We Investigated The Criminals Who Bought Trump: What We Found Will Shock You

For as much as President Trump talks a big game about being tough on crime...

I appointed patriotic, tough-on-crime warriors.

But as you know, we're tough-on-crime administration.

We are going to be very tough on crime.

There's one type of criminal that he keeps pardoning...

President Trump has issued pardons to the three co-founders of the Bitcoin Mercantile Exchange.

President Trump, today, signing a pardon for Ross Ulbricht, the creator of a dark web marketplace named Silk Road.

He was charged with narcotics trafficking, distribution of narcotics by means of the internet, narcotics trafficking conspiracy, continual criminal enterprise, conspiracy to aid and abet computer hacking, conspiracy to traffic in fraudulent identity documents, and money laundering conspiracy.

...Criminals in the crypto industry.

His favorite crypto criminal is Changpeng Zhao or CZ, a man he pretends not to know, but who you're going to hear a lot about in this video.

[Reporter] Why did you pardon him?

[Trump] Okay. Are you ready? I don't know who he is.

[Trevor] CZ is the CEO and founder of Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, and one of Trump's most recent pardons.

He was charged by the U.S. government,

much like the BitMEX founders, for ignoring anti-money laundering laws.

He pled guilty, spent four months in federal prison, was fined millions of dollars and actually was forced to step down as the CEO of Binance.

What makes all of these crypto pardons especially peculiar is that not too long ago, Trump denounced this wildly speculative, fraud ridden industry.

[Trump] Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam.

I don't like it because it's another currency competing against the dollar.

[Trevor] So what changed between 2021, a time when Trump would liken crypto businessmen to scam artists, and now?

A lot of people say that he wasn't guilty of anything.

He served four months in jail.

[Reporter] He admited to his crimes.

[Trump] Well, you know much about crypto.

What did President Trump stand to gain from opening his arms to this industry?

When journalist Jacob Silverman brought us this story, it became clear that of all of Trump's pardons, this was by far the most corrupt one.

It reveals a covert arrangement of bribery, shadowy companies, foreign influence.

And it might just be Trump's ticket to becoming one of the richest people in not just the country, but the world in only a matter of years.

The story starts in 2024, when the crypto industry dumped at least $131 million into the presidential election, much of which was spent getting Trump back into the White House.

Crypto also spent big on defeating anti-crypto Democrats like Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, who lost his race after the industry spent $40 million supporting his opponent Bernie Moreno.

Jacob tells me it didn't take long for Trump to see that he could benefit both politically and personally from the industry.

Can you tell me the story of the early days of World Liberty Financial, what it is, and who's involved?

In October 2024, the Trump family announced that they had founded a new crypto company called World Liberty Financial.

And they did it with Steve Witkoff, a billionaire developer who's a close friend of Donald Trump and is now his chief diplomatic envoy, and Steve Witkoff’s sons, and two other kind of crypto lifers who hadn't really had much success in their previous projects.

It quickly became the main crypto company, among several, but the main vehicle for the Trump family to take in billions of dollars worth of real money and crypto.

They promised to build the financial system of tomorrow, and marketed themselves as a decentralized financial company that, like so many other crypto companies, was somehow going to bring financial empowerment to the masses.

And when Trump won the election in November, the money really started to pour in.

World Liberty Financial announced $1 billion in WLF token sales the first week Trump was in office.

[Trevor]: How does CZ get involved in this story?

I know he helps out World Liberty Financial pretty early on in a big way.

So CZ's crypto exchange Binance, which is the biggest exchange in the world, created the USD1 stablecoin for World Liberty Financial.

They actually wrote the code that ended up making the token.

A stablecoin is generally a crypto token whose value is supposed to remain constant, usually pegged to the U.S. dollar.

So one of these USD1 tokens is supposed to stay at a constant $1.

The USD1 token is pretty much the same as any other stablecoin, but the main, key, critical difference here is that this one is attached to the president and the first family.

The question we should be asking with USD1 is, why are people using this?

Why do people want to use a token issued by the president rather than real money?

Let me explain with these different boxes.

Imagine this is the U.S.'s traditional financial system.

And let's say I want to send this money to a business to buy something, and maybe said business is located in another country.

In order to do so, I have to put my money in this box.

And away it goes.

At each stop the money is inspected, its origin and destination is checked.

Officials will verify that the money complies with the law.

Anti-Money laundering.

Sanctions compliance.

Conflicts of interest.

Know your customer.

Tax law.

There are a lot of stops on the way.

It's slow, but these protections are important.

By the time the money arrives at its destination, we know a lot about it.

The relatively slow speed is a feature, it's not a bug.

Now imagine this is the system created by World Liberty Financial.

Someone decides to send money, real dollars, to buy some of the company's crypto tokens.

The money goes in.

Because there's essentially no regulation, nobody really knows where it came from, who sent it, or where it's going.

The box skips all of these stops and avoids all of these regulations.

Money laundering? Sanctions?

Not a concern here.

At the end of this nonstop journey, which can be much faster than what we see in traditional finance, I have WLF tokens or USD1 tokens that I can use like digital dollars.

