Trump’s Shady Crypto Business Partner Exposed in Shocking New Report

Donald Trump’s shady crypto business has a surprising partner: Zachary Witkoff, the son of the president’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff. But don’t worry, his dad is getting in on the action too.

A sweeping investigation published Tuesday by The New York Times found that the young Witkoff had found his way to becoming one of the top three managers of World Liberty Financial, or WLFI, the decentralized finance platform that is majority owned by a Trump business entity.

DT Marks DEFI LCC, which is affiliated with Trump and his family members, owns 60 percent of World Liberty and is entitled to 75 percent of $WFLI token sales after deduction of agreed reserves, according to the website.

Trump serves as the company’s “Chief Crypto Advocate.” It’s a sort of ironic title because, while Trump can promote the brand itself, he can also shape policy to the benefit of cryptocurrencies and influence the very markets to which crypto value is tied. The president’s sons, Eric and Don Jr., are both Web 3 ambassadors, while Barron, a freshman at New York University, is a “DeFi Visionary.”

A Securities and Exchange Commission filing lists Witkoff and his son as “promoters.” Witkoff, whose background is in New York real estate, has become a central figure in the floundering U.S.-brokered peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia.

The Times reported that Zachary Witkoff was one of three managers who oversee daily operations at World Liberty, alongside Chase Herro and Zak Folkman of Dough Finance, a lending app that was hacked in July, losing its customers more than $2 million. Coindesk previously reported that some of WLFI’s code was lifted directly from the defunct Dough Finance.

The young Witkoff recently traveled with Folkman and Herro to Pakistan to meet with Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif and other 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,” the Times reported.

The trio also met this week with Changpeng Zhao, the founder and former chief executive of Binance, in Abu Dhabi to discuss USD1, WLFI’s stable coin, which is a cryptocurrency that maintains a value of $1. Zhao has been seeking a pardon from the Trump administration after he pleaded guilty to violating U.S. anti–money laundering laws, according to The Wall Street Journal.

World Liberty presents a golden opportunity for investors to curry favor with the Trump administration by allowing them to invest in a coin that directly benefits the president and his family.

World Liberty sent multiple firms a pitch saying that they could essentially pay somewhere between $10 million and $30 million for World Liberty’s endorsement, according to three firms that spoke with the Times. In return for tens of millions of dollars, World Liberty would buy a small amount of the firm’s cryptocurrency, signaling to the market that the firm’s coin was worthy of investment, while pocketing the rest of the cash.

Some firms turned them down. “It’s a very dishonest approach,” Dominik Schiener, founder of the IOTA Foundation, told the Times. His Berlin-based group “immediately” rejected the pitch, he said.

Crucially, World Liberty allows foreign investors to financially back Trump. Many of World Liberty’s early investors were from South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates. Early investors also included some foreign crypto entrepreneurs who had to make payments to the Securities and Exchange Commission over their misdeeds.

Crypto executives have used their purchases of $WLFI to raise their profile in the U.S. and globally, in addition to granting them leverage with the White House. Justin Sun, a Chinese billionaire who founded the crypto platform Tron and was sued by the SEC during the Biden administration, bought a whopping $75 million of $WFLI, late last year. A few months later, the SEC asked a federal judge to halt Sun’s case.

In March, Trump announced plans for a U.S. “crypto strategic reserve,” which presents as a blatant insider trading scam to make his billionaire crypto czar richer—funded by taxpayer money. It directly increased the value of World Liberty’s stash of ether, which was one of the coins included in Trump’s reserve.

In Oklahoma City Thursday, about 20 federal immigration agents raided the wrong home, forcing a woman out of the house with her three daughters, not even leaving them enough time to get dressed, and then seized their phones, laptops, and life savings.

The woman had only moved into the house two weeks earlier, after relocating to Oklahoma from Maryland. The armed agents told the woman, identified by local TV station KFOR as “Marisa,” that they had a search warrant, but the named suspects on the warrant didn’t live in the house and weren’t connected to anyone in the family.

