WSJ Reports UAE Royal Secretly Purchased 49% of Trump's Crypto Venture Before Inauguration

Details

Four days before Donald Trump's inauguration on January 20, 2025, representatives of Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan—brother to the United Arab Emirates' president and the country's national security adviser—signed a deal to purchase a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency venture founded by the Trump and Witkoff families, according to The Wall Street Journal. The $500 million investment made Tahnoon's entity, Aryam Investment 1, the company's largest shareholder and placed two executives from Tahnoon's AI firm G42 on World Liberty's board.

The deal was signed by Eric Trump. It was never publicly disclosed, though World Liberty's website later showed the Trump family's equity stake had fallen from 75% to 38%. The deal's scale was ultimately confirmed by Trump himself: his annual financial disclosure, filed June 30, 2026, showed the transaction generated more than $200 million for the president personally, and by late June 2026 the revelations had prompted top Senate Democrats to formally demand congressional hearings.

Investment Structure

The January 16, 2025 agreement called for Aryam to pay $500 million in two installments. Of the first $250 million payment, the Journal reported:

• $187 million directed to Trump family entities DT Marks DEFI LLC and DT Marks SC LLC
• $31 million directed to entities affiliated with the family of Steve Witkoff, Trump's Middle East envoy and World Liberty co-founder
• $31 million directed to an entity tied to co-founders Zak Folkman and Chase Herro

In their June 2026 letter demanding hearings, Senate Democrats characterized the arrangement as including $218 million in upfront payments to entities linked to the Trump family and Steve Witkoff.

The agreement placed Peng Xiao, G42's CEO, and Martin Edelman, G42's general counsel and a top Tahnoon adviser, on World Liberty's five-person board alongside Eric Trump and Zach Witkoff.

Who Is Sheikh Tahnoon

Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan—sometimes called the "spy sheikh"—oversees a more than $1.3 trillion empire spanning sovereign wealth, AI development, and surveillance technology. He chairs G42, the UAE's flagship AI company, and leads MGX, an Abu Dhabi-state backed investment firm. G42's Chinese-born CEO, Peng Xiao, previously led Pegasus, a subsidiary of Emirati security firm DarkMatter, which faced scrutiny for hiring former CIA and NSA officials to spy on Americans and dissidents.

Under the Biden administration, G42 drew concern from U.S. lawmakers and intelligence officials over its ties to Huawei and other Chinese firms. The House Select Committee on Strategic Competition with China accused G42 of having "extensive ties" to Chinese companies involved in surveillance and military research. G42 said it severed ties with China in late 2023, though concerns persisted.

Tahnoon was already in business with the Trump family through Jared Kushner, whose investment firm had raised $1.5 billion from a Tahnoon-backed company in 2024.

Timeline of Events

December 2024: Steve Witkoff, recently named Middle East envoy, traveled to Abu Dhabi for a crypto conference where Eric Trump declared to the UAE audience: "Our family loves you." Witkoff met with Tahnoon to discuss Gaza cease-fire negotiations and other issues.

January 16, 2025: Aryam Investment 1 signed the deal to purchase 49% of World Liberty for $500 million. The deal was signed by Eric Trump for World Liberty and by Edelman and Xiao for Aryam.

January 20, 2025: Trump was inaugurated and announced plans for a $500 billion AI data center venture involving OpenAI and SoftBank. Tahnoon's MGX was named as one of two additional investors.

March 2025: Tahnoon led a delegation to Washington and met with Trump in the Oval Office, pledging $1.4 trillion in UAE investment in the U.S. over a decade. Trump hosted a White House dinner for Tahnoon attended by the vice president and multiple cabinet secretaries. Tahnoon sat beside Witkoff, with Edelman at the end of the table.

May 2025: Zach Witkoff announced that MGX would use World Liberty's stablecoin, USD1, to complete a $2 billion investment in Binance—the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. The investment gave World Liberty a $2 billion cash pile and generates approximately $80 million annually in interest. Witkoff did not disclose that MGX and World Liberty shared leadership through the same Tahnoon-linked executives.

