s digital currency and receive a cut of the firm’s profits.
The election changed Mr. Witkoff’s life. He had never played any role in international diplomacy, but Mr. Trump gave him a broad portfolio including foreign wars and hostage negotiations.
He started his work while Mr. Biden was still in office. One of his first stops was the U.A.E. in December.
Immediately the division between government and family business started to blur.
First, Mr. Witkoff spoke behind closed doors at a major crypto conference in Abu Dhabi and met with Justin Sun, a Chinese-born billionaire who had recently invested $30 million in World Liberty.
Second, the trip gave Mr. Witkoff a chance to renew his relationships in the U.A.E., a source of capital that he had tapped during his real estate career.
In 2013 and again in 2019, the Emiratis had invested in a New York hotel that Mr. Witkoff’s real estate company had purchased, the Park Lane. Mr. Witkoff is also close with Marty Edelman, a New York lawyer who participated in the Park Lane deal and now works for Sheikh Tahnoon’s G42 as general counsel.
Whether Mr. Witkoff met with Sheikh Tahnoon on the December trip is disputed. A person briefed on the trip told The Times that they met around the time of the conference, confirming reports by Axios and The Wall Street Journal.
But a White House spokeswoman denied that any meeting took place in December, while confirming the subsequent get-together in Sardinia, which she said was focused on mediating international conflicts.
What is clear is that Mr. Witkoff was soon in the middle of overlapping billion-dollar business deals with Sheikh Tahnoon.
His son Zach, a founder of World Liberty, kept tabs on the Middle East discussions. In private conversations last year, he alluded to high-level meetings in the region, according to a person familiar with the matter and messages viewed by The Times.
Sheikh Tahnoon had become “a good friend of the family,” Zach Witkoff told an associate.
A Raging Debate
Just blocks from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, on the edge of the Potomac River, the U.A.E. has its own Washington-area operations hub.
In March, the Emiratis hosted an extraordinary procession of guests there. Sheikh Tahnoon was in town, hoping to make a deal.
The visitors included cabinet members like Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Some of the biggest names in tech also traveled to the compound, including Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft. Joining via video link was Jensen Huang, the founder of Nvidia, whose chips were critical to the Emiratis’ plans.
In the middle of that week, Mr. Trump hosted Sheikh Tahnoon for dinner, alongside Vice President JD Vance and much of the cabinet. Mr. Witkoff sat next to the sheikh, who was across from the president. At the end of the table sat Mr. Witkoff’s old friend, Mr. Edelman — the G42 general counsel.
It looked to be an image of harmony for Sheikh Tahnoon.
Behind the scenes, however, there was discord. The sheikh wanted an export policy that would give the U.A.E. more access to the most advanced American-designed A.I. chips.
Several administration officials, including members of the National Security Council, preferred to tighten export rules, primarily to prevent China’s access to the chips. One of them was David Feith, who had served in the State Department during Mr. Trump’s first term and helped shape the administration’s aggressive stance on China.
Mr. Feith, who had returned in the second term as senior director for technology on the National Security Council, pushed what he and colleagues called the “America First” A.I. chips plan. It would restrict foreign access to the most advanced chips for at least a year, in conflict with Sheikh Tahnoon’s demands.
But in early April, not long after Sheikh Tahnoon’s visit to Washington, Mr. Trump fired six security council officials, including Mr. Feith. The dismissals came after a roughly 30-minute meeting between Mr. Trump and Ms. Loomer.
Ms. Loomer said her opposition to Mr. Feith had to do, in part, with his father’s political views when he was serving in the administration of President George W. Bush. She said it did not pertain to the chips negotiations.
The firing turned the tide for the U.A.E.
With Mr. Feith out of the way, Mr. Sacks, the A.I. and crypto czar, became a key figure in the negotiations.
Mr. Sacks, 53, was one of the early executives at PayPal with Elon Musk and later became a Silicon Valley investor, an influential podcaster and a major Trump fund-raiser.
He adopted the view of many tech executives who believed that the United States could lead the A.I. revolution by ensuring that domestically designed chips powered data centers the world over.
With appropriate safeguards, chip sales to the Middle East should be effectively unlimited, Mr. Sacks contended in meetings starting in late April, one of which included Emirati diplomats.
“The choice is do we want these countries to be the piggy bank for American A.I. or for Chinese A.I.?” Mr. Sacks said on a podcast in May.
His vocal support left other U.S. negotiators frustrated, fearing that it had cost them leverage to demand concessions, like a curb on military ties between the Emirates and China.
Some administration colleagues also expressed concern because Mr. Sacks had once invested in the A.I. industry and had longstanding business relationships in the Gulf, according to four people involved in the negotiations.
Early investors in Craft Ventures, the firm Mr. Sacks helped start in 2017, included the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, which is now overseen by Sheikh Tahnoon. Also among Craft’s investors was the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, another nation seeking A.I. chips. (A spokeswoman for Craft said the Emirati investment represented a “tiny percentage of Craft’s funds.”)
Until at least March, Mr. Sacks, who is still working at Craft, was also invested in a stock fund that included the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which builds Nvidia’s chips, and other A.I.-related companies such as Amazon and Meta. (The size of those stakes isn’t publicly known.)
The White House recognized that Mr. Sacks’s investments could present a problem. On March 31, the White House counsel, David Warrington, signed a letter that granted Mr. Sacks special permission to participate in government decisions that might affect his financial holdings. Without the waiver, those kinds of actions could violate a conflict of interest law.
The waiver came less than two weeks after Sheikh Tahnoon announced that he had met with Mr. Sacks in Washington to discuss A.I. “investment opportunities.”
The waiver was justified, Mr. Warrington wrote, because Mr. Sacks’s personal investments in A.I. were worth less than 2 percent of his total holdings, while Craft’s A.I. shares accounted for less than 1 percent. Mr. Sacks and Craft were also in the process of selling almost all of their remaining stakes in A.I. firms, with the last of them to be sold by the end of June.
Mr. Sacks brought “a unique and invaluable perspective” to the White House, Mr. Warrington wrote.
A Craft spokeswoman said Mr. Sacks had honored ethical standards and completed the promised divestments, though she would not specify when. In its statement, the White House said that Mr. Sacks’s conversation with Sheikh Tahnoon in March was part of a series of “meet-and-greets” and that Mr. Sacks did not join the chip negotiations until May.
Mr. Sacks did not know any U.A.E. representatives before his government service and “participated in the negotiations for the sole purpose of advancing administration policy,” the statement said.
As the negotiations over the chip exports continued, some White House officials noticed that Mr. Sacks had an ally in Mr. Witkoff, who was seen as a valuable supporter for the U.A.E., because he had Mr. Trump’s ear, according to four administration officials.
While the chips debate raged, the Emiratis floated an even bigger request.
They wanted the Trump administration to sign off on a plan for TSMC to build a chip factory in the U.A.E., even as the United States was providing billions of dollars in subsidies for the company to build one in Arizona. Several senior administration officials emphasized that they would not support the U.A.E. plant, according to four participants in the discussions.
At a meeting in the spring, Mr. Witkoff discussed the plan with TSMC executives and Emirati officials, arguing that it was not the right time to push for the factory, according to three people with direct knowledge of the conversation. A White House official disputed this account, saying Mr. Witkoff “was not in those meetings.”
Behind the scenes, the topic surfaced again, and Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Sacks both pushed for the factory to be built in the months that followed, the people with knowledge said.
And in private correspondence, a G42 executive described an effort to enlist Mr. Witkoff’s help with the Commerce Department, which had to sign off on any export deals and was moving cautiously, according to text messages reviewed by The Times. In one message, Talal Al Kaissi, a government affairs executive at G42, praised Mr. Witkoff and said that a company official was seeking his assistance.
The White House spokeswoman disputed that the executive asked Mr. Witkoff to help with the Commerce Department. She acknowledged that Mr. Witkoff was “briefed” on the overall chip discussions, but she maintained that “he did not participate,” an important standard in federal ethics rules that prohibit government officials from taking part in matters that could benefit their families.
An email arrived in early May in the inboxes of U.S. officials working on the negotiations. A new proposal increased the number of chips that would be sent to the U.A.E. in the coming years from about 100,000 a year to 500,000, with a fifth of them slated for G42.
Many of these chips would be the most advanced on the market. In return, the Emiratis would spend hundreds of billions over a decade to bolster U.S. industrial growth, including investments in A.I., according to the Trump administration. (The final deal did not include approvals for the TSMC factory in the U.A.E.)
Several top officials tried to block the new proposal or make tweaks to toughen the demands on the Emiratis before any deal was signed, according to the Trump administration officials with knowledge of the deliberations.
What most disturbed these dissenting officials was that the White House was asking so little from Sheikh Tahnoon. They had hoped for an upfront guarantee that the Emirates would cancel military exercises with China or stop sharing technology with Chinese companies.
But Mr. Sacks argued that additional demands could scuttle the deal and that security guarantees would be worked out in subsequent negotiations. And Mr. Witkoff told senior White House officials that it was vital to complete the deal before Mr. Trump’s upcoming trip to the Middle East, two people familiar with the matter said.
By mid-May, Mr. Sacks, Mr. Witkoff and Sheikh Tahnoon had prevailed.
Dual Roles
While the chips deal was being hashed out, another alliance with the U.A.E. was taking shape.
Until last year, Zach Witkoff, 32, was virtually unknown in the crypto world. But while his father was jetting around the world on White House duty, the younger Mr. Witkoff transformed into a crypto superstar — the face of World Liberty.
Even if his father divested from the company, he would remain one of its primary leaders. In March, he joined a group of the industry’s most powerful executives for a gathering at the White House headlined by Mr. Trump and Mr. Sacks. He celebrated the birth of his son by naming him “Don,” after the president.
But the highlight was an announcement on March 25, just days after Sheikh Tahnoon’s dinner at the White House.
In a post on X, Zach Witkoff revealed that World Liberty would begin selling a stablecoin. These crypto coins maintain a fixed price of $1, making them easier to use than digital currencies like Bitcoin, which fluctuate in value.
Stablecoins are hugely profitable, because issuers like World Liberty can accept deposits from investors, give them stablecoins in return and then invest the deposits to generate a yield.
World Liberty’s stablecoin would be called USD1, Zach Witkoff said, and was tailored to “sovereign investors and major institutions.”
The announcement also revealed that World Liberty was working with a company called BitGo, backed by Mr. Sacks’s Craft Ventures, that would store the reserves underlying the stablecoin. (A White House ethics waiver said that Craft’s stake in BitGo was small enough that it would not affect Mr. Sacks’s work.)
