Week 24: President Trump Notches Another Mysterious Benefactor
A mysterious investor is the latest entrant into the Trump crypto grift, and more stories from the MAGAswamp.
Welcome to week twenty-four 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-three issues here and follow us on Bluesky and X for updates.
There’s plenty of known winners in the latest coverage of the Trump administration’s corrupt machinations. This week’s list includes private prisons profiting from exorbitant prison phone call rates, a pharma giant no longer facing DOJ investigations, and a credit union freed of its obligations to reimburse the millions in junk fees it charged members of the military. But our first story highlights how Trump is so open for (corrupt) business that he’s potentially profiting millions from a deal with a mysterious crypto company whose owners and intentions are essentially unknown, at least to those outside Trump’s circle. However, as is the norm under this administration, the losers are crystal clear: the American people.
World Liberty Financial’s Latest Investor Doesn’t Pass The Smell Test. Writing for The Nation, Jacob Silverman took another crack at Trump’s never-ending crypto grift. This time, his investigation of Aqua 1 Foundation, a Dubai-based company that invested $100 million in Trump’s crypto company left him wondering: Does Trump’s Biggest Crypto Backer Really Exist? Per the terms of Trump’s deal with World Liberty Financial, Trump may have received $75 million from Aqua 1 Foundation’s investment in the crypto company. But The Nation found little information on who Trump’s possible benefactor(s) are. To be clear, that's one of the principal real life purposes of crypto – to obfuscate who, or what, is involved in financial transactions. As Silverman wrote, “It’s possible that Aqua 1 Foundation is a real Emirati company, but it’s just as possible that it could be a front for any number of foreign financial or political interests seeking favors from Trump.”
Trump’s The King, Bondi Intimates In Secret Letters To Tech Companies. This week, One First’s Steve Vladeck reported on the secret letters Attorney General Bondi sent to tech firms regarding the administration’s delay of enforcement of the TikTok ban. The letters, which were recently made available due to Freedom of Information Act requests, are yet another revelation of the administration’s utter contempt for the constitution. Particularly concerning is Bondi’s assurance to the firms, which were permitted to continue providing services to TikTok, that the federal government is “irrevocably relinquishing any claims the United States might have had” against violators of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACAA)—the TikTok ban. Essentially, Bondi has asserted the president’s right to “‘dispense’ with application of whichever laws he wanted, for whatever reasons he wanted, in whatever cases he wanted.” These letters amount to a confession of an obvious and intentional violation of Article II of the Constitution, which requires the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Alas, it’s not clear who the Federalist Society’s Supreme Court would acknowledge has standing to challenge the DOJ’s assertion – and as we’ve seen in the past few months, the body which is most obviously harmed by this power grab (Congress) remains unconcerned with providing a real check on Trump's monarchical behavior.
FCC To Allow Trump’s Private Prison Benefactors To Keep Fleecing Americans. Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr blocked the enforcement of new rules to cap the price of prison phone calls, a move that directly benefits two private prison companies that both donated to Trump’s campaign. The new caps would have taken the price of a 15 minute phone call, which could cost as much as $11.35 in some states, to $0.90. The exorbitant costs are driven by prison telephone contractors offering kickbacks to prison operators who give them lucrative contracts – and those operators include Geo Group and CoreCivic, which each have contributed to Trump’s electoral coffers. During the presidential primary, Geo Group’s PAC maxed out contributions to Trump’s campaign and “used a subsidiary to give an additional $500,000 to a pro-Trump super PAC,” while CoreCivic gave $500,000 to Trump’s inauguration committee. And as Popular Information reported, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan and Attorney General Pam Bondi were once on the payroll of GEO Group. FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez said that Carr’s decision ignores “both the law and the will of Congress,” as the Martha Wright-Reed Act, passed by Congress in 2024, mandated the FCC to reduce exorbitant prison phone and video call rates.
Under Trump, The Federal Government Only Defends Corporations. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, under the direction of Russell Vought, has backpedaled on yet another case that would have brought justice to screwed-over consumers. Last November, the CFPB fined the Navy Federal Credit Union, which had for multiple years “charged customers surprise overdraft fees on certain ATM withdrawals and debit card purchases, even when their accounts showed sufficient funds at the time of the transactions.” Now the new CFPB says that Navy Federal doesn’t have to pay out the $95 million settlement – consisting of a $15 million fine to the CFPB and $80 million to its customers, which by the way, are “almost exclusively service members, veterans and their families.” Corporations over people continues to be the mantra of the vampiric Vought’s corporate financial protection bureau.
