How One Indian Billionaire Bought Off Trump by Investing in His Son

An Indian billionaire paid millions of dollars to Donald Trump Jr. and later won major concessions from the Trump administration.

Anant Ambani, 30, is a member of the richest family in India, and his family’s energy business was in the White House’s crosshairs as part of President Trump’s tariffs against India. But when Trump Jr. visited India in November, he met with Ambani and everything changed.

Ambani wined and dined Trump Jr., taking him to the family’s private zoo and performing a Gujarati folk dance together. Only four months later, a Texas start-up aiming to build the first major oil refinery in 50 years in the U.S. announced it had received a nine-figure investment from the Ambanis’s company, Reliance Energy. The deal was facilitated by Trump Jr., who secretly bought a stake in the new venture, ProPublica reports.

Prior to Trump Jr.’s involvement, the Texas company had failed several times to raise money, missing deadlines and rebranding again and again. Its founder had been repeatedly sued for fraud and had a history of bankruptcy. But with Trump Jr.’s help, America First Refining not only secured funding from Ambani but has also met with investors from foreign countries such as Saudi Arabia.

One foreign government official told ProPublica that the company’s team said they were backed by the Trump family, and that an investment would open doors in the White House. That appears to be accurate, with President Trump gleefully posting about America First Refining’s oil refinery project in March.

Reliance Energy also paid the Trump Organization $10 million as a “development fee” in 2024, although no project has ever been announced. Ivanka Trump was a guest at Anant Ambani’s lavish wedding that year, and Anant’s father, Mukhesh Ambani (worth close to $90 billion), attended Trump’s second inauguration.

In February, the Ambanis’ efforts paid off for all of India, with the country striking a trade deal with the United States. Reliance, meanwhile, got a license to buy Venezuelan oil. After the Iran war, India got an early sanctions waiver to buy Russian crude oil.

All of this goes to show that in Trump’s second term, it’s impossible to tell when Trump’s personal business ends and U.S. policy begins. It’s increasingly apparent that cutting deals with and paying money to the Trump family means that you’ll get benefits from the federal government.

Vice President JD Vance is echoing his president’s false claims of election fraud in the Los Angeles mayoral race.

Vance went on Fox News to carry water for the baseless theory after Republican Spencer Pratt was defeated by progressive Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who will face incumbent Karen Bass in the general election.

“They are still counting the votes [in California]. Do you trust this election?” Fox News host Jesse Waters asked the vice president on Monday night.

“Fundamentally the problem here with this whole thing is: How is it that you had Karen Bass was in first place, Spencer Pratt was in second place, and then this other woman was in third place. You would expect these mail-in ballots to kind of meet that same basic pattern,” Vance said. “But somehow we find ourselves in a situation where number one—they’re still receiving ballots, not just counting ballots. And number two—the way they’re coming in just so happens to work out such that the Republican is getting kicked out of the final two, so it’s a Democrat-versus-Democrat runoff.

“That seems pretty shady to me, especially when you add on top of the fact that in California you are prohibited from asking for somebody’s identification before they vote,” he added.

This is the vice president of one of the most corrupt administrations in history talking about what’s “shady.” Los Angeles has over two more million more registered Democrats than Republicans. It is also common knowledge at this point that liberal and progressive voters are more likely to vote by mail than conservatives, especially since President Trump has wrongly railed against it as corrupt for years. Now, Republicans are reverting back to this tired argument because their chosen candidate lost—not because of fraud, but because voters rejected him.

Speaking to reporters after attending game three of the NBA Finals, Trump claimed that he’d received a warm reception from the crowd at Madison Square Garden.

“You mean when they had the camera on me? I thought it was very good, yeah. It was certainly amazing. It was, I think, mostly cheers. It was loud and it was very enthusiastic,” Trump said Monday night.

Here’s what really happened.

When the jumbotron at Madison Square Garden showed Trump during the National Anthem, the stadium erupted into loud deafening boos.

The second time they showed him, the boos were even worse.

And it wasn’t just Knicks fans in Madison Square Garden: At a watch party in Bryant Park, the crowd burst into jeers when the broadcast showed the president.