As a newcomer to the crypto industry, Zach Witkoff would need money and expertise to fulfill his lofty ambitions. He turned to the U.A.E.
Beginning in January, one of Sheikh Tahnoon’s lieutenants, Fiacc Larkin, a computer science expert who serves as G42’s head of crypto, joined World Liberty, where his title was “chief strategic adviser,” according to his LinkedIn profile and three people familiar with the matter.
Put plainly, while the U.A.E. was negotiating with the White House to secure chips for G42, a G42 employee was helping the Witkoffs and the Trumps make money.
Mr. Larkin did not respond to requests for comment. The G42 spokesman did not address questions about Mr. Larkin but said the company has rigorous protocols governing “professional conduct, external engagements and conflict of interest.”
In May, Zach Witkoff arrived at a luxury resort in Dubai to speak at Token2049, one of the world’s largest crypto conferences.
From the stage, Mr. Witkoff sang the praises of the Emirati royals. The U.A.E. was “just one incredible country,” he said, “the most innovative country on planet Earth today.”
He also revealed that World Liberty had just agreed to a deal with a company called MGX that G42 had helped establish. (Sheikh Tahnoon is MGX’s chairman.) MGX would use World Liberty’s USD1 stablecoin to complete a $2 billion investment in Binance, a giant crypto exchange, Mr. Witkoff announced.
It was the single largest investment in a crypto company ever, according to Binance. The transaction effectively handed World Liberty a $2 billion bank deposit, funds that the company could invest to generate returns in the tens of millions annually.
The transaction also created a financial link between the Trump family and Binance, a firm seeking relief from the U.S. government. Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, has applied for a presidential pardon, after he pleaded guilty to money-laundering violations in 2023.
“We thank MGX and Binance for their trust in us,” Zach Witkoff said in Dubai.
Asked whether the deal was designed to support the Trumps and Witkoffs or secure access to chips, an MGX spokeswoman said in a statement that the company had evaluated several possible stablecoins, assessing “business suitability, the jurisdiction and currency of assets backing the stablecoin, and compliance history.”
“On this basis MGX selected USD1,” the statement said.
‘Your Wonderful Brother’
It was the start of a succession of wins for the Witkoffs, the Trumps and the Emiratis.
In May, during a tour of the Middle East, the president made a stop in the U.A.E. to announce the chips deal. He was joined by Mr. Witkoff, Mr. Sacks, Sheikh Tahnoon and other Emirati leaders at Qasr Al Watan, the presidential palace.
The officials gathered around a scale model of the technology facilities that the U.A.E. intends to build, using the American chips that the Trump administration had agreed to share.
That agreement is still subject to final approval. But in Abu Dhabi, the negotiators touted the framework as historic.
“This partnership has taken a significant leap forward since you assumed office,” Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the president of the U.A.E., told Mr. Trump.
Standing beside the model, Mr. Trump praised the ability of Middle East leaders to move decisively.
“A very strong man, a brilliant man, a man of vision like few others,” Mr. Trump said of Sheikh Mohamed.
Then he added his appreciation for Sheikh Tahnoon, “your wonderful brother.”
Mr. Trump made no public mention of the $2 billion transaction with his family company.
Soon many of the key figures in the U.A.E. deals were reunited in Washington.
They gathered at a private club called Executive Branch that Donald Trump Jr., Mr. Trump’s eldest son, had helped open this year in the tony neighborhood of Georgetown.
Mr. Sacks and Steve Witkoff arrived for the grand opening in June, along with Zach Witkoff. Also among the guests was Mr. Huang of Nvidia, whose chips were set to be exported to the U.A.E. by the hundreds of thousands. And there in the crowd was the Emirati ambassador to the United States.
They had much to celebrate.
Eric Lipton reported from Washington, David Yaffe-Bellany reported from New York and Dubai, Bradley Hope reported from London, Tripp Mickle reported from San Francisco and Paul Mozur reported from Taipei. Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, Adam Satariano, Devon Lum, Robert Draper and Debra Kamin contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Senior department officials who were defense lawyers for the president and those in his orbit are now in jobs that typically must approve any such payout, underscoring potential ethical conflicts.
By Devlin Barrett and Tyler Pager
President Trump is demanding that the Justice Department pay him about $230 million in compensation for the federal investigations into him, according to people familiar with the matter, who added that any settlement might ultimately be approved by senior department officials who defended him or those in his orbit.
The situation has no parallel in American history, as Mr. Trump, a presidential candidate, was pursued by federal law enforcement and eventually won the election, taking over the very government that must now review his claims. It is also the starkest example yet of potential ethical conflicts created by installing the president’s former lawyers atop the Justice Department.
Mr. Trump submitted complaints through an administrative claim process that often is the precursor to lawsuits. The first claim, lodged in late 2023, seeks damages for a number of purported violations of his rights, including the F.B.I. and special counsel investigation into Russian election tampering and possible connections to the 2016 Trump campaign, according to people familiar with the matter. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the claim has not been made public.
The second complaint, filed in the summer of 2024, accuses the F.B.I. of violating Mr. Trump’s privacy by searching Mar-a-Lago, his club and residence in Florida, in 2022 for classified documents. It also accuses the Justice Department of malicious prosecution in charging him with mishandling sensitive records after he left office.
Asked about the issue at the White House after this article published, the president said, “I was damaged very greatly and any money I would get, I would give to charity.”
He added, “I’m the one that makes the decision and that decision would have to go across my desk and it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.”
Lawyers said the nature of the president’s legal claims poses undeniable ethics challenges.
“What a travesty,” said Bennett L. Gershman, an ethics professor at Pace University. “The ethical conflict is just so basic and fundamental, you don’t need a law professor to explain it.”
He added: “And then to have people in the Justice Department decide whether his claim should be successful or not, and these are the people who serve him deciding whether he wins or loses. It’s bizarre and almost too outlandish to believe.”
The president also seemed to acknowledge that point in the Oval Office last week, when he alluded vaguely to the situation while standing next to the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and her deputy, Todd Blanche. According to Justice Department regulations, the deputy attorney general — in this case, Mr. Blanche — is one of two people eligible to sign off on such a settlement.
“I have a lawsuit that was doing very well, and when I became president, I said, I’m sort of suing myself,” Mr. Trump said, adding: “It sort of looks bad, I’m suing myself, right? So I don’t know. But that was a lawsuit that was very strong, very powerful.”
Administrative claims are not technically lawsuits. Such complaints are submitted first to the Justice Department on what is called a Standard Form 95, to see if a settlement can be reached without a lawsuit in federal court. If the department formally rejects such a claim or declines to act on it, a person could then sue in court. Still, that is an unlikely outcome in this instance, given that Mr. Trump is already negotiating, in essence, with his subordinates.
Compensation is typically covered by taxpayers. Two people familiar with the president’s legal claims said that he had not been paid by the federal government but that he expected to be.
The second claim accused Merrick B. Garland, then the attorney general, Christopher A. Wray, then the F.B.I. director, and Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating Mr. Trump at the time, of “harassment” intended to sway the electoral outcome. “This malicious prosecution led President Trump to spend tens of millions of dollars defending the case and his reputation,” the claim said.
According to the Justice Department manual, settlements of claims against the department for more than $4 million “must be approved by the deputy attorney general or associate attorney general,” meaning the person who oversees the agency’s civil division.
The current deputy attorney general, Mr. Blanche, served as Mr. Trump’s lead criminal defense lawyer and said at his confirmation hearing in February that his attorney-client relationship with the president continued. The chief of the department’s civil division, Stanley Woodward Jr., represented Mr. Trump’s co-defendant, Walt Nauta, in the classified documents case. Mr. Woodward has also represented a number of other Trump aides, including Mr. Patel, in investigations related to Mr. Trump or the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
A spokesman for the president’s personal legal team said he was fighting back against the Russia investigation he has long denounced as a witch hunt, and what he has called the weaponization of the criminal justice system by the Biden administration.
A White House spokeswoman referred questions to the Justice Department. Asked if either Mr. Blanche or Mr. Woodward would recuse or have been recused from overseeing the possible settlement with Mr. Trump, a Justice Department spokesman, Chad Gilmartin, said, “In any circumstance, all officials at the Department of Justice follow the guidance of career ethics officials.”
In July, Ms. Bondi fired the agency’s top ethics adviser.
Mr. Trump famously hates recusals. He complained bitterly after his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, withdrew from overseeing the Russia investigation that is now the subject of one of his demands for money.
“The attorney general made a terrible mistake when he did this and when he recused himself,” Mr. Trump said in 2018. “He should have certainly let us know if he was going to recuse himself, and we would have used a — put a different attorney general in.”
The Justice Department does not specifically require a public announcement of settlements made for administrative claims before they become lawsuits. If or when the Trump administration pays the president what could be hundreds of millions of dollars, there may be no immediate official declaration that it did so, according to current and former department officials.
Some former officials have privately expressed misgivings that the department’s leaders did not reject Mr. Trump’s legal claims in the waning days of the Biden administration. It has long been standard practice for civil litigation, including lawsuits against the government, to be paused until any criminal cases around the same facts have been resolved.
Alan Feuer contributed reporting.
The president’s team has created a highly unusual fund-raising apparatus for causes he favors. The Times analyzed more than half a billion dollars in contributions from 346 donors. Some have received pardons, jobs, access to the president and other valuable gains.
By Karen Yourish, Kenneth P. Vogel and Charlie Smart
Since President Trump was elected a second time, he and his allies have raised nearly $2 billion for his favored political causes and passion projects. That total, which was confirmed by four people involved in the fund-raising, likely eclipses the amount raised to support his 2024 campaign.
The astounding haul hints at a level of transactionalism for which it is difficult to find obvious comparisons in modern American history. The identities of the donors behind much of the cash are not legally required to be, and have not been, publicly disclosed. In some cases, Mr. Trump’s team has offered donors anonymity.
To shed light on what has been a largely opaque fund-raising apparatus, The New York Times conducted a comprehensive investigation. It relied on previously unreported documents and public campaign finance filings, as well as interviews with dozens of people who are familiar with the solicitations or are involved in the fund-raising. It traced a large portion of the funds raised — more than half a billion dollars’ worth — back to 346 donors who each gave at least $250,000. It also found that more than half of them have benefited, or are involved in an industry that has benefited, from the actions or statements of Mr. Trump, the White House or federal agencies.
It is not possible to prove that any of the donations directly led to favorable treatment from the Trump administration. And the contributions do not personally enrich Mr. Trump, unlike some of his family’s cryptocurrency ventures.
But many of the deep-pocketed individuals and corporations who have given large sums have a lot riding on the administration’s actions, raising questions about conflicts of interest.
