Billionaire Investor Sues Trump Crypto Firm Over “Criminal Extortion”

Justin Sun, a Chinese national accused of fraud who invested $75 million in President Trump’s crypto firm after his election victory, is now suing the shady venture, which he says is “on the brink of collapse.” 

Sun’s lawsuit alleges that the company unjustifiably froze all of his tokens, blocking him from voting on any proposals, and threatened to burn them. 

Sun noted that he remains an “ardent supporter of President Trump and his Administration’s efforts to make America crypto friendly,” regardless of the lawsuit, even asserting that Trump might not have known, and would have blocked the move if he did.  

“I have tried in good faith to resolve this situation with the World Liberty project team without resorting to litigation. But the project team has refused my requests to unfreeze my tokens and restore my rights as a token holder. They have left me with no choice but to turn to the courts,” he wrote Tuesday on X. 

Sun’s lawsuit also alleges “criminal extortion,” claiming that World Liberty attempted to force ⁠Sun to mint and push its dollar-pegged stablecoin, USD1, on his TRON blockchain network. When Sun refused their advances, WLF retaliated against him, the lawsuit states. WLF has yet to comment. 

This isn’t Sun’s first time dipping his toe into the waters of questionable crypto investment schemes. In 2023, he was charged with marketing unregistered securities and “fraudulently manipulating the secondary market” for a cryptocurrency token “through extensive wash trading,” which, as Popular Information puts it, is “the simultaneous or near-simultaneous purchase and sale of a security to make it appear actively traded without an actual change in beneficial ownership.” He was also charged with paying B-list celebrities like Jake Paul, Soulja Boy, and Lindsey Lohan to endorse his crypto token “without disclosing their compensation.” But that all went away when Trump came back into office and asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to end the case. Now it seems like Sun is getting a taste of his own medicine. 

Virginians voted Tuesday to redraw their state’s congressional map, approving a ballot measure to give Democrats as many as four additional seats. Republicans are flipping their lids.

Fox News commentator Laura Ingraham called the result a “Total travesty!!” on X, while MAGA pundit Juanita Broaddrick said, “No fucking way this is legit.” Right-wing troll Phillip Buchanan, known as Catturd on X, said, “What a fcking joke.”

Republican politicians also went into hysterics, with House Speaker Mike Johnson accusing Democrats of showing “how far they will go to break the law, ‘wage warfare,’ and disenfranchise millions of voters in order to force their unwanted, radical agenda down the throats of every American.”

Former Trump Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin took a shot at President Obama, who had thanked Virginia voters for “showing us what it looks like to stand up for our democracy and fight back.”

“Disenfranchising millions of voters and forcing 45% of Virginians to be represented by 1 congressional district and 55% represented by 10 is now ‘standing up for Democracy.’ Is that ‘equity’?” McLaughlin complained on X. “What a farce.”

Islamophobe and Donald Trump confidant Laura Loomer also blamed Obama.

“Democrats are stealing Virginia, compliments of Barack Hussein,” Loomer posted. “Virginia is about to become uninhabitable.”

Conservatives started this fight last year when Trump started pushing Republican-led states to redistrict in order to save his neck from a Democratic Congress. Trump said that Texas Republicans were “entitled to five more seats,” and the state’s GOP obliged. Republicans in Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio all followed suit.

Democrats fired back first in California, and now they have won a 51–49 percent vote in Virginia in a rebuke to Trump and the Republican Party. The GOP can cry disenfranchisement and gerrymandering all they want, but they have only themselves to blame, and Democrats now have a much stronger chance of retaking Congress in November’s midterm elections.

House Judiciary Democrats want to force FBI Director Kash Patel to take the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test after The Atlantic reported that his drinking was “a recurring source of concern across the government.”

“There are numerous accounts that you consume alcohol to the point of illness, direct profanity-laced outbursts at support staff, and pass out drunk behind locked doors in episodes making you so unreachable that agents have had to fetch SWAT-level breaching equipment to awaken you,” the Democrats wrote in a letter to Patel on Tuesday. “These glimpses of your relationship to alcohol would be alarming to see in an FBI agent; for us to see them in the FBI Director himself is shocking and indicative of a public emergency.”

