The Swamp Is Doing Just Fine

By Judson Berger

Friday, February 13, 2026

 

Once in a while, this newsletter pauses to highlight an important piece of analysis or reporting that ran in or on National Review. We are living in an ephemeral world, and some developments deserve to be rescued from the depths of endless scroll.

 

So I invite you, if you haven’t already, to check out the five-part series Andy McCarthy wrote on the sordid story of the Trump family’s financial entanglement with crypto, a Chinese-born (pardoned) felon, and UAE money. The Wall Street Journal helped blow open this story, with a thoroughly reported piece at the end of January on a half-billion-dollar investment backed by an Abu Dhabi royal in a Trump family cryptocurrency venture. The centrality of crypto to the plot makes the saga complicated from the outset — only the deeply unwell understand how crypto works — but despite White House and Trump Organization claims to the Journal that all was on the up and up, Andy sorts through the tale and explains why it’s redolent of the Biden family’s infamous influence-peddling. Only “you’d have to add two digits to the sum of Biden abuses of power, foreign entanglements, and corruption alleged . . . to get near what Trump has raked in just from the UAE.”

 

Andy sums up the key events in part 1. Pardon the long excerpt:

 

In autumn 2024, when it had become clear that he’d likely win back the White House in about six weeks, Donald Trump and his friend Steve Witkoff founded a crypto business called World Liberty Financial (WLF). . . .

 

A crypto business — whether in tokens, currency, or other iterations — is an ideal way to disguise political payoffs as financial transactions. And, because they have sons who do not hold government positions and could ostensibly run the crypto business, President Trump and his Middle East envoy, Witkoff, would be poised to claim that WLF is a private enterprise, walled off from Trump’s political influence — even though that influence was the magnet for foreign investment and consumer purchases.

 

Reportedly, and predictably, a Chinese-born Canadian billionaire felon named Changpeng Zhao, who ran a corrupt international cryptocurrency exchange called Binance and was desperately seeking a presidential pardon, contributed invaluable technical expertise for building WLF’s infrastructure. So did Zhao’s close associate, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan, the top intelligence operative and the second-highest-ranking royal family member of the United Arab Emirates, a tiny, rich Gulf monarchy. The UAE had big ambitions to become an AI powerhouse but had been blocked by Washington from access to cutting-edge American chip technology because of its extensive ties to the Chinese Communist Party. The UAE also wanted a pardon for Zhao, who lives in Dubai and could move Binance to Abu Dhabi if regulatory complications from his felony convictions were removed.

 

Four days before Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, the UAE began pouring what is now publicly known to be at least $2.5 billion into the Trump crypto enterprise. Before Trump’s first year in office was over, Zhao had his pardon. And the UAE had its chips, in addition to being feted at the White House, inflated into a nation of real consequence in Middle East geopolitics, included in the Trump administration’s Stargate project to build global artificial intelligence and super-computing capacity, and given an ownership slice of TikTok.

 

In other words, a lot of transactions are at play. For the record, WLF claims that Trump and Witkoff haven’t been involved with the firm since taking office. But as with Hunter Biden’s curiously prominent role in foreign dealings during his dad’s time in office, one must wonder what value was being brought to the table by the Trump-tied crypto venture. In part 2, Andy dives into the pardon for Changpeng Zhao and his contributions to WLF’s rise. In part 3, he covers the role of the UAE’s “Spy Sheikh” (Tahnoon) in plowing money first into WLF and later into purchases of WLF’s stablecoin, USD1, for investment in the Binance exchange. In part 4, he returns to detailing Tahnoon’s investments around the time of Trump’s second inauguration and his pursuit of a change in U.S. policy concerning the UAE and U.S. chip tech.

 

The final installment is a comprehensive timeline of events. As Democrats start to sniff around and the story generates more coverage, that timeline will be an important reference. As Andy observes in concluding the series, Trump’s reported, always-fluctuating net worth increased by $3 billion last year through September, mostly from crypto, with the country’s chief executive presiding over what Forbes calls “the most lucrative presidency in American history.”

 

Whether Republicans show the same enthusiasm for getting to the bottom of these transactions as they (justly) did for investigating Biden Inc. remains to be seen. But the crypto saga should dispel any lingering notion that the swamp is in danger of being siphoned clean under President Trump. Its denizens are plumper than ever, and rumor has it that phrases of Mandarin and Arabic can be heard rising from the bog in the gloaming.