Presidents of both parties have raised funds for their inaugurations, and many major companies have long histories of donating to them. But second-term presidents usually begin winding down their own fund-raising after their inaugurations, focusing instead on boosting their parties’ committees and candidates.
Mr. Trump, on the other hand, was emboldened by the record-breaking sum of nearly $240 million raised by his inaugural committee. He immediately tasked his fund-raising team, led by his campaign’s finance director, Meredith O’Rourke, to raise money for an array of groups and causes supported by the president, according to three people involved in the fund-raising. They requested anonymity to discuss nonpublic information, as did five others who discussed other elements of the fund-raising.
It is a buffet of options that allows donors to pay tribute to Mr. Trump and sometimes receive access to him to pitch their own interests. While the groups raising funds are independent from one another, and some are nonpartisan, they are presented to donors as part of a fund-raising apparatus to which Mr. Trump or his allies would like them to give, according to four people familiar with the fund-raising. They said Mr. Trump closely tracks which companies have given, and how much, debriefing regularly with Ms. O’Rourke.
Lobbyists with connections in Mr. Trump’s orbit recommend that their clients donate to these groups to try to win him over, said five people familiar with the fund-raising.
“In this town, money talks, and that is going to give you an opportunity to at least have a seat at the table,” said Harrison Fields, a former Trump White House official who left in August and became a lobbyist. His firm, CGCN Group, has represented companies that have donated to projects Mr. Trump supports, including the new White House ballroom, America250 and MAGA Inc.
“These people are not getting coerced. They are making business decisions,” said Mr. Fields.
At least 51 of the donors have given to more than one of the groups in this analysis since the election.
While MAGA Inc., the inaugural committee and the Republican National Committee (another entity for which Trump-allied fund-raisers are soliciting money) are required to disclose their donors to the Federal Election Commission, there is no such requirement for contributions to other groups for which the president’s allies are raising funds.
Those groups include the Trust for the National Mall, America250, the White House Historical Association, a political nonprofit group called Securing American Greatness and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which Mr. Trump’s allies have remade in his own image, including adding his own name to the title and the building’s facade.
The Times’s investigation identified a number of donations, or potential benefits to donors, that had not been publicly known.
One $2.5 million contribution to MAGA Inc. was given by a South Florida woman whose father months later received an unusually lenient deal from top Justice Department officials to settle charges that he bribed Puerto Rico’s then-governor in 2020.
Another $2.5 million pledged donation — this one to Mr. Trump’s White House ballroom project — came from Parsons Corporation, an engineering firm that has won government contracts for years, including under Mr. Trump, and is jockeying for some of the more than $1 trillion in contracts that could be awarded to build a missile defense system proposed by the president called the “Golden Dome.” Also giving at least $2.5 million to the ballroom project was the chief executive of Roblox, a popular online video game company that has applauded a Trump executive order and other initiatives involving children’s use of artificial intelligence.
A couple who donated $1 million to Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee and $500,000 to MAGA Inc., as well as an undisclosed amount to the ballroom fund, saw Mr. Trump nominate their son to be U.S. ambassador to Finland.
And a company that was accused last year by the Justice Department of colluding over ticket prices donated $250,000 to Mr. Trump’s inauguration. The president pardoned the company’s co-founder in a separate case this month.
In other cases, The Times was able to quantify large donations for which the amounts were previously unknown. Those included gifts from the technology firm Palantir, which donated $10 million to the ballroom project and $5 million to America250. Additionally, the Palantir co-founder Alex Karp donated $1 million each to the inauguration and to MAGA Inc. In Mr. Trump’s second term, Palantir has secured federal contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, including to develop software to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement deport people. But a Palantir official said in a previously unpublished response to an inquiry from Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, that the company did not seek and was not offered any special consideration for its donation to the ballroom project.
While a foundation funded by Miriam Adelson, a casino magnate, mostly supports Jewish and Israeli causes, it pledged to donate $25 million to the ballroom project, according to two people familiar with the donation. In a speech at a White House Hanukkah party last week, Mr. Trump praised Dr. Adelson, a physician by training, for donating tens of millions of dollars to help his campaigns and using her access to lobby for greater U.S. backing for Israel. Calling her to the lectern, Mr. Trump said, “When somebody can give you $250 million, I think that we should give her the opportunity to say hello.” The two embraced and bantered about how Dr. Adelson would be willing to donate $250 million more to help Mr. Trump seek an unconstitutional third term.
Mr. Trump’s continued fund-raising is all the more striking given his boasts during his first presidential campaign a decade ago that he was an outsider whose personal wealth made him impervious to Washington’s pay-to-play politics and the manipulation of major donors, including Dr. Adelson’s late husband.
Liz Huston, a White House spokeswoman, rejected the suggestion that donors were getting special treatment. She said in a statement that Mr. Trump’s “only motivation as the president of the United States is improving the lives of the American people and making our country greater than ever before.” Donors who support him “should be celebrated, not attacked,” she said.
While the donations far exceed most Americans’ means, the sums pale in comparison to the contracts being sought from the Trump administration.
Take Mr. Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense project, which could yield lucrative work for a number of contractors. Palantir has already held discussions about being involved. Firms including Lockheed Martin and Boeing also are expected to compete for pieces of the work; each company donated $1 million to Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee. That is the same amount they gave to President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s inaugural committee.
But Lockheed Martin also donated $10 million to the Trust for the National Mall for Mr. Trump’s ballroom project and $5 million to America250, according to two people familiar with the sums. Lockheed is the primary maker of F-35 fighter jets, which cost about $80 million to $110 million each. While some national security officials have expressed concern about selling the jets to Saudi Arabia, Mr. Trump announced last month that he planned to approve such sales. The next day, Lockheed’s chief executive attended a black-tie dinner at the White House honoring Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, which was also attended by executives for other defense contractors.
As for Boeing, two months after the inauguration, Mr. Trump announced that the company would be paid to build more than 180 new advanced fighter jets for the Air Force.
Major defense contracts can take years to develop, bid and execute, and there is no evidence that any such contracts were awarded as a direct result of donations.
Boeing’s ability to pursue federal contracts could have been hindered by criminal charges stemming from two fatal crashes of its planes during Mr. Trump’s first term. But this year, the Trump Justice Department dropped the case, entering into a settlement that required the company to improve its safety and compliance programs and pay hundreds of millions of dollars into a fund for victims.
Presidents have long awarded their campaigns’ top donors with ambassadorships, jobs and appointments to boards and commissions. Mr. Trump appears to have taken that tradition to a new level, tapping at least 32 people for an array of positions — including in his cabinet — who have donated at least $250,000 each to his causes after the election, or whose companies or families have made such donations.
Among them is Howard Brodie, now the U.S. ambassador to Finland. His parents, Elizabeth and Stefan Brodie, donated to the Trump inauguration, MAGA Inc. and the ballroom project after Mr. Trump’s victory in the 2024 election. The elder Brodies were invited to the White House dinner last month honoring the Saudi crown prince, and Stefan Brodie attended a dinner the month before for major donors who gave at least $2.5 million for the ballroom.
Another Trump ambassador nominee, the Miami mortgage lender Bernie Navarro, gave a little-noticed $1 million donation to the inaugural committee through an obscure company registered in Puerto Rico. Mr. Navarro, a close ally of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, said in a statement that the donation was unrelated to his interest in becoming an ambassador. “In retrospect, he is doing such an amazing job that I wish I would have done more,” Mr. Navarro said of Mr. Trump.
In all, more than a dozen donors have been nominated or confirmed for ambassadorships.
It is not possible to definitively link donations to nominations.
Tommy Pigott, a spokesman for the State Department, in a statement called Mr. Trump’s ambassadors “an America first diplomatic A-team,” adding that they “were chosen to help drive forward historic wins for the American people, and they have done exactly that.”
Four of Mr. Trump’s cabinet officials made personal or corporate donations of more than $250,000.
They include Kelly Loeffler, the administrator of the Small Business Administration. She and her husband, Jeffrey C. Sprecher, the chief executive of the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, donated a combined total of $11 million to groups Mr. Trump favors, including $1 million to the inaugural committee and $5 million to MAGA Inc., as well as previously unreported donations totaling $5 million for the ballroom, according to records and a person familiar with the fund-raising.
Getting a reprieve from adverse state action can be just as valuable as winning a government contract or appointment.
Extremity Care, a company that makes a pricey form of bandages known as skin substitutes, donated $5 million to MAGA Inc. An executive from the company then attended a donor dinner in March at Mar-a-Lago where he lobbied Mr. Trump, whose administration announced the next month that it would delay a Biden-era plan to limit Medicare’s coverage of the bandages. Extremity Care or one of its affiliates subsequently donated $2.5 million to the ballroom.
And Mr. Trump has entered into deals with a number of drug makers, including several that donated to groups he supports, to lower prices in exchange for avoiding punitive measures including threatened tariffs.
In two instances, Mr. Trump pardoned people whose companies or families made donations.
In January, amid scrutiny from the Justice Department’s antitrust division, which had identified — but not charged — the venue management company Oak View Group in a lawsuit against Ticketmaster’s parent company, Oak View donated $250,000 to Mr. Trump’s inauguration.
The donation did not eliminate legal exposure for Oak View’s co-founder and then-chief executive, Timothy J. Leiweke. Months later, the antitrust division charged him in an unrelated case. He stepped down as head of Oak View, and the company agreed to pay $15 million in penalties. Mr. Leiweke pleaded not guilty. But this month, before the case went to trial, Mr. Trump pardoned him.
David B. Gerger, a lawyer for Mr. Leiweke, rejected a question about whether the donation was intended to avoid legal trouble.
“Any such innuendo — whether coming from ill will or just ignorance — is false,” he said in a statement.
In another case, the former health care entrepreneur Elizabeth Fago, after donating $1 million to MAGA Inc., attended a donor dinner with the president. Mr. Trump pardoned her son, Paul Walczak, less than three weeks later, sparing him from having to pay nearly $4.4 million in restitution and from reporting to prison for an 18-month sentence for employment tax crimes.
Another donor with an interest in the outcome of a criminal case was Isabela Herrera, who donated $2.5 million to MAGA Inc. late last year. At the time, her father, Julio Herrera Velutini, a Venezuelan-Italian banker, was being prosecuted by the Justice Department for trying to bribe the governor of Puerto Rico.
Mr. Herrera hired a former personal lawyer for Mr. Trump, who alleged that the case was an example of the political weaponization of the criminal justice system. Top Justice Department officials appeared to agree, authorizing a misdemeanor plea deal to settle the case and overruling career prosecutors who had pushed for a harsher sentence.