Promoting Competition = Attacking Trans People. Speaking of the administration’s pro-corporate bias, the Federal Trade Commission has settled three merger challenges in the past month, spurring the American Economic Liberties Project to call the agency’s actions a “return to a failed era of merger deregulation and permissive consolidation.” Now that consumer protection is no longer a priority, the Commission has found new unrelated policy interests: Chair Andrew Ferguson is turning the competition agency into his personal culture war bully pulpit. Just this week, the FTC hosted a workshop on “The Dangers of 'Gender-Affirming Care' for Minors.” The FTC should be doing their jobs of protecting consumers and promoting competition, but instead they are attacking health care for trans people, while letting corporations off the hook.
Trump Uses Latest “Liberation Day” Tariffs To Retaliate On Behalf Of Fellow Wannabe-Coup Plotter. Donald Trump announced plans to impose a 50% tariff on Brazilian imports, a move which he stated plainly was motivated by his anger over the criminal case against former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro attempted “to hold on to power after losing Brazil’s 2022 election,” and was prosecuted for it. That seemingly reasonable accountability has been termed a “WITCH HUNT” by Trump, just like the lackluster attempts by various states and the Garland Justice Department to hold him accountable for his actions after the 2020 election. It’s been clear from the onset that most of these new tariffs had no basis in real policy – and now Trump is flaunting that fact.
Musk’s Racist AI Service Grok Feeds On All Our Personal Data. You might have read the news about Elon Musk’s Grok AI going haywire and calling itself “MechaHitler” on X. But you might have missed that while he was still in the good graces of Trump, Musk had DOGE utilize his AI chatbot Grok to analyze government data. A customized version of the chatbot reportedly sifted through data at the Department of Homeland Security with no departmental approval, potentially violating security and privacy laws. And while Musk appears to be at odds with the president, recent reporting from the Wall Street Journal indicates his ongoing influence on the DOGE operation. Per this new report, Musk and his longtime ally Steve Davis are committed to “keeping tentacles in government to help their businesses.”
DOJ Investigations Into Pam Bondi’s Former Client Pfizer Conveniently Disappeared. Pam Bondi’s former client appears to have benefited from her decisions at the Department of Justice. Pharma giant Pfizer, which Bondi once represented as outside counsel, had been under investigation by the DOJ’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Unit since 2023, according to the company’s SEC filings. But the Miami Herald reported that the company’s latest filings no longer reference the investigations. The change comes after Bondi “rolled back the enforcement of foreign corruption cases that didn’t involve drug cartels and international criminal organizations,” and the DOJ reduced the number of prosecutors working on foreign-corruption matters and “closed nearly half of its foreign-bribery investigations.” Bondi’s former client Pfizer is certainly not the only corporation to benefit from the DOJ’s new priorities – but as Public Citizen’s Lisa Gilbert pointed out, “All of this comes back to the appropriateness of Pam Bondi’s conduct and whether she should be touching anything that approaches Pfizer.”
Crypto Wriggled Its Way Out Of Trump’s Remittance Tax. As the list of gut-punches passed in the “Big Beautiful” Republican spending bill continues to grow, the crypto industry apparently found a way to profit from the Trump administration’s intentional punishment immigrants and citizens alike. The bill imposes a new 1% tax on remittances, but digital transfers – including crypto and stablecoins – are not subject to the new rule.
ICYMI this week from Revolving Door Project:
Read our Dylan Gyauch-Lewis in the American Prospect: More AI Means More Cancer and in Common Dreams/In These Times: The Anti-Labor Undercurrent of 'Abundance'
Check out our latest work tracking the Trump administration:
Trump’s Disastrous Disaster Policy: We are monitoring how the Trump administration’s callous policy choices, before and after bouts of extreme weather, exacerbate avoidable suffering and death.
Tracking Uses of AI in the Trump Administration: The Trump administration and DOGE are hellbent on not only gutting the civil service, but replacing it with black box technology that uses exorbitant amounts of energy.
Trump’s War on Public Data: We are detailing the Trump administration’s efforts to manipulate, erase, and undermine the quality of public data.