“We just moved here from Maryland,” Marisa said. “We’re citizens. That’s what I kept saying. We’re citizens.”

The agents, who identified themselves as U.S. marshals, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and FBI agents, didn’t seem to care, waking the family up, forcing them outside in their underwear, ransacking the house, and taking the family’s belongings as “evidence.”

“I told them before they left, I said you took my phone. We have no money. I just moved here,” said Marisa. “I have to feed my children. I’m going to need gas money. I need to be able to get around. Like, how do you just leave me like this? Like an abandoned dog.”

“They were very dismissive, very rough, very careless,” the woman added. “I kept pleading. I kept telling them we weren’t criminals. They were treating us like criminals. We were here by ourselves. We didn’t do anything.”

One agent told the family, “I know it was a little rough this morning.”

“It was so denigrating. That you do all of this to a family, to women, your fellow citizens. And it was ‘a little rough’? You literally traumatized me and my daughters for life. We’re going to have to go get help or get over this somehow,” Marisa said. The agents told her that it could take days or months for the family’s stuff to be returned, and wouldn’t even give her a business card.

It all fits a pattern of cruelty from the Trump administration in its efforts to deport as many people as it can. The White House doesn’t believe in due process or following the law, or even standards of basic decency. The violent raid in Oklahoma City would be wrong even against a family of undocumented immigrants, let alone U.S. citizens like Marisa and her daughters. Hopefully, she and other victims of the administration’s wanton behavior can get restitution.

UPS plans to fire 20,000 people before the end of the year, in the midst of a Trump-induced drop in deliveries from Amazon, the postal service’s biggest customer. This amounts to a staggering 4 percent of its workforce. UPS will also shut down 73 buildings.

“In connection with our anticipation of lower volumes from our largest customer, we began our Network Reconfiguration, which is an expansion of Network of the Future and will lead to consolidations of our facilities and workforce as well as an end-to-end process redesign,” UPS stated in a regulatory filing. 

Trump’s 145 percent tariffs on Chinese imports are likely to have a massive impact on Amazon, as 60 percent of its sales come from smaller, independent retailers that depend on said imports. Even Amazon CEO Andy Jassy admitted that the cost of countless products “made in China” will shoot up. Earlier on Tuesday, a report indicated that Amazon had plans to display how much each product’s final cost had been impacted by Trump’s tariffs, though it later caved under White House pressure and said that’s no longer the case. 

These are thousands of good union jobs here getting eliminated by Trump’s destructive trade policy. UPS is the single largest employer in the Teamsters Union, with over 61 percent of its employees maintaining union membership. This critical blow comes as Teamsters President Sean O’Brien continues his shameless support of the clearly anti-labor Trump administration.

And even more troubling: UPS is in serious negotiations with an AI start-up that would have hundreds of gray, humanoid robots replace human workers at the UPS packaging conveyor belt, as this bleak, sterile clip from the company’s X profile shows. Tariffs aren’t getting negotiated, prices are rising, people are being fired, and a team of soulless assembly-line robots is waiting in the wings.  

The Trump administration may not be telling the truth on deporting undocumented immigrant mothers with their U.S. citizen children.

Attorneys for the women and three U.S.-born children say their deportations over the weekend were illegal and the administration’s claims that the children were placed on deportation flights at their mothers’ request are false. One mother wasn’t allowed to speak with a lawyer or her family before she was deported with her children, even though Immigration and Customs Enforcement knew that one of them has stage 4 cancer.

That child, a 4-year-old boy, left the country without access to his cancer medication along with his 7-year-old sister, also a U.S. citizen. Their mother “did not consent to any of this,” according to attorney Mich P. González.

“She did not sign anything, did not write anything, and did not consent to anything expressly. The entire time she was trying very aggressively to speak to her lawyer,” González told NBC News. “As a matter of fact, she was trying to get ahold of a phone to try to call her family and her attorney. But she wasn’t being allowed.”