Mr. Herrera could still face a year in prison at sentencing, which is scheduled for next month.
Ms. Herrera and a lawyer for Mr. Herrera declined to comment.
A Justice Department spokeswoman said “the decision to settle this case was made through the proper channels and was not influenced by any donation to MAGA Inc.”
But John D. Keller, who oversaw the Justice Department division that handled the case, said in an interview that the difference between the deal and the more than 20 years Mr. Herrera could have faced if convicted of the original charges was “striking.” Mr. Keller, who resigned in protest when he was directed by Mr. Trump’s appointees to drop another politically fraught prosecution, said the Herrera case “appears to be another example of political considerations dictating the outcome in an individual criminal case.”
A broader relaxation of federal scrutiny has benefited cryptocurrency companies and other corporate interests that have showered donations on Mr. Trump’s groups.
The Securities and Exchange Commission largely abandoned its hard-line approach to crypto trading platforms, ending lawsuits against Coinbase, Kraken and Ripple after the companies each donated $1 million or more to Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee, and ending an investigation into Robinhood after it donated $2 million to the committee. Coinbase and Ripple also donated to the ballroom, while Coinbase gave to America250.
A spokesman for the S.E.C. said that “politics have had nothing to do with S.E.C. actions” on the cases. “Decisions on these cases turn on long held publicly expressed legal and policy views,” he added.
In addition to specific benefits enjoyed by individual companies and people, Mr. Trump has also enacted sweeping tax cuts and taken other actions that more broadly advantage a wide range of industries, major corporations and wealthy individuals.
Last week, Mr. Trump signed an executive order to downgrade cannabis from the most restrictive category of drugs, easing some limitations and allowing for more research. It was a major victory for a burgeoning industry that has spent heavily since the election on lobbying and donations, including a $1 million donation to MAGA Inc. from American Rights and Reform PAC, a pro-cannabis political committee; and a $750,000 donation to the inaugural committee from Trulieve, a leading marijuana retailer. Kim Rivers, Trulieve’s co-founder and chief executive, urged Mr. Trump to make the move during multiple meetings with him, including a donor dinner at his New Jersey golf club in August, according to a person familiar with the event, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
“We are really thankful for the president,” Ms. Rivers said in an interview on Thursday. “He has been consistently supportive,” she added. She declined to comment when asked if she would have been granted the presidential audiences without donating.
The crypto industry writ large has benefited from Mr. Trump’s cheerleading, as well as his championing and signing into law a bill creating the first federal rules for stablecoins, a popular form of digital currency. At least 27 companies or executives with interests in crypto gave a total of at least $58 million to groups Mr. Trump favors after the election, The Times found.
Mr. Trump has also favored the fossil fuel industry, directing tens of billions of dollars in incentives to companies, allowing drilling in the Alaska wilderness, and repealing environmental regulations. About two dozen companies with interests in oil, gas and coal donated at least $41 million.
Likewise, the administration has pushed regulatory changes and other executive actions that benefit Big Tech, tobacco interests, private equity firms and the defense and aerospace industry. (In all of the industries discussed here, individuals and firms may have benefited to different degrees from these actions.)
Danielle Alvarez, a spokeswoman for the R.N.C., said Mr. Trump “has governed and delivered results for every American,” citing his efforts to secure the Southern border and crack down on fentanyl trafficking, among other initiatives. She said Mr. Trump “is grateful to his donors, but unlike the politicians of the past, he isn’t bought by anyone.”
Since retaking office, the president has lavished his post-election donors with praise and access to himself and his inner circle. In some cases, the attention can provide a competitive business advantage. In others, it may only mean bragging rights.
At least 100 donors have attended exclusive dinners and events with Mr. Trump at the White House, accompanied him on overseas trips that include meetings with foreign dignitaries and prospective business partners — or both. About half have popped up at multiple events. Regular visitors to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue include Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia; Lisa Su, chief executive of AMD; Tim Cook, chief executive of Apple; and others.
Mr. Trump is fond of using these presidential forums to call out friends and donors in the room.
“So many of you have been really, really generous,” Mr. Trump told donors to the ballroom project he convened at the White House for a thank-you dinner in October. He singled out defense contractor donors (representatives for Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin and Palantir were in the room), saying the United States was “the greatest manufacturer of weapons.”
And it’s not just Mr. Trump.
The White House has used government platforms to praise major donors to a wider audience. At least 67 post-election donors have been positively featured, often multiple times, in official press releases, social media posts and other communications.
There is a flip side to Mr. Trump’s willingness to reward loyalty. His efforts to punish perpetrators of perceived slights have been an animating theme of his second term — and a motivating factor for at least some of the donors to his favored causes, according to three people familiar with the fund-raising.
They said that major donors and corporations fear incurring Mr. Trump’s wrath by not giving, or not giving as much as their rivals, and that they donate out of concern that he might publicly attack them or even use the levers of government against them. Donations, they said, serve as a form of protection — or, if things have already soured, as an olive branch.
But it’s no guarantee. For some companies that have given large sums since the election, Mr. Trump and his administration’s actions have not been exclusively helpful.
Pilgrim’s Pride, a massive poultry producer, donated $5 million to Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee, making it the biggest donor. Good news for the poultry industry followed: In April, the Trump administration withdrew a Biden-era proposal that would have required poultry companies to keep levels of salmonella bacteria under a certain threshold and to test for six dangerous salmonella strains.
And in June, after years of attempts, federal regulators approved a public listing on the New York Stock Exchange for JBS, the Brazilian firm that owns Pilgrim’s Pride. But then last month, Mr. Trump directed the Justice Department to investigate JBS and three other meat packing giants, accusing them of “driving up the price of beef through illicit collusion, price fixing and price manipulation.”
In another example, Mr. Trump’s relationship with Mark Zuckerberg has been a mixed bag over the years. But when Mr. Trump won last fall, Mr. Zuckerberg and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and other platforms, took steps that seemed designed to appease the incoming president. Meta donated $1 million to his inauguration, as did other tech companies and executives that had occasionally been crosswise with Mr. Trump, including Amazon, Google and Apple’s chief executive, Mr. Cook. The companies’ executives were given prominent places behind Mr. Trump inside the Capitol rotunda as he was sworn in.
Days after the inauguration, Meta announced that it had agreed to pay $22 million to Mr. Trump’s library foundation to settle a lawsuit. Google agreed to donate a similar sum for the ballroom project to settle a similar suit. (Those settlement amounts are not included in the analysis presented in this article, nor are payments to the Trump library foundation by Paramount Global and ABC News to settle separate lawsuits brought by Mr. Trump.) Meta also donated at least $2.5 million for the ballroom project, according to a person familiar with the fund-raising.
And Amazon, Meta and Google each donated at least $200,000 to the White House Historical Association to sponsor the annual Easter Egg Roll. While Meta and Google had sponsored the event during the Biden administration, top sponsors have not traditionally been expressly offered access to a pre-event brunch with the first lady as a donor perk, according to a person familiar with the event.
The offer came from a private event production firm on contract with the association, and not the association itself, which does not offer access to the White House or first family as an inducement for donations, according to a person familiar with previous fund-raising efforts.
Mr. Zuckerberg unsuccessfully lobbied Mr. Trump and his aides to derail a federal antitrust lawsuit against Meta. (A judge dismissed the case on its merits last month.) But the company has won other victories from the administration. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ended an investigation into Meta’s advertising for financial products in September, amidst a Trump-led push to kill the agency. And Mr. Trump this month signed an executive order to neuter state laws that limit the artificial intelligence industry — a major growth area for Meta, Google and other tech companies.
(The New York Times has sued three tech companies that are among, or whose executives are among, the donors in this analysis — Microsoft, OpenAI and Perplexity — claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The companies have denied the suits’ claims.)
As Mr. Trump’s term moves into its second year, there are signs that the president and his allies intend to continue the fund-raising push.
MAGA Inc. has already announced dinners for donors who give $1 million or more, with Mr. Trump at his golf club in the Virginia suburbs of Washington in January and at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., in February, according to invitations reviewed by The Times.
And the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Foundation has indicated in filings that it intends to raise $950 million before the beginning of Mr. Trump’s final year in office.
If anything, the buffet of options to which donors can give appears to be expanding.
Last week, Mr. Trump announced the creation of a new initiative called Freedom 250, which will raise money from corporations and donors to fund events and projects dear to him as part of the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the country’s independence. Those include an arch overlooking Washington in the style of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, a National Garden of American Heroes, a prayer event on the National Mall and a four-day competition for high school athletes.
Freedom 250 will be housed inside the National Park Foundation, a nonpartisan nonprofit group. Last month, at the behest of the Trump administration, the foundation quietly added to its board Ms. O’Rourke, who will raise money for Freedom 250, and Chris LaCivita, who helped run Mr. Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.
Ms. O’Rourke did not respond to a request for comment. Mr. LaCivita declined to comment.
Methodology
The Times created a database of every person, company and organization that Federal Election Commission filings indicated had donated at least $250,000 to the inaugural committee or MAGA Inc. after the 2024 election. After establishing this initial universe, The Times, through interviews and other reporting, expanded the database to include donors to Trump-supported groups and projects that — unlike the inaugural committee and MAGA Inc. — are not required to disclose their donors, including the White House ballroom project, the White House Easter Egg Roll and America250.
Reporters combed through documents and interviewed dozens of people to determine the donors behind each contribution (some of their identities were obscured in public filings by corporate structures), as well whether and how each donor may have benefited from actions by Mr. Trump or his administration. This involved reviewing lobbying disclosures; campaign finance and corporate filings; Securities and Exchange Commission reports; agency memos; government contracting databases; corporate and government press releases; White House pool reports; social media posts; transcripts, photographs and video from White House events; and other documents. The Times reached out to everyone identified as having benefited from actions by Mr. Trump or his administration. Some people and companies did not respond or declined to comment. Others said they did not benefit from the administration’s actions. And others did not dispute the characterization.
In some cases, companies had existing contractor relationships with the federal government; this analysis included new contracts and renewals only, not those awarded in previous administrations.
Sarah Bahr, Kitty Bennett, Sarah Cahalan, Amanda E. Newman, Destinée-Charisse Royal and Hannah Wulkan contributed reporting.
Correction: Dec. 22, 2025
An earlier version of a video in this article showed an incorrect donation amount for Palantir. Palantir donated $15 million, not $20 million.
As President Trump blurs the lines between politics and business — and threatens steep tariffs on trade partners — governments feel compelled to favor Trump-related projects.