May 2025: The Trump administration committed to giving the UAE access to approximately 500,000 of the most advanced AI chips annually—enough to build one of the world's largest AI data center clusters. The framework agreement allocated roughly one-fifth of the chips to G42.

October 23, 2025: Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, Binance's founder, who had pleaded guilty to enabling money laundering. Zhao is a UAE citizen with close ties to Tahnoon and the royal family. Days after the pardon, Binance began promoting USD1 sales on its U.S. platform. Binance CEO Richard Teng later denied that the exchange had boosted World Liberty's products to help secure the pardon.

June 23, 2026: Five senior Senate Democrats formally requested that Republican committee chairs hold hearings into the $500 million investment, calling it "something unprecedented in American politics."

June 30, 2026: Trump filed his annual financial disclosure with the Office of Government Ethics, confirming the UAE deal generated more than $200 million for him personally as part of roughly $1.4 billion in 2025 crypto income.

Constitutional and Legal Questions

Legal experts told the Journal the deal could violate the Constitution's Foreign Emoluments Clause, which prohibits federal officials from accepting "any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State" without congressional consent.

"This sure looks like a violation of the foreign emoluments clause, and more to the point, it looks like a bribe," said Kathleen Clark, a law professor and former ethics lawyer for Washington, D.C. The transaction "should be a five-alarm fire about the federal government being for sale."

Ty Cobb, who served as a top White House lawyer in Trump's first administration, told the Journal: "My advice as an ethics lawyer would have been clear: You don't do business deals with the families of the leaders of foreign countries. It taints American foreign policy."

The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, noted that World Liberty's deal with Abu Dhabi-backed MGX "clearly implicates the Emoluments Clause" and called for Congress to pass legislation requiring presidential financial disclosures and establishing a structure for congressional consent.

The Brennan Center for Justice noted that during Trump's first term, litigation over the emoluments clause ended without resolution when Trump lost the 2020 election and the Supreme Court dismissed pending cases as moot.

Response from Trump and World Liberty

A White House spokeswoman told the Journal: "President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public. There are no conflicts of interest." White House counsel David Warrington said Trump "has no involvement in business deals that would implicate his constitutional responsibilities."

World Liberty spokesman David Wachsman said: "We made the deal in question because we strongly believe that it was what was best for our company as we continue to grow. The idea that, when raising capital, a privately held American company should be held to some unique standard that no other similar company would be held is both ridiculous and un-American."

The company said Trump and Witkoff had no involvement in the deal and haven't been involved in World Liberty since taking office. A person close to Witkoff said the envoy wasn't involved in G42's chip negotiations but was briefed on the discussions.

A person familiar with Tahnoon's investment said the sheikh and his team reviewed World Liberty's plans "for a number of months" before completing the investment, which the person said didn't involve G42 money. "At no time during that due diligence or thereafter was the investment discussed with President Trump," the person said.

Following the June 2026 Senate Democrats' letter, neither World Liberty Financial nor the UAE government responded to requests for comment. Responding to the June 30 financial disclosure, a Trump spokesperson reiterated that the president "only acts in the best interests of the American public" and has "no conflicts of interest," and the White House noted that the president is exempt from federal conflict-of-interest laws.

Congressional Response

In October 2025, Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) led Senate Democrats in demanding answers from Witkoff about his failure to divest from World Liberty Financial crypto assets while serving as envoy. The letter noted that "World Liberty Financial secured a $2 billion investment from one of Sheikh Tahnoon's investment firms, just weeks before the White House granted the U.A.E. access to thousands of advanced artificial intelligence chips."

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, called the Zhao pardon an example of "corruption," stating: "First, Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to a criminal money laundering charge. Then he boosted one of Donald Trump's crypto ventures and lobbied for a pardon. Today, Donald Trump did his part and pardoned him."

