Senate Democrats Demand Hearings on Trump’s Half-Billion Dollar UAE Crypto Deal

Five Senate Democrats are freaking out about $500 million the UAE poured into Trump’s crypto venture right before he took office. Warren, Blumenthal, Peters, Durbin, Wyden – all demanding sworn testimony on whether this is the most obvious foreign influence operation ever attempted.

Here’s the timeline. Four days before inauguration, UAE officials signed a deal to buy 49% of World Liberty Financial. The Trump family and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East diplomat, got $218 million upfront. Sheikh Tahnoon, UAE’s National Security Advisor, was backing the whole thing. All of this got blessed by Trump before he became president.

Then what happened? Trump administration started handing out massive favors to the UAE.

May 2025 they approved a $1.4 billion arms sale despite Congress worrying about weapons reaching armed groups in Sudan where 150,000+ people already died. Same month, Treasury created a “Known Investor Pilot” program that fast-tracks foreign investment approvals. The UAE had been lobbying for that exact thing.

Commerce Department rescinded Biden-era chip export restrictions. Suddenly the UAE could import triple or quadruple the advanced semiconductors it previously could get. They authorized G42, a UAE AI company chaired by – wait for it – Sheikh Tahnoon, to receive 35,000 Nvidia Blackwell chips. That deal was worth over a billion dollars.

Except G42 got caught providing US technology to China for missile enhancement work. US intelligence caught them. They allegedly committed to divesting Chinese holdings but reports suggest they just moved their China operations to a different investment firm to hide the connections.

So the sequence is: UAE buys into Trump’s crypto company, Trump becomes president, Trump administration approves massive deals favoring the same UAE, one of those UAE companies got caught helping China with military tech.

The senators are asking for sworn testimony on “what they knew and when about payments to the families of the President and his lead diplomat.” They want answers about “how they will restore faith that the Administration is representing the best interests of the American people rather than the personal interests of the President.”

That’s diplomatic speak for “this looks like naked corruption and we need to hear you lie under oath.”

The arrangement is being called “unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.” Even by modern standards where everything’s corrupt, this is brazenly corrupt.

World Liberty Financial and the UAE government didn’t comment when CoinDesk reached out. Hard to defend the indefensible anyway.