By Damien Cave
Photographs by Linh Pham
When officials in the home province of Vietnam’s top leader went door to door recently, pressing residents to sign letters agreeing to the Trump Organization’s plans for a new golf community, Le Van Truong wanted to refuse.
Planning documents promised a “new benchmark in luxury, recreation and business.” Mr. Truong, 54, pictured something else: the uprooting of a cemetery with five generations of his ancestors and the loss of rich farmland that has sustained local families for centuries.
Yet he signed anyway, because, as he put it, “there’s nothing I can do.”
“Trump says it’s separate — the presidency and his business,” Mr. Truong said. “But he has the power to do whatever he wants.”
This $1.5 billion golf complex outside the capital, Hanoi, as well as plans for a Trump skyscraper in Ho Chi Minh City, are the Trump family’s first projects in Vietnam — part of a global moneymaking enterprise that no family of a sitting American president has ever attempted on this scale. And as that blitz makes the Trumps richer, it is distorting how countries interact with the United States.
To fast-track the Trump development, Vietnam has ignored its own laws, legal experts said, granting concessions more generous than what even the most connected locals receive. Vietnamese officials, in a letter obtained by The New York Times, explicitly stated that the project required special support from the top ranks of the Vietnamese government because it was “receiving special attention from the Trump administration and President Donald Trump personally.”
And Vietnamese officials have waved the development along in a moment of high-stakes diplomacy. They face intense pressure to strike a trade deal that would head off President Trump’s threat of steep tariffs, which would hit about 30 percent of Vietnam’s exports.
Eric Trump, the president’s second son, stands at the center of the drama. Mr. Trump was in Vietnam to break ground for the golf project on Wednesday, less than a year after meeting a local building partner, Dang Thanh Tam. Inside a tent with a gold facade, Mr. Trump told guests, including the country’s prime minister, that “the Trump family is going to make you very, very proud.”
The White House said, in an emailed statement, “All of the president’s trade discussions are totally unrelated to the Trump Organization.” It argued that there are no ethical issues as the president’s family develops about 20 Trump-branded properties worldwide, because the president’s sons run the businesses. President Trump’s financial disclosure report, however, shows that he still personally benefits financially from most of these ventures.
Eric Trump, who did not respond to interview requests, has insisted that he is just doing his job, developing properties. Vietnamese officials say that prioritizing Trump projects assists the country’s economic rise.
But as the deal-making accelerates and collides with U.S. threats to free trade, the line between Trump the president and Trump the tycoon is now seen by diplomats, trade officials and corporations worldwide as so obviously blurred that governments feel more compelled than ever to favor anything Trump-related.
While other Trump deals are happening in Serbia, Indonesia and the Middle East, Vietnam has become a case study for how the Trump brand wields influence and gains advantage, challenging local norms and encouraging leaders to rush approvals, to please the Trump family.
With trade negotiations intensifying, Vietnamese officials have allowed the Trump project to break ground without completing at least a half-dozen legally required steps, from securing all the land and financing to conducting environmental reviews.
The process usually takes two to four years. But records show that initial planning documents were filed only three months before Wednesday’s event, which was held on newly leveled land under an archway announcing “THE GROUNDBREAKING CEREMONY OF TRUMP INTERNATIONAL, HUNG YEN.”
Vietnam’s foreign ministry did not respond to questions about the legality of the project.
Residents, who gathered outside the development site to watch the groundbreaking, were held at a distance by the police. Many worry that their livelihoods and land will soon be taken. Fifty years after the end of a brutal war with the United States, they say they fear becoming collateral damage as the new move-fast-and-defy-the-rules approach of Trumpism marches on.
Taking Land for Villas
In Vietnam’s communist system, all land is owned by the people and managed or leased out by the state. Most of the property for the golf project is still controlled by families with long-term rights of use. In the Khoai Chau district of Hung Yen province — where the Trump project will take up nearly four square miles along the Red River — a sense of betrayal has been rumbling.
At town-hall meetings in early April, officials told hundreds of residents that the best they could expect was about half of what their land would have sold for even before the golf project was announced in October.
Amid a chorus of outrage at one meeting, nearly everyone stormed out. Word of the offered rate spread through streets and into the fields. Opposition has hardened as farmers fear losing investments in saplings that take years to mature, and the security that the land has provided for generations.
“They’re not listening to us,” Le Thi Thanh, 57, said on a recent fever-hot afternoon, squatting to graft young custard apple trees. “They just come here and impose their will.”
Vietnam’s construction approval process is supposed to begin with independent scrutiny in the public interest at the district and provincial level. In reality, as interviews and government documents show, little of that happened and planning laws have been shoved aside.
After the March 20 letter from provincial officials that said the project needed special treatment, the government cut short public comment and did not follow the usual rules on using public funds for preliminary research, documents show. Legal experts said the project was in conflict with the province’s housing master plan. The entire complex, with Trump-designed villas and 36 holes of golf in one of four development zones, would add 35,000 residents, theme parks and an urban commercial district.
On top of that, the project is planned in a riverfront area that flooded during a typhoon last year, and the province is dotted with unexploded ordnance from the Vietnam War. A 200-pound bomb was discovered six months ago.
Nonetheless, on May 15, just over three months after the first official filing, Vietnam’s central government ended the planning process early, to allow for investment and a groundbreaking event that would — as the letter in March had requested — align with Eric Trump’s availability and avoid “missing the window to capitalize on the support of the Donald Trump administration.”
That same day, residents rushed to the site of the groundbreaking, only to find that some construction had already begun. A black Rolls-Royce Phantom (valued at about $500,000, belonging to the Trump partner, Mr. Tam) sat near excavators, photographs showed, 100 yards from Mr. Truong’s family cemetery and families working the land.
At the groundbreaking, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh seemed sensitive to the possibility of public backlash in a country where, despite the power of a one-party state, people are not afraid to protest over being forced from where they live and work.
Raising his voice to a crowd of bankers, generals and Trump invitees in suits or shimmering stilettos, Mr. Chinh instructed the provincial authorities to ensure that those who sacrificed property would “have a new livelihood and new home better than their old ones.”
He also said the project would “receive maximum support” to “further strengthen the relationship between Vietnam and the U.S.” He promised that it would be completed in 2027.
Several lawyers and developers said that while Vietnam’s bureaucracy can be slow, the Trump project’s pace was unprecedented, illegal and unfair to other investors.
Residents said their needs were being tossed aside to please the already rich.
“They’ll have hotels, golf courses and swimming pools,” Mr. Truong said. “We’ll have nothing.”
The American Connection
The first Trump project in Vietnam got its start with the previously undisclosed efforts of two former Marine Corps platoon commanders with post-combat idealism in mind.
Billy Birdzell, 45, grew up in Larchmont, N.Y. David Lewis, 47, comes from an oil and gas family in Texas. The Iraq war welded them together forever after Aug. 5, 2004, when a rocket skipped off Mr. Lewis’s helmet and then exploded during a brutal battle in Najaf.
“He got very badly injured,” Mr. Birdzell said. “My guys, we evacuated him.”
They stayed in touch, as veterans do, and each separately developed a connection to Vietnam.
Mr. Birdzell visited in 2007, trekking to Khe Sanh and other Marine Corps landmarks before starting an investment banking firm, Horatius Group, and moving to California. In 2015, Mr. Lewis started Energy Capital Vietnam, which develops natural gas power projects.
In January 2024, they were at the Melia hotel in Hanoi, on a joint business trip, when Mr. Birdzell came down to breakfast and explained that he had been texting “a friend” who was interested in real estate in Vietnam.
“That was Eric,” Mr. Birdzell said.
In an interview, he would not say how they had met. They share a passion for guns and hunting. Mr. Birdzell is also married to a niece of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services.
Mr. Lewis, with a decade of work and connections in Vietnam, said he saw in Eric Trump a chance to bring the United States and Vietnam closer together. So, right after he heard of his interest, he reached out to Mr. Tam, the founder of the industrial construction firm Kinh Bac City, who embraced the idea immediately.
Mr. Birdzell and Mr. Lewis said that if the new development succeeded, it might be a catalyst for fostering deals and updating American perceptions about Vietnam after the war.
“It’s to elevate the Vietnamese people,” Mr. Birdzell said, “and to elevate Vietnam.”
Mr. Birdzell added that he had mainly been an intermediary, though he hoped for a role in raising capital. Mr. Lewis said he had stepped back and had no financial stake in the project.
But they have watched it advance. They attended the first meeting at Trump Tower between Mr. Tam and Eric Trump in July. They were there again on Sept. 24 to witness the signing of initial documents for the deal.
That day, the Trump family’s personal-political blend was on full display. Surrounded by Vietnamese business leaders and officials, Donald J. Trump took a break from his campaigning — just weeks before the U.S. presidential election — to play a leading role.
In a promotional photo from that day, Eric Trump sits on one side, Mr. Tam on the other. The past and future president occupies the center, smiling in front of two American flags.
Risks for U.S.-Vietnam Relations
Like those two former Marines, who saw the Trump golf course as a potential extension of America itself and this White House, Vietnam’s government sees Mr. Trump’s administration and the Trump Organization as one.
“When he wants to build a project in Vietnam, it’s under his personal brand name, and Vietnam wants to show off that connection,” said Dang Hung Vo, a former deputy minister of natural resources and environment who helped write some of the country’s land laws.
Part of the draw is national pride: Only some countries have Trump developments, and Vietnam would like to join that club. Many Vietnamese also admire Mr. Trump for his riches and resistance to China.
China is central to the U.S.-Vietnam relationship — and its current tensions.
In late April and early May, according to U.S. officials, Washington warned Vietnam that its hopes for lower tariffs were at risk because of the American perception that too many Chinese companies have been setting up in Vietnam and using the country to avoid tariffs on China.
Vietnamese officials say, in public and in private, that they hope the Trump golf project will serve as a good-will token, and further intertwine the U.S. and Vietnam.
The groundbreaking occurred just a few days after the Trump administration’s trade negotiator, Jamieson Greer, met with Vietnam’s trade minister, Nguyen Hong Dien, in South Korea. It was their first in-person meeting since Mr. Trump imposed (then paused) 46 percent tariffs on Vietnam, which sends more of its exports to the United States than anywhere else.
But as economists note, big development projects driven by political favors or optics, rather than by traditional investment calculations, often lose focus. By elevating patronage over merit, they can erode public trust.
The Trump project, initially announced as a golf community, now includes a lot more, and residents who had gathered near the groundbreaking demanded greater transparency about what it entails and how it will affect them.
Many analysts say that providing special treatment for the Trump family business undermines the efforts of To Lam, Vietnam’s top leader, to create a modern, evenhanded business environment with less corruption.