Still, Fox News tried to claim that the audience at MSG burst into cries of “USA! USA!” for Trump. In reality, the crowd was cheering for a group of New York City firefighters, and started to loudly boo moments later when Trump appeared on-screen.

Trump was even booed as he drove away from the stadium.

It seems that Knicks fans weren’t at all thrilled at the president’s visit, which disrupted the perfect vibes in New York City. But still Trump refused to own up to just how much everyone hates him.

Also, the Knicks lost by four points, ending a 13-game winning streak.

FBI Director Kash Patel’s incessant desire to uncover a “deep state” conspiracy against Donald Trump ruined multiple federal employees’ careers and turned judges against the Justice Department, The New York Times reported Monday.

Patel first announced last summer on Joe Rogan’s podcast—where else?—that he had stumbled across a secret room in FBI headquarters containing evidence that a cabal had been out to get Trump since 2016. The “evidence” was a collection of documents Patel found in government “burn bags,” which are meant to be destroyed.

Patel claimed that a “grand conspiracy” would tie together the 2016 Russia investigations, Trump’s 2020 election loss, and the president’s criminal prosecutions in 2023 and 2024. It was certainly a good plot for a movie.

“You know how I caught these guys?” Patel gloated. “Because these guys were so arrogant, they would write everything down, and I found the documents.”

Unsurprisingly, the documents failed to show the conspiracy that Patel promised. But that didn’t stop him, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, and other members of the Trump administration from weaponizing the Justice Department to pursue the conspiracy claims and attack Trump’s enemies.

Over the course of 2025, the White House demanded that low-level prosecutors indict the likes of former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Senator Adam Schiff, even when the evidence was flimsy.

Todd Gilbert, a Virginia district attorney, was told to investigate the burn bags in relation to Comey, whose name showed up on some of the documents. Gilbert concluded that his office only had jurisdiction to investigate whether the documents in the bags were intentionally hidden.

That still would have been a big deal had Gilbert found that to be the case. But even under intense pressure from the White House, the attorney found that nothing was out of the ordinary with the documents, and he refused to impanel a grand jury. Despite his team writing a lengthy analysis to the Justice Department explaining the decision, Gilbert was then fired.

Patel and company continued trying to indict Trump’s enemies with brazen disregard for the justice system. James and Schiff became targets, but as with Comey, the Justice Department’s cases against them fell apart. The Trump team did get a win in April after North Carolina prosecutors indicted Comey for posting an Instagram photo showing the numbers “86 47” written in seashells, but that case is almost certainly too stupid to actually get Comey in trouble.

The Trump administration’s biased use of the Justice Department is a blatant and awful example of their corruption that doesn’t get as much media coverage as it should. District prosecutors and judges continue to uphold the law, but the pressure on them from above is certainly tremendous, and the next few years will test their limits.

ProPublica reports that the federal government was looking into violations of the Clean Water Act from Southern Coal and other affiliated mining operations controlled by West Virginia Governor Jim Justice and his family. In the past, the companies have been sued numerous times by state and federal authorities for failing to follow environmental laws, and racked up numerous pollution violations. The Trump administration doesn’t see the value.

The investigation was an effort spanning multiple federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Justice’s Environmental Crimes Section, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Western District of Virginia. Initially, prosecutors thought they had the backing of Robert Tracci, President Trump’s top official in the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

Such a criminal probe was a rare occurrence, as there are only a dozen Clean Water Act criminal cases prosecuted each year by the DOJ. Rarer still is the fact that such an investigation was killed so early. As prosecutors fought the companies for records through subpoenas in court, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, headed by now–Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, shut down the investigation.

“They were told ‘pencils down,’” an unnamed source told ProPublica. A former federal prosecutor, Rick Mountcastle, told the publication that he had “never heard of that happening before.”

“There shouldn’t be some sort of untouchables list of people who are immune from enforcement,” said Mountcastle, who spent 24 years as a federal prosecutor in the Western District of Virginia. Justice is a Republican elected to the Senate in 2024, winning the seat with the help of Trump’s endorsement.

It’s no secret that Trump doesn’t care about environmental laws, and he has long praised coal as an energy source, ignoring its widespread negative impact on clear air, water, and public health. Protecting a political ally like Justice from any consequences from the unsafe effects of a sprawling coal operation is entirely expected of this president.