In another case, a mother of a 2-year-old American citizen about to be deported was given less than two minutes on the phone with her husband to decide what to do with their child. She had been told by ICE to take her children to her routine check-in, moved up from the original date, when she was detained.

Her attorney told MSNBC that “at every single point ICE denied anybody the ability to know where this family was, denied everybody the ability to contact with them and communicate with them.”

The child’s father “barely had any opportunity to speak with the mother about what was best for the child before an ICE officer hung up the phone as he tried to give her the number for an attorney,” said Grace Willis, an attorney with the National Immigration Project.

The Trump administration’s “border czar” Tom Homan has said that the deportations of these young children all took place at their mothers’ request. Secretary of State Marco Rubio concurs, saying that the kids weren’t deported but “went back with their mothers,” and can return to the U.S. if there’s someone who “wants to assume them.”

All of this is more proof of the White House’s cruel and haphazard approach to immigration. It wants quick, mass deportations so badly that it ignores the law and even basic allowances for family contact and phone calls. To these officials, basic human rights, let alone those guaranteed under the Constitution, do not apply to anyone slated for deportation, lest anything get slowed down or overturned.

It’s always a sign that things are going well when you have to break out the polygraph machines!

FBI Director Kash Patel has directed the use of “lie detector” tests to root out leakers at national security agencies, The Washington Post reported Monday, a significant escalation of the Trump administration’s efforts to prevent sources from disclosing information to the press that could undermine the president’s policies.

“The seriousness of the specific leaks in question precipitated the polygraphs, as they involved potential damage to security protocols at the bureau,” the FBI spokesperson said of the Trump administration’s latest McCarthyist antic.

While polygraph tests are regularly used by government agencies in hiring practices, as well as by law enforcement for interrogating suspects, they are widely considered to be unreliable indicators of actual deception, instead indicating a subject’s anxiety levels.

“They are stress detectors,” said Steven Aftergood, an expert on intelligence policy formerly with the Federation of American Scientists, to the Post. “If for any reason the questions being posed are upsetting to an individual, your pulse might accelerate even if you’ve done nothing wrong. So polygraphs do not measure truth or falsity.”

Aftergood said the use of polygraphs was the result of “thin-skinned” agency heads who were afraid of “adverse news coverage.”

Last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a startling internal memo rescinding a Biden-era policy that protected journalists from leak investigations. The updated policy would allow for the use of subpoenas, search warrants, and court orders to collect information and testimony from journalists. “Federal government employees intentionally leaking sensitive information to the media undermines the ability of the Department of Justice to uphold the rule of law, protect civil rights, and keep America safe. This conduct is illegal and wrong, and it must stop,” Bondi wrote in the memo.

Bondi pointed to reports that Dan Caldwell, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s senior adviser, had been fired. She also included a report that revealed a “secret assessment” by the National Security Council that determined that Venezuela was not directing members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to invade the U.S. as an example of leaked classified information.

Aftergood told the Post that Bondi’s memo had wrongly presumed that the White House’s communications were all “sacrosanct.”

“It’s like saying dissent will not be tolerated. It is both absurd and offensive,” Aftergood added.

Concerns over leaks within the Trump administration have been escalating since before the humiliating Signalgate scandal last month. On a podcast Sunday, an ex-Hegseth aide said that the secretary and his team had become “consumed” by leaks. “If you look at a pie chart of the secretary’s day, at this point, 50 percent of it is probably a leak investigation,” the aide said.

The growing crackdown in intelligence agencies has created what one former official at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence anonymously described to the Post as “a culture of fear that there will be personal retribution.”

A former FBI field office head was more blunt. “Morale’s in the toilet,” they told the Post anonymously. “When you see people who are being investigated, or names [of agents who worked on January 6 cases] being passed over to the DOJ, it’s what the fuck?”