“This pushes Vietnam in the direction of more personalistic business transactions, rather than those more invested in markets, transparency and uniformity,” said Ja-Ian Chong, a political science professor at the National University of Singapore who studies Southeast Asia.
The faster things go, he added, the greater the risk of major problems. In Indonesia, the authorities halted construction on another Trump golf project this year because of water mismanagement. Mr. Tam, the Trumps’ local building partner in Vietnam, promised at the groundbreaking to continue working quickly before handing over the private golf project to the Trump Organization to operate.
For the people wondering about their land, the pace of change makes trouble look inevitable and close at hand.
“In just five days, they filled up all that farm’s land and put up that tent for the ceremony,” said Do Thi Suat, 63, watching the groundbreaking from a row of saplings. “Why are they moving so fast?”
“They will take our land away,” she said. “Then what will we do with our lives?”
Tung Ngo contributed reporting from Hanoi, and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
An investigation by The Times found the administration’s change in enforcement benefited the industry, including companies that had ties to the president.
By Ben Protess, Andrea Fuller, Sharon LaFraniere and Seamus Hughes
Graphics by Elena Shao
A cryptocurrency firm run by the billionaire Winklevoss twins was facing a punishing federal lawsuit. After Donald J. Trump returned to the White House, the Securities and Exchange Commission moved to freeze the case.
The S.E.C. had also sued Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, but then dropped the case altogether under the new administration.
And after a yearslong legal fight with Ripple Labs, the new S.E.C. tried to reduce a court-ordered penalty against the crypto firm, seeking to soften the blow of the punishment.
The agency’s pullback from these cases illustrated a wide-ranging transformation in the federal government’s treatment of the crypto industry during President Trump’s second term, a New York Times investigation has found.
It is unheard-of for the agency to retreat from a swath of lawsuits against a single industry. And yet, The Times found that the S.E.C. had eased up on more than 60 percent of the crypto cases that were ongoing when Mr. Trump returned to the White House, moving to pause litigation, lessen penalties or outright dismiss the cases.
The dismissals were particularly unusual, The Times found. Under Mr. Trump, S.E.C. dismissals came at a far higher rate for crypto firms than other cases.
And although the particulars of the crypto lawsuits differed, many of these firms had something in common: financial ties to Mr. Trump, the self-described crypto president.
The S.E.C., the top federal regulator that polices wrongdoing in the financial markets, is no longer actively pursuing a single case against a firm with known Trump ties, The Times found. It backtracked against every firm that either has relationships with the Trump family’s crypto businesses or has donated to his political causes. The agency’s only remaining crypto cases are against little-known defendants without clear ties to Mr. Trump.
In a statement, the S.E.C. said that political favoritism “had nothing to do with” how it handled crypto enforcement, and that the agency was pivoting for legal and policy reasons, including concerns about its authority to police the industry. The S.E.C. noted that the agency’s current Republican commissioners fundamentally disagreed with filing most crypto cases long before Mr. Trump embraced the industry, and that it “takes securities fraud and investor protection seriously.”
There is no indication that the president pressured the agency to go easy on specific crypto firms. And The Times did not find evidence that the firms had tried to influence the cases against them through donations or business ties to Mr. Trump, some of which were made after the S.E.C. pivoted in their cases.
But Mr. Trump is both a crypto industry player and the industry’s top policymaker, a president who stands to profit from companies that his administration oversees. The fact that many of the firms sued by the S.E.C. have connections to him demonstrates the conflict in a president’s pushing policy that dovetails with his interests.
In the early days of his second term, the White House declared that the president would be “halting aggressive enforcement actions and regulatory overreach that have stifled crypto innovation.”
While the S.E.C.’s abandonment of some individual crypto cases has garnered public attention before, an analysis of thousands of court records by The Times along with dozens of interviews laid bare the previously untold scope of its rollback this year and the boon to Mr. Trump’s industry allies.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, disputed that Mr. Trump and his family had any conflicts of interest. She said that Mr. Trump’s policies were “fulfilling the president’s promise to make the United States the crypto capital of the world by driving innovation and economic opportunity for all Americans.”
Mr. Trump’s administration has softened crypto oversight across the board, including at the Justice Department, which shuttered a crypto enforcement unit. But the changes this year at the S.E.C. marked an especially sharp reversal.
During the Biden administration, according to The Times’s analysis, the S.E.C. brought on average more than two crypto cases a month — in either federal court or its in-house legal system. Even in Mr. Trump’s first term, the agency averaged about one a month, including the high-profile case against Ripple.
In contrast, the S.E.C. has not brought a single crypto case, as defined by The Times, since Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, even as it has continued filing dozens of cases against other types of defendants.
In a statement, Paul S. Atkins, Mr. Trump’s newly appointed S.E.C. chairman, contended that his agency was simply reining in the prior administration’s overzealous stance toward the crypto industry. The Biden-era S.E.C., he asserted, had used its enforcement powers to dictate new policy.
“I’ve made clear that we would end regulation by enforcement,” Mr. Atkins said in the statement.
While crypto firms hailed what Mr. Atkins has called a “new day” for their industry, career S.E.C. lawyers who had brought some of these cases have expressed alarm at the pullback. They fear that the agency — created nearly a century ago at the height of the Great Depression to protect investors and oversee the markets — has emboldened the crypto industry in ways that could harm consumers and threaten the broader financial system.
Christopher E. Martin was a senior trial counsel at the S.E.C. and led the case against one of those crypto firms. He retired after the agency dropped the suit this year.
“It was a complete surrender,” he said of the S.E.C.’s broader retreat. “They’ve really just thrown investors to the wolves.”
Last Days of a Crackdown
Inside the S.E.C.’s glass-facade Washington headquarters, the agency’s crypto crackdown was running on fumes late last year.
Gary Gensler, the agency’s chairman under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., wanted to forge ahead on many of its crypto investigations. But he was almost out of time.
Mr. Trump, who had recently announced a crypto venture involving him and his family called World Liberty Financial, had just won re-election. And he had vowed to rein in the S.E.C.
Mr. Trump was not always so supportive of the crypto world. During his first term, he said on Twitter that cryptocurrencies were based on “thin air” and could foster the drug trade and other illegal activity.
His S.E.C. took a tough approach at the time, as well. The agency created a unit dedicated to rooting out cyber and crypto wrongdoing and filed dozens of cases.
The agency took it up several notches under Mr. Biden. By 2022, the year that the giant crypto exchange FTX imploded, the size of the S.E.C.’s crypto unit had nearly doubled, to about 50 lawyers and industry experts.
Under both presidents, the S.E.C. believed that if investors could pump their life savings into crypto, then they deserved to know the risks.
But a thorny legal question loomed over the agency: Did it even have the authority to bring these cases? The answer rested on whether cryptocurrencies were securities, a modern twist on stocks and other financial instruments.
The S.E.C. argued that many in fact were, and so firms like crypto exchanges and brokers must register with the agency, file extensive public disclosures and in some cases face independent examinations. If they failed to register, the agency could sue them for violating securities laws.
The industry fired back that most cryptocurrencies were not securities, but rather a different animal that warranted its own set of rules, which the agency had not yet established.
“We’re not looking to be unregulated; we’re looking for clear regulations that we can operate under,” said Summer Mersinger, the chief executive of the Blockchain Association, an industry trade group.
Last year, the tide began to turn for crypto, once Mr. Trump flipped from crypto doubter to evangelist.
In a speech in July 2024, he promised crypto enthusiasts that the “persecution” against their industry would stop, saying that “on Day 1, I will fire Gary Gensler.”
The S.E.C. is an independent agency composed of five presidentially appointed commissioners, including a chair who often reflects the views of the administration that appoints him or her. The commissioners vote on cases — whether to bring, settle or dismiss them — but career enforcement officials actually do the investigating, a system that allows for priorities to change while traditionally avoiding wild swings in political whims.
But after Mr. Trump triumphed at the ballot box for a second time, a sobering reality set in at the S.E.C. Mr. Gensler announced his departure soon after the election. And working in the crypto unit, once a career launchpad, was suddenly perceived to be a liability.
During the presidential transition, Mr. Gensler’s enforcement chief, Sanjay Wadhwa, implored enforcement staff to “do the work the American people are paying us to do,” according to people with knowledge of his comments who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private meeting.
Some of the staff, however, got cold feet.
One of the crypto team’s senior leaders took an unannounced multiweek vacation, the people with knowledge said, and did not respond to emails about the cases. Another senior official refused to sign her name to one of the few crypto cases the agency brought after Election Day. Other officials stopped working on crypto cases altogether, stymying Mr. Gensler’s final push.
Victor Suthammanont spent a decade at the agency, most recently as Mr. Gensler’s enforcement counsel. Through two prior administration changes, he said, the staff stayed the course.
“But this transition wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen,” Mr. Suthammanont said, while declining to discuss specific cases. “The climate changed immediately.”
There was no turning back once Mr. Trump was sworn in. He named Mark T. Uyeda, one of the S.E.C.’s Republican commissioners, as the agency’s acting chairman until the president’s nominee, Mr. Atkins, received Senate approval.
Mr. Uyeda had long objected to the agency’s approach to crypto cases. And in a statement to The Times, he said that Mr. Gensler was adopting novel theories “in ways not supported by existing law.”
But Mr. Gensler had made clear in a 2022 speech that he saw it the opposite way. “When a new technology comes along, our existing laws don’t just go away,” he said.
By early February, Mr. Uyeda had sidelined Jorge G. Tenreiro, the agency’s head of litigation who had previously helped lead the crypto unit and oversaw most of the cases. Mr. Tenreiro was reassigned to the I.T. department, seen within the agency as a demeaning demotion.
Without Mr. Tenreiro, the agency began dropping investigations into crypto firms that were facing potential lawsuits. While some investigations have continued, at least 10 firms announced that they were no longer under scrutiny, including one just last week.
‘Nothing to Negotiate’
Mr. Uyeda soon faced a tougher decision: what to do with Biden-era lawsuits that the agency was still pursuing in court.
While the S.E.C. routinely drops investigations, dismissing an ongoing case was rare and would require approval from the agency’s commissioners.
In one of the highest-profile crypto cases, the S.E.C. had sued Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the United States, for failing to register with the agency. The company mounted an aggressive defense during the Biden years, persuading the judge overseeing the case to let a higher court review it before going to trial.
Now, with the S.E.C. in the Trump administration’s hands, Coinbase was one of the first in line seeking a dismissal.
Traditionally, the S.E.C. chairman’s office would stay out of these types of negotiations, leaving it to the career officials overseeing a case. But an official from Mr. Uyeda’s office was present for some of the talks with Coinbase, alongside enforcement lawyers.
