Week 25: Crypto Week Marks Washington’s Insatiable Appetite For Grift
Crypto’s march through Washington follows the standard playbook, but there is no precedent for the complete capture of our politics by a patently hollow industry.
Welcome to week twenty-five of the Revolving Door Project’s Corruption Calendar, where we highlight examples of corporate corruption shaping the Trump administration’s agenda and their material impact on everyday people. Read our first twenty-four issues here and follow us on Bluesky and X for updates.
It’s been just about six months since we began this newsletter monitoring MAGAworld corruption in the era of Trump 2.0. We’ve highlighted numerous corporate victors, but one industry has been an especially regular feature: the crypto industry. Crypto’s dealings with the President most clearly encapsulate Trump’s naked pursuit of wealth and willingness to dole out favors to friends.
While the House of Representatives was busy passing three industry-written pieces of legislation which all but ensure crypto’s complete capture of the federal government, Trump netted close to $100 million from sales of his crypto memecoin. There’s no doubt that the favor machine will keep whirring as long as the zeroes keep adding up for Trump and his family. As the stories below will show, the President isn’t the only one laughing to the bank. Vice President JD Vance’s investment in defense contractor Anduril, whose valuation continues to rise as it feeds off the teat of government, is reaping real rewards.
The two most powerful men in the country are joined by corporate lobbyists, the avatars of the so-called Washington swamp, who are seeing enough business to regularly turn away clients. Welcome to our new normal.
More Trumpcoins Flood The Market, Netting POTUS $93 Million. Yesterday, as Congress considered industry-written crypto legislation, early investors in Trump’s memecoin began selling 90 million of the $TRUMP tokens, which are valued at at about $930 million. The president, who had made about $150 million from trades of the coin through mid-June, is now set to add $93 million to his $6.4 billion net worth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Changpeng Zhao, The Latest Beneficiary Of President Trump’s Pardon Power? Late last week, Bloomberg revealed that Trump’s USD1 stablecoin “received key behind-the-scenes help” from crypto exchange Binance right before its founder applied for a presidential pardon. The company and its founder Changpeng Zhao pled guilty to federal charges in 2023, paying a $4 billion penalty for anti-money laundering, unlicensed money transmitting, and sanctions violations. Zhao, who served a four-month sentence, is now seeking record-relief from a president with shared business interests. Zhao’s Binance wrote the code powering Trump’s USD1, ensuring its use in United Arab Emirates firm MGX’s $2billion purchase of a stake in Binance. Now, close to 90 percent of USD1 circulating sit in Binance wallets, likely generating tens of millions of interest income for the Trump family annually.
A Presidential Library Built On Graft. New analysis from the office of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) revealed that “companies seeking favorable outcomes from the Trump administration have pledged to funnel at least $63 million into Trump’s future presidential library.” This includes Paramount, Meta, X, and ABC News, who have respectively donated $16 million (and fired Trump critic Stephen Colbert), $22 million, $10 million and $15 million dollars to settle suits launched when the President was a private citizen. Other companies such as the Lenox Corporation have partnered with the Trump team, donating proceeds from sales of Trump-themed merchandise. Qatar also joined in on the party earlier this year, donating a $400 million jet, which will be remodeled at the public’s expense before being transferred to the President’s library.
The Veep Would Also Like A Taste. Researchers at Accountable.US have uncovered a slew of the veep’s conflicted investments. Through the end of 2024 at the very least, Vice President JD Vance held potentially up to $250,000 in one of venture capital firm Revolution’s funds. The fund, which he managed before his political career, includes at least four companies who have won government contracts since Vance stepped into the White House. Most notable is defense contractor Anduril whose valuation has skyrocketed by about 125% since January, having received $220 million worth of public funds. There’s likely more to come for the Peter Thiel-backed firm, which is in pole position to build Trump’s $175 billion Golden Dome defense system. Of course, Thiel is a former employer/mentor of Vance.
In MAGAworld, Ethics Counseling Is A Redundant Service. This past Sunday, Bloomberg reporter Ben Penn shared that Attorney General Pam Bondi fired Joseph Tirrell, who was the Justice Department’s chief ethics official. The department’s ethics director is responsible for “reviewing and approving financial disclosures, recusals, waivers to conflicts of interest, and advice on travel and gifts for Bondi” and other DOJ leaders. Tirrell had served nearly 20 years at the department as a career attorney before receiving a dismissal letter in which his name was misspelled as “JOSPEH.”
