“We’re going to hold the crooks accountable,” House Democratic leader Hakim Jeffries told the Associated Press last week in anticipation of the Democrats’ likely retaking the House on November 3. (The political forecaster Charlie Cook says a Democratic House is a “done deal” and a Democratic Senate “very realistic.”) Leading House oversight hearings, Jeffries explained to Reuters a couple of days later, will be Reps. Jamie Raskin, who’s in line to become chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and Robert Garcia, who’s in line to become chair of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee. If the Democrats retake the Senate, then Raskin’s and Garcia’s counterparts will be Senators Sheldon Whitehouse, who’s in line to become chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Richard Blumenthal, who’s in line to become chair of the Senate Committee on Investigations.
Raskin told the AP that overseeing “systemic corruption” under President Donald Trump is a “gargantuan” task, and Raskin and Blumenthal both advised Reuters that no definitive list of top-priority targets yet exists. So much corruption, so little time!
There is of course plenty to investigate with no corruption angle per se, just catastrophic and/or illegal governance. For example: You could hold an entire hearing to calculate how many people Robert Kennedy, Jr., has killed as Health and Human Services Secretary (though lately a corruption angle on Kennedy has surfaced, too, involving $4 million in book advances and free flights to Fiji and Greece). Certainly Kennedy has not killed as many people as Pete Hegseth has by dropping bombs on fishing boats in the Caribbean that may or may not be conveying drugs (234 dead). Not to mention the other couple thousand civilians Hegseth’s killed in an Iran war nobody wants. And Hegseth and Kennedy are pikers compared to the triumvirate of Elon Musk, Russell Vought, and Marco Rubio. By shutting down US AID these three people, one of them a devout Christian fundamentalist, have killed 781,343, according to an estimate by ImpactCounter.com, of whom 518,428 were children. According to the Gates Foundation, child deaths, which since 2000 have been cut in half globally, rose worldwide in 2025—the first increase of this century. Gentlemen, take a bow. Now raise your right hand.
But if the Democrats hope specifically to hold crooks accountable, by which I presume Jeffries and Raskin mean kleptocrats who use their governmental positions to line their pockets, they will need to assemble a list of top-priority targets. Not being quite so busy these days as Raskin, Garcia, Whitehouse, and Blumenthal, I’ve come up with the following five. At the very least, I think it’s a strong first cut.
The UAE AI Chips Affair. The mother of all Trump family financial scandals. It begins with a president-elect of the United States entering into a business partnership with a foreign nation four days before his second inauguration. Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who runs the sovereign wealth fund of the United Arab Emirates (Tahnoon is also brother to the UAE president) purchased, for $500 million, a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial, or WLF. WLF is a cryptocurrency company, created two months before the 2024 election, in which the Trump family owns a 38 percent equity stake (initially it was 60 percent), and from which the Trump family extracts 75 percent of net proceeds from token sales, even though nobody in the Trump family appears to have invested a dime in WLF. The UAE partnership deal was signed by Trump’s son Eric.
Sheikh Tahnoon also put $31 million into business entities associated with the family of Steve Witkoff, a WLF co-founder (his son Zach is chief executive of WLF). Before the money changed hands Witkoff was named Trump’s envoy to the Middle East. The UAE, please note, is situated in the Middle East.
That all happened in January 2025. In May of that year Sheikh Tahnoon purchased $2 billion of a WLF stablecoin called USD1 to invest in Binance. This transaction was arranged by a felon named Changpeng Zhao, who’d spent four months at the Federal Correctional Complex Lompoc for violating various securities laws. He was also Binance’s chief executive until his 2023 plea deal required him to step down. Zhao supplied WLF with more than a dozen Binance engineers to help set up USD1. Five months later, Trump pardoned Zhao. An October Wall Street Journal piece suggests the pardon was understood by both sides to be payback for Zhao’s invaluable help in launching WLF.