“We were very careful to make sure that the acting chair’s office was kept up to speed on what was going on and apprised of all of it,” Paul Grewal, the company’s chief legal officer, said in an interview.
Mr. Uyeda called it “entirely appropriate” for his staff to participate in those meetings.
The S.E.C. under Mr. Uyeda was initially reluctant to abandon the case. Its opening offer to Coinbase was to simply pause the litigation, a person familiar with the matter said.
But Coinbase balked at a delay.
The S.E.C. then returned with a more generous proposal. It would dismiss the case, so long as the agency had the power to revive it later if the agency’s leaders changed their minds.
Coinbase would not settle for that, either.
“We were absolutely clear — either they would surrender or we would keep litigating because we had nothing to negotiate,” said Mr. Grewal, a former federal judge.
The S.E.C. eventually backed down. By that point, the agency had only two Republicans and one Democrat, after Mr. Gensler and another Democrat left.
Without addressing any particular decision, Mr. Uyeda said that it was “inappropriate to continue such cases, particularly if the S.E.C. were to disavow the underlying theories in the near future.”
But Caroline A. Crenshaw, the remaining Democratic commissioner, said in an interview that the agency had given all the advantage to the industry.
“They can effectively get away with anything,” she said.
Change of Heart
The industry saw the Coinbase dismissal as a white flag.
Lawyers for other crypto firms sought similar deals. And by the end of May, the agency had dropped six other cases.
The Times’s analysis of court records underscores just how noteworthy that was.
Under Mr. Biden, the S.E.C. did not voluntarily dismiss a single crypto case still pending from the first Trump administration, though it did drop the case against one defendant who had died and part of another in response to a judge’s adverse ruling.
Yet, during the second Trump administration, the agency dismissed 33 percent of the Biden-era crypto cases it had inherited. It dropped just 4 percent of the cases against other industries.
While the S.E.C. has vowed to continue pursuing fraud, it nonetheless dropped the lawsuit against Binance. In that case, the S.E.C. said a pair of related entities had fraudulently misled customers about their efforts to prevent manipulative trading.
The S.E.C. also petitioned a judge to freeze a fraud case against the crypto mogul Justin Sun and his Tron Foundation, one of four cases the agency handled that way in hopes of striking a deal. Agency officials have yet to announce a resolution of the case.
All told, the Trump S.E.C. inherited 23 crypto cases — 21 from the Biden years and two from the first Trump term. It pulled back from 14 of them.
Eight of those were against defendants who formed ties to the president or his family, either before or shortly after their cases were resolved.
Mr. Sun, for example, has bought $75 million worth of World Liberty’s digital token. His company, Tron, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. In court papers, Mr. Sun and Tron said the S.E.C. lacked evidence of fraud and jurisdiction to sue.
And just weeks before the Binance case was dismissed, the firm participated in a $2 billion business transaction that used digital currency from World Liberty. That deal is poised to generate tens of millions of dollars a year for the Trumps.
A spokesman for World Liberty said that “there is zero connection between World Liberty Financial and the U.S. government,” adding that the firm “has no influence on policy or decision-making by the administration.”
In a statement Binance said the S.E.C.’s action against it was “a product of the war on crypto.”
In March, the S.E.C. abandoned a case accusing Cumberland, a crypto trading firm, of acting as an unregistered securities dealer.
About two months later, DRW, its parent firm, invested nearly $100 million in the Trump family’s media company.
DRW officials said that the company was offered the opportunity to invest only after the case ended, and that the lawsuit was dismissed purely because the allegations were false.
In the case against Ripple, which donated nearly $5 million to the Trump inaugural, the agency tried to undo its own efforts.
During the first Trump term, the S.E.C. accused Ripple of depriving investors of material information in selling its crypto token. Last year, after rejecting some of the agency’s accusations, a federal judge ordered Ripple to pay a $125 million penalty for some securities violations.
Yet after Mr. Trump returned to the White House, the S.E.C. tried to reduce the punishment to just $50 million. The judge chided the government for its change of heart and rejected the new deal.
Ripple had argued to the judge that it deserved a lesser penalty, partly because the S.E.C. had moved to dismiss similar complaints against other crypto firms that were sued later. It ended up paying the full penalty.
The president’s media company said in July that it planned to include Ripple’s cryptocurrency in an investment fund open to the public.
In an interview, Hester M. Peirce, a Republican commissioner who is leading the S.E.C.’s new crypto task force, said that the decision to backtrack from many of these cases was rectifying a wrong. They should not have been filed in the first place, she said.
“I would say that the drastic action happened in the prior years, namely, bringing cases that we didn’t have a legal basis for,” she said, adding that she believed the cases stifled legitimate innovation.
Ms. Peirce said that political or financial considerations had no bearing on the situation. “We are looking at the facts and circumstances and making a decision on that,” she said, not “who the person knows.”
‘Plenty of Cash’
Few crypto industry players are closer to Mr. Trump than Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss.
The twins, who founded and run Gemini Trust, donated to a fund-raising committee that backed his re-election campaign and other Republican organizations. They chipped in funds for the construction of a White House ballroom, a pet project of the president’s. They also backed a new exclusive club in Washington, Executive Branch, partly owned by Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son.
In addition, the brothers’ investment firm recently put money into a new crypto mining company called American Bitcoin; Eric Trump, Mr. Trump’s second son, is a co-founder and chief strategy officer of the firm, and Donald Trump Jr. is an investor.
The president has repeatedly sung the twins’ praises, describing them as brainy male models.
“They’ve got the look. They’ve got the genius. Got plenty of cash,” Mr. Trump said at a White House event.
But Gemini Trust had legal trouble.
In December 2020, Gemini and another firm, Genesis Global Capital, agreed to offer Gemini customers the chance to lend their crypto assets to Genesis. Genesis, in turn, lent the assets to bigger players.
Genesis paid interest to the customers, who were promised the option to withdraw their assets at any time, while Gemini got a cut for its role as intermediary. Gemini touted the program as a way for account holders to earn interest rates of up to 8 percent.
Peter Chen, a data scientist in San Diego, said in an interview that he trusted Gemini enough to turn over more than $70,000.
“They gave me the impression that they were clean, followed the rules and were among the most regulated of all the crypto firms,” he said.
Then in late 2022, Genesis, facing bankruptcy, froze the accounts of 230,000 customers.
A 73-year-old grandmother pleaded with Gemini to return $199,000, her life savings. “Without that money I am doomed,” she wrote, according to a lawsuit filed by New York authorities.
Genesis reached a $2 billion settlement with New York in May 2024 and customers eventually got their money back. Gemini struck its own deal with the state to pay up to $50 million, if needed, to cover any remaining losses. It acknowledged no wrongdoing, blamed Genesis for the debacle and noted that no customers lost money in the end.
But the S.E.C. had also sued the two companies, accusing them of the unregistered sale of crypto. On social media, Tyler Winklevoss called the lawsuit a “manufactured parking ticket.”
While Genesis settled, Gemini was still fighting the lawsuit until this April, when the S.E.C. moved to freeze the case to hammer out a resolution. The agency disclosed in September that it had struck a deal with Gemini, which the commissioners must still vote on.
The S.E.C. told the federal judge overseeing the case that the agreement “would completely resolve this litigation.”
David Yaffe-Bellany and Alex Klavens contributed reporting. Julie Tate contributed research.
Howard Lutnick is helping push data center projects. His family companies are profiting from them.
By Eric Lipton, Michael Rothfeld, David Yaffe-Bellany and Ana Swanson
Kyle Lutnick, the 29-year-old scion of his family’s real estate business, traveled in July to Amarillo, Texas, to walk a dusty tract of land with the head of an artificial intelligence start-up called Fermi America.
He was touring the site of a future data center with Toby Neugebauer, a billionaire who is building one of the behemoth facilities that will power the next generation of A.I. Mr. Lutnick’s company was helping raise capital for the center, banking millions in fees in the process.
“Polite young man,” Mr. Neugebauer said in an interview.
A month later, Kyle’s father, Howard Lutnick, was photographed with Mr. Neugebauer at an event near the White House that celebrated Fermi’s partnership with a South Korean company on the same data center project.
This sequence of events — a son making money on a project his father is boosting as a federal official — has come up repeatedly since President Trump tapped Howard Lutnick to head the Commerce Department, according to an investigation by The New York Times.
In that role, Mr. Lutnick has twisted the arms of American allies, dangling policy favors in exchange for investments in U.S. industrial projects. At times, these tactics have created opportunities for his family’s clients to gain access to much-needed foreign capital, The Times found.
Mr. Lutnick, for example, demanded that the South Korean government invest billions of dollars in U.S. industry to reduce tariffs. Mr. Neugebauer is vying for a share of those investment dollars to build the data center that Mr. Lutnick’s family is also helping to finance.
The job of commerce secretary has always been to promote American industry through deal-making at home and abroad, and the position has traditionally been populated with titans of industry who were expected to bring a business sensibility to meetings filled with career government workers.
But never in modern U.S. history has the office intersected so broadly and deeply with the financial interests of the commerce secretary’s own family, according to interviews with ethics lawyers and historians.
Since February, Kyle Lutnick and his younger brother Brandon, 27, have helped run a network of companies under the corporate umbrella of Cantor Fitzgerald L.P. The companies, led by their father until this year, include the Wall Street investment firm Cantor, the securities brokerage BGC Group and the real estate company Newmark Group.
Brandon is the chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald L.P., and Kyle is the executive vice chairman. The sons and their two younger siblings have a controlling ownership stake in all three companies in the network.
The family’s companies operate in a wide range of industries, from cryptocurrencies to data centers, that overlap with Mr. Lutnick’s work in government, raising concerns even among high-level staff members in the Commerce Department, according to five current and former officials and others familiar with the matter.
It is a blurring of lines that has become a defining characteristic of Mr. Trump’s second term, where top officials and their family members have retained major stakes in industries the government oversees. For months, the president’s two older sons and the sons of his Middle East adviser, Steve Witkoff, have traveled the world pursuing deals that have generated hundreds of millions in profits, at least on paper.
As for Mr. Lutnick, The Times did not find evidence that he had intervened in policy discussions with the intention of driving business to his family. But as he promoted data center construction, business has boomed at the Lutnick companies.
Newmark recently announced that it had completed more than $25 billion of data center deals in the past 12 months, taking a small cut in fees on each transaction. “We are having our best year ever,” Brandon Lutnick said in October at a conference in Switzerland.
The White House and the Commerce Department said in statements that Mr. Lutnick had fulfilled his ethics requirements and took them seriously.
