White House Ballroom Donor Keeps Getting Big Breaks Thanks to Trump

Last year, Russian American investor Konstantin A. Sokolov donated an undisclosed sum to President Trump’s $300 million White House ballroom project. He also gave $12 million to the MAGA Inc. super PAC and hundreds of thousands to the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the Senate campaigns of Susan Collins and Pete Ricketts. Since all those donations, he’s only been rewarded.

Reporting from Talking Points Memo finds that a company that Sokolov manages, called Dynamic Frontier Holdings LLC, was rapidly awarded a license that allowed them to purchase a copper mine in Armenia owned by by VTB Bank, which is sanctioned by the federal government due to its role in supporting the Russian financial system. Sokolov’s company was able to bypass the sanctions in October last year and receive a license from the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Controls in just 10 days, a remarkably quick turnaround.

Then, in July, Sokolov was also handpicked by the State Department to lead a $201 million Trans-Caspian enterprise fund looking to invest public funds into the south Caucus.

“He hardly would be my first choice,” former State Department sanctions coordinator Daniel Fried told TPM, highlighting how his business interests in the region could interfere with the fund. “You have to ask yourself whether his involvement in [the Trans-Caspian Enterprise Fund] is going to lead to conflicts of interests.”

Sokolov, who is originally from St. Petersburg, has also met with 1789 Capital, the investment firm where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner.

This report comes just days after another major corruption scandal, where U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle attempted to convince a Republican donor to pay off her American Express card in exchange for access to the Trump administration. On Tuesday, she resigned at the president’s request—but that’s clearly not the end of pay-to-play schemes in this administration.

The Trump administration ordered federal financial regulators to retract a report flagging suspicious oil trades. 

Only 15 minutes before President Trump decided not to strike Iranian power plants on March 23, a few traders sank billions of dollars into predicting that the S&P 500 would go up and oil prices would fall, making a hefty profit, Bloomberg reports. The traders reportedly used a two-minute window at 6:49 a.m. that day to make the massive deals in futures markets. 

“The fact that this trading preceded a headline driven sell-off means that either someone got very lucky or knew something,” Tim Skirrow, head of derivatives at Energy Aspects, said to Bloomberg. 

As is standard practice, analysts with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal agency responsible for regulating derivatives markets, flagged these trades and referred them to the commission’s Division of Enforcement, to decide whether a further investigation into insider trading was necessary. 

But then Mel Gunewardena, an adviser to the Trump-appointed chair of the CFTC, Michael Selig, told a supervisor on the commission’s market oversight team to retract the referral, according to unnamed sources cited by Bloomberg. 

This kind of move was unprecedented. The oversight team reportedly didn’t know what to do, as such a retraction had rarely, if ever, been ordered before. Career agency employees on the oversight team gather data and write reports, and, as a matter of procedure and expertise, send them to the enforcement team, which has expert attorneys on the subject, to make the legal decisions. 

“In every previous administration I’m familiar with, that would not just have been unusual—but never done,” Aitan Goelman, who worked as the agency’s director of enforcement from 2014 to 2017, told Bloomberg when asked a general question about Gunewardena’s kind of move. “It makes it harder for the staff, if they know that any moment the rug can get pulled out from under them.”

Sources told Bloomberg that Gunewardena, a former Goldman Sachs and State Streets Corp. executive who worked for the CFTC during Trump’s first term, was trying to scrap the referral and take over gathering the data on the trades himself. Weeks before, he was hired by the agency as head of the Office of International Affairs and senior markets adviser to the chairperson. 

Bloomberg reached out to the CFTC, which declined to comment, as well as Gunewardena, who did not respond to the outlet. The Trump administration is trying to make the agency the main oversight body for prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket, and this incident won’t help the White House beat accusations of insider trading, with suspicious events becoming all too common  since the Iran war began in February. 

A military archbishop is urging enlisted Catholics to recuse themselves from the execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan.

Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio issued his own orders to America’s military members Monday, imploring them not to participate in Hasan’s death, either by being in the firing squad or by watching Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s planned livestream.

“I oblige any Catholics assigned to the firing squad to request to be excused from this action contrary to the teaching of the Church,” Broglio said in a statement.