Amazon was almost going to break down tariff prices on its shopping platform for consumer transparency—before the White House threw a tantrum.

Shortly after the e-commerce giant announced Tuesday that it would display tariff costs for its customers alongside its marketplace items’ original prices, Amazon balked, caving to the Trump administration’s demands that it reconsider what the MAGA leader viewed as a “hostile and political act.”

“Why did Amazon do this when the Biden administration hiked inflation to the highest level in four years?” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt during a press briefing, adding that “it’s not really a surprise” that Amazon would do such a thing since it has, per the Trump administration, “partnered with a Chinese propaganda arm.”

Hours after Leavitt made the accusation, an Amazon spokesperson said that the larger website had never considered such a move, instead deferring blame to one of its smaller storefronts for low-priced goods, Amazon Haul.

“The team that runs our ultra low cost Amazon Haul store has considered listing import charges on certain products,” the spokesperson told The Washington Post in a statement. “This was never a consideration for the main Amazon site and nothing has been implemented on any Amazon properties.”

Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos made unexpected political waves when he appeared at Donald Trump’s inauguration, visually backing the president’s forthcoming administration. Since then, Bezos’s net worth—which is tied up mostly in Amazon stock—has tanked by some $36 billion as Trump has proposed a 145 percent tariff on imported Chinese goods, a move that would practically shatter Amazon’s supply chain and irreparably damage sellers on the market’s platform.

During the same press briefing, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that 18 countries have issued trade proposals to lower tariffs. Earlier this month, the White House promised to make 90 deals in 90 days to drive down predicted costs and erase the trade war, a pledge that economists argue is no less than a monumental task.

Major big box retailers have already rung the alarm bells over Trump’s paused plan. Last week, representatives from Walmart, Target, and Home Depot met at the White House to discuss concerns over Trump’s aggressive tariff plan.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday bragged about ending a military program he described as “yet another woke divisive/social justice/Biden initiative.”

But that initiative—the Women, Peace & Security program—was started by the Trump administration in 2017 after he signed a bipartisan bill authored by Kristi Noem and Jan Schakowsky. The measure was also supported at the time by Mike Waltz and Marco Rubio. Three of those four people named now work at the highest levels of the Trump administration.

“This morning, I proudly ENDED the ‘Women, Peace & Security’ (WPS) program inside the @DeptofDefense. WPS is yet another woke divisive/social justice/Biden initiative that overburdens our commanders and troops — distracting from our core task: WAR-FIGHTING,” Hegseth wrote on X. “WPS is a UNITED NATIONS program pushed by feminists and left-wing activists. Politicians fawn over it; troops HATE it. DoD will hereby executive the minimum of WPS required by statute, and fight to end the program for our next budget. GOOD RIDDANCE WPS!”

Yet in 2020, Trump-appointed Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Rath Hoffman described this same program as a worthwhile national effort.

“By recognizing the diverse roles women play across the spectrum of conflict—and by incorporating their perspectives throughout plans and operations—DOD is better equipped to promote our security, confront near-peer competitors, and defeat our adversaries,” he said.

“When we recognize the diverse roles women play as agents of change; and when we incorporate their perspectives throughout our plans and operations, we are better equipped to promote our security, confront our near peer competitors, and defeat our adversaries,” said Stephanie Hammond, another Trump Defense Department staffer. “It will help the department strengthen alliances and attract new partners by demonstrating U.S. commitment to human rights and women’s empowerment, making the United States the partner of choice.”

The program Hegseth is now vilifying was fully backed by MAGA, and it takes anyone about 30 seconds to figure that out. Another honest blunder from Hegseth—whose name has been rightfully followed by words like “embattled” and “controversy” ever since his Cabinet nomination—would be unsurprising. Or maybe he’s just lying blatantly again.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is trying to prevent Democrats from opening up inquiries into the Trump administration.

Johnson used his authority on Monday to advance a measure in the House Rules Committee that would prevent any votes on “resolutions of inquiry,” which would take away one of the few oversight tools that House Democrats have as the minority party in the chamber.