Sheikh Tahnoon got an even bigger payback. He’d been lobbying the Trump administration to allow the UAE to purchase advanced AI chips that the Biden administration previously denied that nation. The Biden administration denied UAE the chips because it had pretty good evidence that a company of which Tahnoon was chairman shared advanced technology with China, which in turn used that tech to upgrade its long-range missiles—missiles that could be used to shoot down United States jet fighters should the United States try to halt a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “Intel was flashing red,” one former US official told Demetri Sevastopulo of the Financial Times last October. Tahnoon’s company, G42, has denied that it shared the technology.
Two weeks after UAE’s $2 billion stablecoin purchase (and only four months after the UAE purchased 49 percent of WLF) the White House green-lighted UAE’s purchase of the advanced AI chips. Steve Witkoff was involved in this transaction himself! In dollar terms, this is the biggest bribery scandal in United States history. It makes Teapot Dome look like shoplifting a candy bar. And unlike Teapot Dome, this scandalous transaction enriched a sitting president.
Witkoff should be called to testify. WLF said at the time of the chips announcement that Wikoff was “in the process of fully divesting from WLF.” But three months later a financial disclosure form showed that Witkoff still owned a piece of WLF. Zach Witkoff also looks like a promising witness, if only because he has a big mouth.
Trump’s IRS Indemnity. Trump filed a $10 million lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service last January over the leak of his tax returns to The New York Times. The tax returns leaked during Trump’s first term, so in effect Trump was suing himself, and the lawsuit was filed during Trump’s second term, so in effect Trump was negotiating a settlement with himself (via a Justice department over which Trump exercises improper control). The settlement was that Trump would get a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” (i.e., slush) fund to compensate people Trump believed were prosecuted unjustly, plus immunity from any pending tax audits. In July, District Court Judge Kathleen Williams voided both settlements. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche then rescinded the anti-weaponization fund. He did not rescind the indemnification agreement.
Nobody puts it past Trump that he might try to revive the slush fund, whose cancellation (like its creation) is, for complicated reasons, a matter of some legal doubt. But the main question for congressional investigators is what, if anything, the Internal Revenue Service did in response to that indemnification deal that Blanche never rescinded. Was Trump being audited? Is he being audited now? Were existing audits cancelled? These questions should be answerable in a congressional hearing even if the content of those audits must remain confidential.
Pete Hegseth’s Blood-Money Insider Trade. In March, the Financial Times broke the story that a Morgan Stanley broker representing Pete Hegseth attempted to make a multimillion dollar investment in defense companies on the eve of the Iran War. The broker approached BlackRock about Hegseth investing in BlackRock’s Defense Industrials Active Exchange ETF, or exchange traded fund. An ETF is sort of similar to a mutual fund but it bundles multiple stocks and bonds into a single financial instrument that trades like a stock. A Pentagon spokesman denied Hegseth’s broker made any such inequiry, but the FT had three sources confirming that he did. Advantage: FT.
The purchase never took place because, for some reason, BlackRock’s Defense Industrials Active Exchange ETF was not available to Morgan Stanley clients. Conceivably BlackRock threw a boulder in Hegseth’s path because it understood these discussions were destined to become the subject of an investigation. According to the FT, the matter was “flagged internally.” That means multiple BlackRock employees who know about this should be available for Congress to subpoena.
My guess is BlackRock also created an internal paper trail, because if you were BlackRock and you’d “flagged internally” a blatantly corrupt attempt by a sitting secretary of defense to get rich off the war he was overseeing, wouldn’t you create a paper trail so that nobody later could accuse you of misbehavior? As I noted last March, this is low-hanging investigatory fruit. All that’s really necessary is to send a few subpoenas to BlackRock.