“Boom Time In Washington For The Influence Industry.” Yet another industry has found a way to profit from MAGAworld’s stomach-turning corruption. Corporate lobbyists, the quintessential venal Washington operatives, are laughing to the bank with the uptick in business since President Trump entered office. According to a recent report by the Wall Street Journal, “The top 10 lobbying firms in Washington took in about $123 million in the first quarter of 2025, compared with about $80 million in the same time frame of both Joe Biden’s presidency and Trump’s first term.”
What’s more, professional influencers who maintain close ties to the president, e.g. his former campaign manager Chris LaCivita, are turning down clients and expanding their offices as business opportunities continue to swell. Per the report, the industry has also launched a new line of work; no longer content with securing sweetheart deals for their clients, lobbyists are now bringing the president business opportunities. There is truly no bottom for a White House wholly unconcerned with ethical behavior.
DOGE To Nuclear Regulatory Commission: Forget About Regulatory Independence. In the latest broadside against independent agencies, DOGE representative Adam Blake informed the chair and top staff of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the White House expects the regulatory agency to “rubber stamp” approval of new nuclear reactors already tested by the Energy or Defense departments. The move essentially disempowers regulators who are critical to keeping all of us safe by ensuring nuclear power plants and operators maintain a positive, responsible record. It’s also a big win for the nuclear industry and Big Tech companies who are currently engaged in a never-ending search for new sources of energy to power their insatiable artificial intelligence data centers.
Trump’s Tariff Cudgel Stalls European Commission’s Investigation Of Musk’s X. The European Commission, which runs the bloc’s trade policy, just delayed finalizing its probe of X for breaking Europe’s digital transparency rules. Although Trump and Musk remain at odds, the episode highlights the administration’s plans to use tariff threats to protect Big Tech companies that routinely break other sovereign entities’ rules for governing their digital space. Last year, the commission found that the social media company was in breach of the bloc’s Digital Services Act, noting three grievances: a deceptive verification process; use of an opaque advertisement repository; and murky management of public data.
MAGA’s Election Conspiracists Cook Up A New Scheme. In its new bid to taint the sanctity of our electoral processes, the Trump administration “launched a multipronged effort to gather data on voters and inspect voting equipment.” Still bruised by his defeat in 2020 elections, Trump and his allies are now looking to access voter rolls in nine states and even physically inspect states like Colorado’s election equipment.
The administration’s actions, which threaten states’ ability to freely and fairly administer elections in their localities, have left even Republican election officials worried about likely interference in the upcoming 2026 midterm elections. Speaking to the Washington Post, one clerk said, “To me, it felt like they were wanting to intervene before 2026.” Another cautioned that “Nobody gets access to my voting equipment, for security reasons.” As my colleague Chris Lewis explained in The New Republic last fall, this is the playbook of “an organized network of voter suppression activists and conspiracy theorists who seek to surgically, meticulously, and cunningly dismantle the electoral process.”
Wall Street Wants Your Retirement Savings... And the Trump administration is eager to hand them over. According to a Wall Street Journal exclusive, the Trump administration plans to order the Labor Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission to facilitate big asset management firms' access to workers’ 401(k) retirement accounts. This would allow firms like BlackRock, Blackstone, and Apollo to include their products in retirement funds, exposing “small retirement savers to Wall Street’s highly risky, totally opaque, and illiquid private equity investments.”
The plan, which is a rehash of the previous Trump administration’s 2021 approval of the inclusion of private equity funds in 401(k)s, follows intense lobbying by private market fund managers. While the industry claims that this would level the playing field between regular and institutional investors, it’s clear that Wall Street is better equipped to manage the high-fee, low-transparent investments that pervade private market offerings. The truth is that this is not a noble provision of investment access, but a new opportunity for Wall Street to fleece workers across the country.
ICYMI this week from the Revolving Door Project:
Read our KJ Boyle in the American Prospect: AFL-CIO Report: Is DOGE’s Antonio Gracias Mishandling Retiree Investments?
Enjoy our Kenny Stancil’s analysis of insurers’ record profits in written and video format
Check out our Executive Director Jeff Hauser’s debate on the Abundance Agenda with Paul Williams of the Center of Public Enterprise on the Realignment Podcast
Listen to Timi Iwayemi’s appearance on the Citations Needed podcast, discussing Corporate Self-Regulation and the Fine Art of “Preempting" Public Outrage