Broglio said he opposed capital punishment—in line with the stance of the larger church—and that Hegseth’s plan would “imitate the terrorists” by making a “public spectacle of barbarically killing our adversaries.”

“The Catechism was already clear and Pope Francis made it even clearer. The dignity of the human person is again at stake,” Broglio noted.

Hasan opened fire on Fort Hood in 2009, killing 13 people and injuring 32 others at a processing facility readying troops for deployment in Afghanistan. Hasan was an Army psychiatrist at the time.

Last week, Donald Trump paved the way for the military to execute Hasan by firing squad, marking the first time since World War II that the military is expected to use the method. Shortly thereafter, Hegseth pledged the December 23 event would be livestreamed—a decision that has faced nationwide bipartisan blowback from the public as much as the streaming companies expected to host the state-sponsored brutality.

“The crime committed by Nidal Malik Hasan was heinous, but does exposing the public to his execution serve any purpose?” questioned Broglio in his statement. “Has the potential moral injury, which the members of the firing squad might experience, been considered? Will the exposure of a live-stream to the young and impressionable during the 250th anniversary year of our independence be able to be repaired?

“The US military generally enjoys a good reputation in the world. Is there really a value to throwing them in the same boat with terrorists by broadcasting the image of the execution of a man in a wheel chair to the whole world? Does this decision reflect the dignity of the human person?” he continued, calling “upon all men and women of good will” to prompt the government to reverse its decision.

Hegseth, who has deeply infused his leadership of the Pentagon with his right-wing Christianity, has not yet responded to Broglio.

A federal judge has once again blocked President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of a public golf course in Washington.

District Judge Ana Reyes issued a temporary two-week injunction Tuesday barring the National Parks Service from cutting down any more trees on the East Potomac Golf Links. The tree clearing is part of a plan to transform the public golf links into an exclusive, high-end course.

During an emergency hearing Monday, a furious Reyes tore into the Trump administration for proceeding to cut down more trees over the weekend. The government had only notified the court of its intentions shortly before 5 p.m. on Friday, and at the start of a holiday weekend.

“I trusted you all not to do precisely what you have done,” she said during the hearing, declaring that the government had “lost credibility” by defying her instructions to give advance notice of any renovations.

When Justice Department attorney Marissa Piropato argued the actions over the weekend were “not a renovation,” Reyes slammed her excuse as “preposterous,” “doublespeak,” and “completely beyond the pale.”

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller took to social media Monday to hit back at Reyes. “I missed the part of the Constitutional Convention that put federal judges in charge of golf course maintenance,” he wrote.

It’s funny, I must’ve missed the part where the Constitution gave the president permission to order expensive demolition and renovation projects without receiving a whiff of congressional or legal approval. And yet, that is what Trump has done time and time again.

FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, is paying a ton of money to rent space in Trump Tower that it isn’t using.

The New York Times reports that FIFA last year signed a $4 million seven-year lease for a seventeenth-floor suite in the New York building, but it isn’t getting much use, raising concerns that it is essentially a bribe to President Trump.

The move didn’t even make financial sense at the time, as taxes in New York City are pretty high and most of FIFA’s activities take place outside of North America. FIFA already has two offices in Miami, as well. Right now, the suite isn’t fully staffed, and the organization has no plans to fill it, according to unnamed sources who spoke to the Times. The space only gets used for special events and meetings with dignitaries, such as during the U.N. General Assembly.

“This deal with the Trump Organization raises a clear conflict of interest in the light of FIFA’s interests in the U.S. World Cup or its partnership with President Trump’s Board of Peace,” Miguel Maduro, a former governance head at FIFA, told the Times.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino has cozied up to Trump since the 2024 presidential election, spending more time with him than just about any other leader. Infantino lavished praise and accolades upon the president, making up a peace award just for him, letting Trump interfere with the 2026 World Cup, and floating a multibillion-dollar deal to sell the World Cup to private investors, including Josh Kushner, brother of the president’s son-in-law.

That deal was scuttled due to a massive backlash from soccer fans and organizations around the world, with Europe’s soccer body, UEFA, even taking Infantino to court. But Infantino’s opponents have not united to field a candidate to oppose him, allowing his corrupt activities with Trump to continue. The world appears to be stuck with both of these unethical politicians for the time being.