“The fact of the matter is that the only special interest guiding Secretary Lutnick and the rest of the Trump administration’s decision-making is the best interest of the American people,” said Kush Desai, a White House spokesman.
Representatives for Cantor and Newmark said the firms had business expertise and relationships that long predated Mr. Lutnick’s role in the administration.
Newmark’s chief executive, Barry Gosin, said in a statement that the company was the industry leader in raising capital and leasing for data centers.
“Newmark’s data center advisory work is independent of governmental and other private activities,” Mr. Gosin said. “Our success in this sector reflects the optimal outcomes we deliver for our clients.”
‘Enough Money’
Howard Lutnick first drew international attention in 2001, when 658 employees of Cantor, including his younger brother, were killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Mr. Lutnick was not at work that morning because he was dropping off Kyle for the first day of kindergarten.
Over the next two decades, he rebuilt the business in the wake of the tragedy. It now has more than 13,000 employees, and has expanded into new areas of the finance world, after acquiring Newmark in 2011.
At times, Mr. Lutnick has pushed boundaries and found his companies in the cross hairs of law enforcement. Cantor and affiliates agreed to pay more than $50 million over the last decade to settle at least eight separate investigations of illegal gambling and money laundering, incomplete, false or misleading statements in financial filings, and other issues, enforcement records show. In some cases, the firms settled without admitting or denying wrongdoing.
When Mr. Trump nominated him to lead the Commerce Department, Mr. Lutnick noted that at the age of 63, he wanted to serve the nation. “I’ve made enough money in my life,” he said at his confirmation hearing.
Mr. Lutnick has said he eliminated any ethics issues by turning over his ownership stake of the companies to his children, a process he announced in May, with an agreement that excluded him from any profits or losses after that date.
He has also claimed that he does not speak to his sons about their work. “I would love to talk to them about it, but I’m not allowed,” Mr. Lutnick said on a podcast in March.
The actual transfer of his ownership stake was not completed until early October, meaning he continued to have a financial interest in parts of the family’s business while he was commerce secretary, with his name on filings in full view of any client.
Until his divestment was completed, the Trump administration granted Mr. Lutnick an ethics waiver. That permitted him to participate in certain policy matters that might benefit the firms, while prohibiting him from working on specific deals in which they were involved.
Three ethics lawyers interviewed by The Times said it was not clear whether Mr. Lutnick had violated federal ethics rules or the terms of his waiver. But they said the Lutnick family’s connections to the same deals in both government and private spheres — like its involvement on different sides of Fermi’s data center project — raised questions about whether Mr. Lutnick was doing enough to distance himself from possible ethical conflicts.
“If there is a cloud of distrust over whether the action of that official is aimed at the public interest versus their family’s own interest, that’s a problem,” Kedric Payne, general counsel at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, an ethics group, said after reviewing documents at the request of The Times. “You’re going to create a risk that the public will just start to really lose trust in the government.”
Pressuring the Emiratis
Artificial intelligence has become a vital engine of the U.S. economy in recent years, drawing hundreds of billions of dollars in investment from around the world. Much of that money has flowed into data centers — sprawling facilities that sit on vast swaths of land and run industrial-grade computers that power A.I.
So it is no surprise that major commercial real estate brokers like Newmark were attracted to the sector.
In 2023, when Mr. Lutnick was the company’s chairman, Newmark expanded its team of investment bankers specializing in data centers. The company helps select land for these colossal projects, find power supplies and line up billions of dollars worth of loans and other financing.
The data center boom is “a modern-day gold rush,” Chad Lavender, a top Newmark executive, said in a podcast interview in September, shortly before the company reported record earnings for the quarter. “We’re seeing a ton of activity.”
Now Mr. Lutnick is helping foster that activity from Washington. The Commerce Department is seeking to accelerate data center construction with tax breaks, grants and permits to build new power sources to fuel the facilities.
Mr. Lutnick has also repeatedly pressed foreign nations to send chunks of their own money to help build data center projects in the United States, at the same time that his family’s company serves as one of the data center industry’s leading deal makers, earning tens of millions in fees.
Among the nations that Mr. Lutnick has pressured is the United Arab Emirates.
This spring, the Emiratis approached the Trump White House, requesting access to advanced U.S.-made computer chips, which are crucial to the Emirates’ ambitions of dominating the A.I. industry.
It was a controversial ask.
During the Biden administration, the United States had established strict controls to limit access to the chips, fearing that the Emiratis might share them with China and allow the Chinese to create sophisticated weapons that could be turned on U.S. soldiers. Even some within Mr. Trump’s administration were reluctant to give the Emirates unfettered access to the most advanced chips.
Mr. Lutnick was open to exporting chips, with the right safeguards in place. But his position gave him the power to say “no” and the Emiratis knew it. That is because the Commerce Department oversees the nation’s export licenses.
So he made clear that he wanted the Emiratis to commit billions of dollars to the construction of data centers in the United States in return for the chips, according to administration officials involved in the process.
“You will invest in America and build data centers in America for an equal amount of chips,” Mr. Lutnick said, describing the terms of the deal with the Emiratis during Senate testimony in June.
Eventually the chips deal was approved. Newmark’s clients are one of the possible beneficiaries.
Early this year, the Emirates agreed to commit money to help build the U.S. portion of a global network of data centers. The flagship site of this network, named after the 1994 sci-fi movie “Stargate,” is rising in Abilene, Texas.
Newmark has helped finance construction of the Abilene facility, soon to become one of the largest data centers in the country. The firm brokered more than $9.4 billion in loans this year for a partnership working on the project.
The Emirati money ultimately might not be used on the Abilene data center, executives involved in the effort said. But it is already helping finance other Stargate sites.
Deals have also been struck with Saudi Arabia to invest at least $20 billion in energy and data center projects in the United States, helping bring yet more business to the real estate brokers who structure financing for these projects, though there is no indication whether it will benefit Newmark specifically.
A Commerce Department spokesman said Mr. Lutnick did not pressure Middle East partners to fund specific projects, just to spend money on data centers somewhere in the United States.
A similar instance of overlaps played out again in July.
That month, Mr. Lutnick joined Mr. Trump in Pittsburgh, boasting about the billions of dollars that private companies are spending on a slate of data centers, including a giant project in Lancaster, Pa.
“The A.I. revolution will change the way the world works, and we cannot lose,” Mr. Lutnick said at the event. “The Trump administration will not let us lose.”
What he did not mention was that Newmark was involved in the Lancaster project. A few weeks after Mr. Lutnick’s appearance in Pennsylvania, the company announced it had brokered a $4 billion joint venture to build a “state-of-the-art A.I. data center campus” there.
A Commerce Department spokesman said Mr. Lutnick had no role in any of the individual deals that he promoted in Pennsylvania, and attended the event simply to support the industry.
Pressuring the Koreans
The intersection of Mr. Lutnick’s work as commerce secretary and his sons’ as data center deal makers is most apparent in the Fermi America project in Amarillo.
Fermi was co-founded in January by Rick Perry, the former Texas governor who was Mr. Trump’s first-term energy secretary, and Mr. Neugebauer, a major Republican donor who has supported Mr. Trump. The company has not yet generated any revenue.
This year, Mr. Neugebauer turned to Kyle and Brandon Lutnick to help Fermi raise $107.6 million as an early step in plans to build the President Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus, which would be powered in part by nuclear energy.
Mr. Neugebauer said he chose Newmark because of the expertise of its staff, not its connection to the commerce secretary. He said he knew that seeking favors would most likely backfire.
“Was never going to help me,” he said. “Makes it harder.”
In July, Mr. Neugebauer gave a tour of the Texas construction site to Kyle Lutnick, a Stanford graduate who has worked as a D.J. under the stage name Kxtz. Mr. Neugebauer said that he gave Kyle and other visitors Fermi-branded cowboy hats, and that Kyle later texted a picture of himself with the hat.
Soon Mr. Neugebauer was also engaging with Kyle’s father. Shortly after the Texas tour, Mr. Lutnick announced that South Korea had agreed to a trade deal that would funnel $350 billion into the United States.
Mr. Neugebauer coveted a piece of those investments.
His plan was to get the South Korean government, with the support of the Trump administration, to help finance a nuclear power plant to fuel his Amarillo data center. Components for the plant would be supplied by Doosan Enerbility, a South Korean industrial giant.
In August, Mr. Lutnick appeared alongside Mr. Neugebauer during a U.S.-Korean business summit at the historic Willard InterContinental hotel, where Fermi and Doosan announced plans to collaborate.
Mr. Neugebauer and his Doosan counterpart posed for a photo holding their memorandum of understanding, flanked by Mr. Lutnick and a Korean government official.
“You’re going to see a national and economic security fund built with the Japanese money, the Korean money and other countries’ money,” Mr. Lutnick said on CNBC the day after the event.
Days after the Doosan announcement, Fermi unveiled its financing deal for the Amarillo project, with both Newmark and Cantor listed as advisers. The companies were paid $6 million for this work, according to a financial filing.
In a bigger coup for the Lutnick companies, Cantor jointly managed an initial public offering of Fermi’s stock in early October that valued the company at more than $12.5 billion. Millions of dollars in additional fees flowed to Cantor.
“Honored to co-lead the I.P.O. for such an innovative and inspiring company Fermi America,” Kyle Lutnick posted on social media at the closing of that deal.
Ben Kass, a Commerce Department spokesman, said no decision had been made on where to allocate the funds South Korea had agreed to spend in the United States. So far, he said, the department is planning to use part of the money to promote U.S. shipbuilding, rather than nuclear power.
Still, Mr. Kass added, the final terms of the trade deal remain under negotiation.
At a recent meeting in Washington, Mr. Neugebauer pressed Deputy Commerce Secretary Paul Dabbar to direct money from the Korean trade deal toward Fermi’s nuclear plant.
Mr. Neugebauer has an important ally in Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas and the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. Fermi is also seeking low-interest financing from the Energy Department, which is offering billions of dollars in nuclear-energy loans.
“Toby has been a close friend of mine for 20 years,” Mr. Cruz said last week, at a Cantor-sponsored conference at the Ritz-Carlton in Miami Beach, after he wrapped Mr. Neugebauer in a bear hug by the pool. “It is a powerful proposal to bring billions of investments to Texas and create a whole lot of jobs.”
Mr. Neugebauer remains optimistic that the Commerce Department will help him get the Korean funding.
“Do I think it probably gets done?” Mr. Neugebauer said. “Yes.”
He added, “We got no special treatment.”
Cade Metz contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy, Kitty Bennett and Laine Cibulskis contributed research.