Top-ranking Senate Democrats are pressing for hearings into a $500 million investment in a Trump family cryptocurrency venture from an Emirati royal’s investment group, a deal first reported by The Wall Street Journal earlier this year.
In a letter sent Tuesday to Republican committee chairs, Sens. Richard Blumenthal, Elizabeth Warren, Gary Peters, Dick Durbin and Ron Wyden — ranking Democrats on the Investigations, Banking, Homeland Security, Judiciary and Finance committees — requested hearings that 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.”
The transaction sold 49% of World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture co-founded by members of the Trump family and U.S. special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, to a group led by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan, brother to the United Arab Emirates’ president and head of the country’s spy agencies, according to documents reviewed by the Journal. Eric Trump signed the agreement four days before the inauguration. The deal steered at least $187 million to Trump family entities and $31 million to entities linked to Witkoff’s family, the documents showed.
Four months after the investment, the Trump administration announced a framework deal granting the U.A.E. access to highly coveted AI chips. The Biden administration had largely blocked the Gulf nation from receiving the chips over concerns about its relationship with China.
The investment raises “questions about what more the U.A.E. may receive — or may have already received — at the expense of U.S. national security,” the senators wrote in their letter.
In a separate report also published Tuesday, Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee listed a series of policy actions they said benefited the U.A.E. investors following the World Liberty deal. These included the approval in January of a 15% sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations to MGX, a company led by Tahnoon. The report also cited the October pardon of Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, a cryptocurrency firm part-owned by MGX. Binance has an administrative presence in the U.A.E. and holds Abu Dhabi regulatory licenses, but a spokesman said the company is “a global, remote first business with people and operations all over the world.”
The events “raise the possibility of an unprecedented ‘pay to play’ scheme that is enriching the families of the President and his senior lieutenants — all while selling out the interests of Americans,” the report states.
White House counsel David Warrington said in response that “the president has no involvement in business deals that would implicate his constitutional responsibilities.” Witkoff, he added, “has not and does not participate in any official matters that could impact his financial interests,” and chose to divest from World Liberty Financial.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said President Trump’s businesses are held in a trust managed by his children, and the AI chips deal with the U.A.E. had “everything to do with what is best for the United States and nothing to do with World Liberty Financial.”
“Early capital invested in the business of World Liberty helped the company achieve its extraordinary growth,” World Liberty Financial spokesman David Wachsman said. “World Liberty is a private American enterprise and no one at the company works for the U.S. government.”
A spokeswoman for Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, called the Democrats’ letter “smacks of hypocrisy,” asking where the “outrage from Democrats” was in response to corruption allegations under the Biden administration.
Any hearings will require Republican support, and GOP lawmakers have not publicly criticized the deal.
Tuesday’s push adds to a growing chorus of Democratic scrutiny. In February, California Rep. Ro Khanna announced an investigation into the sale, and Democratic members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said the investment was evidence of “corruption and self-dealing.” During an April Senate hearing, Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent if he disputed that Tahnoon invested $500 million in World Liberty Financial just before the inauguration. “I’m not aware of that,” Bessent replied.
Tahnoon and MGX did not immediately respond to requests for comment.