U.S. President Donald Trump stated at a press conference that he is unaware of the investments of representatives of the ruling family of the UAE in the cryptocurrency project World Liberty Financial (WLF). In response to reporters' questions, the president said that 'his sons are handling it.'
On the weekend, an investigation by The Wall Street Journal was published, stating that the investment fund Aryam Investment 1 from Abu Dhabi, linked to Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, secretly acquired 49% of World Liberty Financial. The deal was signed by Eric Trump in January 2025, four days before his father's inauguration.
Co-founders of WLF at the end of 2024 were Donald Trump and his sons. As of June, the Trump family's share in World Liberty Financial was 40%. The company is led by Zach Whitcoff, son of Trump's special representative to the Middle East, Steve Whitcoff. Sheikh Tahnoun is an advisor on national security for the UAE and the brother of the country's president, Mohammed bin Zayed.
The agreement between WLF and the UAE sheikh was not publicly announced. Journalists' investigations indicated that the $500 million investment channeled through Trump's family structures coincided with active lobbying by the sheikh for access to advanced American AI chips.
“Outright corruption”
Meanwhile, Democrats in the U.S. Congress are calling this deal a fact of corruption, as reported by Decrypt. They accuse Trump of granting the Emirates access to technologies that were previously banned for export in exchange for money.
“An investor from the UAE secretly transferred $187 million to Trump, and $31 million to his main representative in the Middle East. Then Trump granted this investor access to secret defense technologies, violating long-standing national security traditions,” wrote Senator Chris Murphy.
Senator Elizabeth Warren told Decrypt that this situation represents “simple and straightforward corruption” and demanded that the Trump administration reverse its decision to sell AI chips to the UAE. Congressman Greg Landsman described the deal as “outright corruption,” adding about Trump: “He gets richer every day. You become poorer. That’s his presidency.”
In the fall of 2025, The New York Times published its own investigation into WLF's deals with the UAE. It was reported that Whitcoff's business interests might have overlapped with his diplomatic activities.
In May, the U.S. and the UAE signed an agreement to establish the largest AI campus outside of America. Two weeks prior, World Liberty Financial announced raising $2 billion from the Emirati state company MGX. The deal was conducted in the USD1 stablecoin issued by World Liberty Financial itself, which provided the project with potential tens of millions of dollars in income from government bonds that serve as collateral for the stablecoin and go directly to the company as its issuer.
In the White House, both WLF and Donald Trump denied any connection between the deals, and Trump filed a defamation lawsuit against the NYT for $15 billion, claiming that the publication's articles in 2024 harmed his reputation and that of associated cryptocurrency projects, including the meme coin TRUMP.