I can send them anywhere. Even a crypto wallet owned by the first family.

And unlike the traditional process involving the U.S. dollar, this crypto transaction generates money.

Any money exchanged for USD1 is held by World Liberty Financial, which they then get to invest in things like short-term treasury bonds, which generates income for the Trump family.

So critically, when people use this parallel system, it makes the president and his family richer.

A lot richer.

And it's all made legal by legislation like the Genius Act passed by Trump and his party with an assist from some prominent Democrats.

Welcome to the corruption economy.

You can now buy influence with the president at speeds you wouldn't believe, without any kind of permission.

Just buy this token.

So you've brought us some examples, some egregious cases of people putting money in the black box.

So earlier this year, an Emirati company called MGX, which is affiliated with the government there, part of the sovereign wealth fund, decided it wanted to invest $2 billion in Binance.

Instead of just sending $2 billion to Binance, the UAE and this prince named Sheikh Tahnoun, who's a member of the royal family, decided to involve World Liberty Financial.

So what they did was they sent $2 billion U.S. dollars to World Liberty Financial.

In return, they got $2 billion worth of USD1 stablecoins.

This is the USD1 stablecoin that was originally created by Binance.

Then they take that $2 billion worth of USD1 coins, they send that to Binance, and now MGX, or the Emirati government, owns a $2 billion share in Binance.

Right after this major investment in May, the administration gave the UAE access to highly advanced AI chips from the U.S.

There was an SEC case against Binance, that gets dropped, and seemingly all the legal issues facing Binance here in the U.S., and in some other parts of the world start to go away.

And finally, CZ had been publicly asking for a pardon for months.

And he finally got that.

He was pardoned by Trump, despite pleading guilty to financial crimes and spending four months in federal prison.

And let's not forget Steve Witkoff, a founder of World Liberty Financial, helped broker this deal.

Steve Witkoff is playing a dual role in that he is both Trump's top diplomatic envoy to the Middle East, he's negotiating, a lot of these deals.

As of his last financial disclosure, Witkoff still had an ownership interest in World Liberty, where, let me remind you, his two sons also work.

So he is potentially directly profiting off of these both diplomatic and crypto deals.

Steve Witkoff is using the government to make these deals, and then he's profiting from the deals directly.

That sounds like a quid pro quo.

If it's not a quid pro quo, I don't know what one is.

Then we've got Justin Sun.

Justin Sun is a very colorful, almost notorious crypto entrepreneur...

[Justin Sun] Hi, I’m Justin Sun and I’m floating in space.

who has been involved in a lot of projects.

His most notable one is called the Tron blockchain, which is widely used for money laundering in the criminal underworld.

Sun has been in a lot of trouble with the SEC for a long time, charged with fraud and market manipulation.

He recently stuffed $75 million into the black box, specifically buying the WLF token.

And this really helped give an early start to World Liberty Financial, when a lot of people were skeptical of the company and not buying its token.

He starts becoming friendly with Trump's sons.

He's named an advisor to the business.

he's not just investing in the business or buying their tokens, He's actually basically on the masthead.

He's part of the company and now working with them closely.

So what does Justin Sun get out of this relationship?

He gets potential financial benefits and the ear of the president and his sons.

But more importantly, there was a multibillion dollar fraud case brought by the SEC against Justin Sun.

And after this relationship forms between Sun and World Liberty Financial, that case gets thrown out.

There's sort of a whole rogue's gallery of strange and potentially criminal people surrounding World Liberty Financial, some of whom have given them tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, and we don't know a lot about them.

One of them is a company called Aqua1 Foundation, which appeared at the beginning of the summer announcing a $100 million deal with World Liberty Financial.

And we know that they sent $100 million worth of stablecoins to World Liberty Financial, but beyond that, they don't really seem to exist.

I've looked into them, and there was also a Reuters investigation, and the best that we can find is that they're run by two guys from China who used to be involved with a company called Web3Port– this was another crypto company that was accused of market manipulation, various scams. They claim to be based in the United Arab Emirates.

There are no corporate records that a company called Aqua1 Foundation even exists in the UAE.

But apparently these two Chinese businessmen, one who seems to work for a Chinese state energy company, and one who is being investigated for financial crimes in England, were able to send $100 million to the president.

And we don't know what they want, what they expect in return, or even where that money might have come from, but they definitely sent it.

[Trevor] The key innovation here isn't any kind of improvement on the financial system.

World Liberty Financial looks pretty much like any other crypto company out there.

The innovation is now anyone, anywhere in the world, at any time, has a way to buy influence with the president of the United States– permissionless, mostly untrackable, with plausible deniability.

It's not an exaggeration to say that this system could make Donald Trump the richest man in the world in a few short years.

Meanwhile, the tough-on-crime president is associating with some of the biggest criminals in the world.

ICIJ investigations have found Binance repeatedly helped transfer money for accounts associated with Chinese crime gangs and the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel.

And that's exactly why money normally moves slowly through the global economy.

We need to know where this money is coming from, how it was made and who we're doing business with.

Anything less is just increasing the speed of corruption.