The Atlantic article is pretty damning. A litany of sources detailed Patel’s excessive drinking in private clubs across the country with White House staff, which often led him to push meetings for his hangovers and in one instance even forced the FBI to request SWAT-level “breaching equipment” because he was unresponsive behind a locked door. Patel of course has denied all of these allegations, stating that he’d never been drunk on the job and filing a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic.

Patel has yet to respond to House Judiciary Democrats’ demand, which had a deadline of 5 p.m. Tuesday.

Do Donald Trump’s legal prosecutors know what they’re doing? According to the chief of staff for the former top MAGA prosecutor in the country: No, they really don’t.

As part of an article on Todd Blanche’s time as acting attorney general, CNN asked Chad Mizelle, Pam Bondi’s former chief of staff, why her “Weaponization Working Group”—which tried to investigate former government prosecutors Trump believed were politically motivated—never produced anything substantial.

“Part of the reason the weaponization work has been difficult is that you need people who are MAGA and who are really competent,” Mizelle said. “Many career prosecutors are not interested in this kind of work. It’s a very small group of people.”

Presumably this was said without a whiff of irony. The quote is a perfect encapsulation of one of the few joys one can take from our present political situation: Trump’s staff is simply too dumb to carry out most of their assignments.

Harmeet Dhillon, another Trump prosecutor who recently lost her fifth consecutive case trying to acquire a state’s voter rolls, gave CNN another doozy: “There are many prosecutors out there who are opposed to the president’s agenda and are not interested in doing the kinds of cases that are important to the White House.” Hmm, I wonder why.

Trump has weaponized the Department of Justice like no president before, using it almost exclusively to attack political enemies. CNN reports that doing this kind of work “took a toll on Bondi, who sources said believed that she was at times being asked to do the impossible.”

In fact, Bondi may have been unceremoniously fired because Trump believed she was going too soft on his enemies.

Bondi’s biggest failure in the eyes of the public was her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, in which the rollout of information on the convicted sex trafficker was repeatedly delayed. She told Fox early last year that Epstein’s client list was “on her desk”—before her department backtracked and said the list never existed.

After the files were released, some victims’ names were mistakenly left visible, while key information that might have actually led to some justice being done was redacted. No one has been arrested in the U.S. for involvement in Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring, even with tons of publicly available documents for use as evidence. And of course, there are also 2.5 million files that have not been released yet.

Blanche is continuing the Trump administration’s targeted legal agenda, releasing a report alleging that Biden’s DOJ was biased in persecuting anti-abortion protesters, and fighting to get a few Proud Boys off the hook for their January 6, 2021, actions. But like Bondi, he has not yet successfully prosecuted a high-profile Trump opponent. Long may the ineffectualness continue.

Employees at the Department of Homeland Security are weeks away from losing their paychecks.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Fox News Tuesday that the agency’s funding has all but run dry, 66 days into the partial government shutdown.

Donald Trump signed a memorandum earlier this month that authorized the release of $10 billion in emergency funds from the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, but that money will be gone by the first week of May. Mullin noted that between DHS’s 22 agencies, the department spends roughly $1.6 billion on wages every two weeks.

“So the money is going extremely fast, and once that happens, there is no emergency funds after that,” the DHS chief told Fox. “After we get through April … I’ve got one payroll left and there is no more emergency funds, so the president can’t do another executive order for us to use money because there’s no more money there.”

The only solution, according to Mullin, is for Congress to pass another funding bill. Republicans and Democrats have been in a stalemate for months, unable to reach a bipartisan consensus on how to fund DHS without tackling the myriad recent abuses by two of the department’s subagencies: Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.

Shortly after federal agents killed Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, Democrats demanded 10 reforms to the two agencies as a prerequisite for ongoing funding negotiations. Those demands included line items that required agents to identify themselves, take off their masks, and obtain judicial warrants before forcing their way onto private property. Republicans refused.

The conservative caucus, however, is attempting to put forward a new funding package that would address DHS’s financial straits without diverting additional funds toward ICE and CBP. Last year, the two agencies independently received a total of $170 billion in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill”—more than five times their 2024 allotment.