These types of resolutions are privileged, which push them to the top of the House agenda. If the majority party on a committee does not report a resolution of inquiry to the full House, the resolution can be brought to the floor without the speaker’s permission, forcing a vote.

At the moment, Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee are using one of those resolutions to demand answers from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth about U.S. attacks on the Houthis in Yemen, and about how the Pentagon is handling classified and sensitive information. Hegseth’s use of private group chats on the Signal app to discuss U.S. airstrikes in Yemen have prompted House Democrats to push for more information.

Republicans, with Johnson’s backing, have responded by pausing resolutions of inquiry until September 30, hoping that questions about “Signalgate” (and any other oversight attempts) from the Democrats will die out. Republicans hid the pause inside another set of resolutions attacking former President Biden’s environmental policies.

With this cowardly move, Johnson and the House GOP have made it harder for Democrats to ask the Trump administration for documents about Signalgate, or any other issue. It’s a blatant favor to President Trump, and effectively weakens Congress’s oversight powers over the executive branch. It’s more proof that Trump owns the Republican Party and wants to exercise total control over the government, the constitutional separation of powers be damned.

Donald Trump has received failing marks from voters in his first 100 days in the White House.

A new poll by NPR/PBS/Marist published Tuesday found that when asked to give the president a letter grade for his efforts during the first three months of his presidency, 46 percent of respondents who were registered voters selected an “F.”

Twenty-four percent of respondents graded Trump with an “A.”

The poll was conducted between April 21 and 23, amid the president’s crackdown on immigration, threats against the judiciary and due process, and a 90-day easing of his sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs, which have rocked global markets.

But Trump isn’t very interested in receiving a report card. “The Polls from the Fake News are, like the News itself, FAKE! We are doing GREAT, better than ever before,” he wrote on Truth Social late Monday night.

This is just one in a spate of humiliating polls for the president.

An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll published Sunday found that Trump’s approval rating had plummeted to 39 percent, a 6 percent drop from February. Fifty-five percent of Americans said they disapproved of the job he’s doing in office, which is the lowest first-100-day rating of a president since modern polling began roughly 80 years ago. A poll from The New York Times was similarly bleak, with 66 percent of respondents thinking “chaotic” accurately described Trump’s first 100 days. Fifty-four percent thought Trump had exceeded his executive powers, and 50 percent already said he’s made the economy worse.

Trump was so incensed by that result that he demanded a criminal probe into the pollster.

A top GOP pollster suggested that while Trump wasn’t necessarily alienating his own voter base, he was bleeding independents, nonpartisans, and people who already didn’t like him.

The president is following through on his threats to transform the American military into domestic watchdogs.

Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday titled “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Civilians,” effectively tasking Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to work out the kinks in determining “how military and national security assets” and personnel “can most effectively be utilized” to hamper crime.

The executive order also directed the creation of a legal defense mechanism to further shield law enforcement from potential consequences, and specifically tasked Bondi with prioritizing “holding state and local officials accountable” for potential wrongdoing, such as “directly and unlawfully prohibiting law enforcement officers from carrying out duties.”

It’s not the first time that Trump has threatened to turn the U.S. military on American citizens. Before Election Day, he suggested that the National Guard could be tapped to subdue “radical left lunatics” and individuals that he described as the “enemy from within.”

But Trump has  obviously been ruminating on the idea for a while. In September 2020, he warned that he would use force against Democrats if they chose to protest in the streets following his potential win on Election Day.

“We’ll put them down very quickly if they do that. We have the right to do that. We have the power to do that, if we want,” Trump said at the time, according to Politico.

“Look, it’s called insurrection,” he continued. “We just send in, and we do it very easy. I mean, it’s very easy. I’d rather not do that because there’s no reason for it, but if we had to, we’d do that and put it down within minutes.”

Ironically, it was his own followers who violently protested the election results.