Curtis asks Senate Judiciary panel to subpoena Trump Jr over wedding payment
The wedding took place in May in the Bahamas, with Kremlev — a Russian boxing official with close ties to Putin — helping cover the cost of renting a private island and staging a fireworks display, according to ProPublica reporting. Trump Jr married Bettina Anderson at the event, and Bettina Trump later described Kremlev on Instagram as a “dear friend” who had generously hosted two nights of post-wedding celebrations.
Trump, who did not attend the ceremony, defended Kremlev’s involvement. He said he was told by Trump Jr that the money would eventually be reimbursed, but added that giving a wedding party as a gift is “totally allowed” and is also “very common.”
In a Tuesday letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Curtis asked Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and ranking Democrat Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) to subpoena Trump Jr over his business dealings, his relationships with foreign individuals, gifts he has received, and any occasions where his connection to his father “was invoked or understood to provide value.”
“A toaster is a wedding gift. A private-island party paid for by a Putin-connected oligarch is something else,” Curtis wrote in a social media post accompanying the letter. “Republicans nearly wore out the subpoena machine investigating Hunter Biden’s foreign relationships. We should not unplug it now.”
Curtis, who was elected to the Senate in 2024 on a pledge not to shy away from disagreements with Trump, first flagged the wedding payment as problematic on Friday, calling it “corruption” in a video posted online and promising further comment.
The letter lands amid signs of broader unease among Republicans over Trump’s standing heading into November’s midterm elections, with the party facing pressure over the war in Iran, high gas prices, and slipping poll numbers.
Curtis’s call for a formal committee inquiry marks one of the sharper breaks with the president by a sitting Republican senator. Republicans in the House of Representatives spent much of 2023 and 2024 investigating whether Hunter Biden traded on his father Joe Biden’s name in his overseas business dealings — an effort that produced a report alleging a conspiracy to enrich the Biden family but never resulted in impeachment articles reaching a House vote. The Bidens denied wrongdoing throughout.
“‘Trust us’ was not enough then, and it is not enough now,” Curtis wrote.
Trump Jr’s ties to Russia have drawn scrutiny before. He was a central figure in the Robert Mueller investigation that followed the 2016 election, after it emerged he had attended a Trump Tower meeting with a Russian lawyer who had promised damaging material on Hillary Clinton.