Trump’s Memecoin Racket. Trump made more than $2 billion in income in 2025, according to his June financial disclosure. The single biggest component was licensing fees for a memecoin called $TRUMP that Trump hawked on social media. It earned Trump $635 million. Two thirds of all investors in the $TRUMP memecoin—988,905 people, according to the crypto analytics firm Nansen—lost a total of $3.81 billion. ($TRUMP briefly traded at about $73 in January 2025; as I write this it’s trading at about $2.) But for Trump it’s all upside because he collects a transaction fee on every $TRUMP trade, including $TRUMP tokens sold by MAGA suckers at a loss. Nice work if you can get it.
Trump’s swindle of credulous followers is an interesting angle for investigators to follow, but an even more interesting angle would be to study the motives of people who buy $TRUMP in sufficient quantities to score an invitation to a VIP reception with Trump. This group appears willing to lose money on Trump memecoins so long as it gains them access to Trump. Trump’s hosted two such receptions. In 2025, the attendees were 25 investors who held, according to the Financial Times, a median $3.2 million in near-worthless $TRUMP memecoins. In 2026 the attendees were 29 investors who held a median of $539,000 in even-more-worthless $TRUMP memecoins. The top purchaser in both contests was Justin Sun, whom the Securities and Exchange Commission charged with fraud in 2023. Curiously enough, in March the SEC settled the case for a paltry $10 million and on social media Sun pronounced himself “very pleased.” Sun is an obvious star witness to any investigation, but other contest winners should be called to testify also; FT said in April that it was able to identify 27 of the 29 most recent attendees (though, exasperatingly, it didn’t say who they were).
Diplomacy For Sale. We come, finally, to the sprawling Trump family. Donald, Jr., is of course a fat target and merits investigation for various suspicious investments, including in several defense companies, one of them a startup that received a $620 million loan from the Pentagon after White House aide Peter Navarro intervened, according to a May ProPublica investigation. (Don, Jr., “formed a close bond in recent years” with Navarro, ProPublica’s
A classified report produced by a European intelligence agency states that Trump and people around him have discussed several potential contracts in Russia. The report is not dated, but the European official who gave it to me said that the details were first discussed sometime after Trump invited Putin to Anchorage, in August, 2025.
The proposed business ventures mentioned in this classified report were strikingly specific:
The document lists ten potential ventures, which it says appear to “have been originally designed by the Kremlin’s political and business elites.” They include reopening the Nord Stream 2 pipeline under American control, resuming ExxonMobil’s operations in Sakhalin, and drilling for oil in the Sea of Okhotsk. According to the report, there was discussion of unfreezing Russian assets that are held under American sanctions. The document mentions people who might participate, including Trump, Witkoff, and Kushner.
A Kushner spokesperson told Filkins that no United States officials would profit from the deals under discussion. But Kushner’s $6 billion venture capital firm, Affinity Partners, is already funded in large part by sovereign wealth funds in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, all of them situated, of course, in that same Middle East where Kushner is negotiating peace deals (or anyway trying to). After Kushner joined the Trump administration he personally solicited $5 billion in investments, according to a March 2026 report by Rob Copeland and Maureen Farrell in The New York Times.
Affinity, though possibly not Kushner himself, approached the Saudis this year to increase their investment. The Saudis already invested $2 billion in Affinity back in 2021 over the objections of its sovereign wealth funds advisers, who pronounced Affinity “unsatisfactory in all aspects” and in particular judged “excessive” its proposed management fee. But that was before Kushner re-entered government to negotiate peace deals in, among other places, the Middle East. “Mr. Kushner’s fund-raising,” The Times’s Copeland and Maureen Farrell reported, “is expected to stretch on for the better part of this year.” I would guess many affinities have been identified.
An investigation of Affinity Partners should be a top priority.
Those are my top five scandals to investigate. There are, of course, many other kleptocracy scandals, many of which I’ve documented (see “The Trump Family’s Ever-Expading Portfolio of Corruption,” March 2025, and “How Trump May Be Cashing In On A Weakening Dollar,” October 2025, and “Trump’s New Bank Is His Most Naked Scandal Yet,” August 2026). But Democrats will need to pace themselves. These five represent, I think, the most promising initial pr0jects.