Senate Democrats Demand Hearings (June 2026)

The congressional response escalated sharply after the Journal's January 2026 revelation of the secret Aryam stake. On June 23, 2026, Senators Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal, Gary Peters, Richard Durbin, and Ron Wyden—the ranking Democrats on key Senate committees—sent a letter to their Republican committee chairs calling for hearings into the $500 million investment, The Wall Street Journal reported. The senators argued hearings would compel White House officials to "explain under oath what they knew and when about payments to the families of the president and his lead diplomat for the region"—a reference to Trump and Witkoff.

The letter described the transaction as "something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president's company," noting the deal closed four days before the inauguration and included $218 million in upfront payments to Trump- and Witkoff-linked entities. The senators catalogued subsequent administration actions benefiting the UAE, including a $1.4 billion arms sale in May 2025, a chip-export authorization allowing G42 to receive 35,000 Nvidia chips, and the creation of a "Known Investor Pilot" program the UAE had lobbied for. Senate Banking Committee Democrats issued a formal release framing the request as an inquiry into the extent of Trump, his family, and senior administration officials "cashing in on foreign crypto deals."

The push remained active into July: CNBC reported on July 10, 2026 that Senate Democrats had broadened their demand to cover Trump's overall crypto holdings and foreign investors. With Republicans controlling the Senate, however, no hearings had been scheduled as of that date.

2025 Financial Disclosure Confirms the Deal's Scale

Trump's annual financial disclosure—a 927-page filing submitted to the Office of Government Ethics on June 30, 2026, under a 45-day extension with late fees assessed—provided the first official confirmation of how much the UAE deal was worth to the president personally. According to a New York Times analysis of the filing (syndicated via GV Wire), Trump reported at least $2.2 billion in income for 2025, his first year back in office, up from a minimum of $622 million reported for 2024. Roughly $1.4 billion of the 2025 total came from cryptocurrency, and the Times identified the Emirati purchase of the 49% World Liberty stake as one of the single largest components—a transaction that generated more than $200 million for Trump through the disclosed entities. The filing also showed more than $600 million from sales of the $TRUMP memecoin, which was trading at about $1.67 at publication, down roughly 80% from a year earlier—meaning retail buyers absorbed losses while Trump collected sales proceeds and royalties.

The disclosure prompted an unusual rebuke from the right: on July 1, 2026, The Wall Street Journal's editorial board—the flagship conservative opinion page of Rupert Murdoch's media empire, and an opinion source distinct from the Journal's news reporting—published an editorial titled "The Trump Family and 'Honest Graft'" declaring that "the Trump clan is cashing in on the Presidency in big and sketchy ways." The board cited the $1.4 billion in crypto income, including $635 million in memecoin royalties and, per accounts of the editorial, $593 million from World Liberty token and equity sales. It said the family's dealings "demean the office" and warned that what distinguishes this from past presidential-family controversies is how brazenly open the self-enrichment is—with the core danger that foreign actors are being led to believe they can buy American goodwill or favors by cutting the Trump family in. The editorial specifically traced the World Liberty–Witkoff–Binance thread at the heart of this file: the Middle East envoy co-founded a crypto firm receiving Gulf money, MGX routed its $2 billion Binance investment through World Liberty's stablecoin, and Binance's pardoned co-founder had pleaded guilty to violating anti-money-laundering laws.

Context: Biden Administration Chip Restrictions

The Trump administration's chip agreement represented a significant reversal from Biden-era policy. The Biden administration had largely stymied Tahnoon's efforts to obtain advanced AI chips due to fears the technology could be diverted to China. Of particular concern was G42, which the House China Select Committee had found maintained "extensive ties" to Chinese firms involved in surveillance and military research.

In December 2024, the Biden administration approved limited chip exports to a Microsoft-operated facility in the UAE, but with stringent security requirements that included G42 cutting ties with Chinese firms and engineers.

The Trump administration's May 2025 framework agreement removed many of these restrictions, allowing the UAE to build what officials described as one of the world's largest AI data center clusters outside the United States.