Adjust your aperture away from individual outrages for a moment. Instead, focus on the nightmare that institutionalized corruption is leaving behind. It will take years – decades – to repair.

This week, a watchdog counted 57 officials in this administration worth at least $100 million, more than four times the total of the last three presidencies combined. This could be seen as populist red meat, but ask yourself: why are they there? Occam’s Razor suggests focusing on the spoils and establishing a process for securing future spoils.

Closely related, the president’s institutionalized insider trading, which Wall Street firms are happily signing up for, made news again this week. Wall Street’s fastest traders began paying his media company up to $100,000 a month for a first look at his market-moving posts.

A Trump appointee granted the president’s family crypto firm a federal bank charter. This institutionalizes a channel by which companies can funnel bribes to Trump.

In the institutionalizing corruption column, the registry that let investigators trace who owns an American company was switched off and queued for deletion.

Taken together, these events form a pattern we want to draw your attention to. The obscenely wealthy are using the power of the government – your power – against you. Not only are they barely bothering to hide it, but they are in government to ensure power over your children, too.

The rest of the world is noticing this, even though US voters are drowning in this dreck. El País spent the week documenting how a Venezuelan billionaire, under investigation for money laundering in two countries, became Washington’s back channel to Caracas. It even documented how this billionaire’s private jet scrubbed its manifest mid-flight. By the way, this manifest included an executive from a Peter Thiel-backed bank.

Policy debate about the International Criminal Court (ICC) has an old pedigree that predates Trump. Look past that and even the fact that Tokyo and The Hague are cooperating to lodge protests at the State Department over sanctions against the president of the International Criminal Court. Instead, view this through a broader prism. Shred the ICC appeals to the Trump family because it attacks the rule of law, which is the mood music of this administration.

This institutionalizing of criminality is doing generational damage to the scaffolding that made America the safest place on earth to invest. This country built it over decades. It’s doing the same thing to the rule of law in the US that DOGE did to US diplomacy and RFK Jr. did to public health. Each of Trump’s supporters has their own reasons for supporting this. Thiel gets his crypto hellscape, the donors get their mergers, Musk gets his government contracts, etc. But the Trump family gets the law out of the way of the family business – they hope, forever.

One election will not fix the damage they are causing. Five might, if Americans stay focused and beat enough money out of our system to allow the deep repairs. The comforting, Biden-esque theory that the political thermostatic reset repairs all needs to be tossed aside because the Trumps are causing real, lasting, institutional damage – by design – and it will take generations of work to repair it.

It’s a depressing thought, but “Moonshot” is typical shorthand for the country achieving great, unimaginable things. But the next generation’s Moonshot will be confined to rebuilding a competent domestic law enforcement agency in the wake of the damage being done to the FBI, or rebuilding a public health system able to tackle diseases creeping back into American society, largely controlled since the first moon landing, such as measles and polio.

57 Trump Officials Are Worth $100 Million or More, Quadruple the Combined Total of the Last Three Presidents

Associated Press via Fortune, August 17, 2026

Public Citizen counted 57 administration officials who are worth at least $100 million, among them eight billionaires, seventeen ambassadors, and a third of the cabinet, against five such officials under George W. Bush, three under Obama, and five under Biden. More than half were donors to Trump’s 2024 campaign or its committees, a combined $65 million. The report walks through what they bought. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s old firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, now controlled by his sons, was picked to run a $1.5 billion stock offering tied to a mining company receiving federal support from his own department (longtime readers will remember this from the July 24 edition). Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg’s former firm, Cerberus, owns companies that have collected at least $90 million in Pentagon investments and contracts. Public Citizen’s Lisa Gilbert warns that governments drawn from the ultra-rich produce “misplaced incentives and corruption.” Unfortunately for our kids, they’re going to get a civics lesson in what misallocated investment capital means for an economy.

‘Brazen Act of Self-Dealing.’ Lawmakers, Watchdogs Alarmed After Trump Regulators Let Trump Firm Start a Bank

CNN, August 17, 2026

Last month, we told you former OCC officials considered rejection inconceivable. On August 14, the inconceivable duly failed to happen. The OCC granted preliminary conditional approval for World Liberty Trust Company to issue and redeem the family’s USD1 stablecoin, hold its reserves, and custody digital assets for institutional clients. Translation: If a corporation wants to funnel millions of dollars directly to the president, it will have a “legal” means of doing so. Reminder: World Liberty reported more than $526 million in income from World Liberty token sales last year, in addition to roughly $263 million from an equity sale to investors led by a UAE royal. Or you may remember the $100 million that reached World Liberty through a UAE-based entity from a British money-laundering suspect, covered here last week. The Trumps know their customer base, so stand back and stand by for more of this, which is definitely not bribery.

Trump Media Says Wall Street Firms Paying Up to $100K for Early Access to Trump Truth Social Posts

CNN, August 11, 2026

Wall Street listened to the mood music and so eagerly reached for its checkbook. On its first earnings call, Trump Media said more than 10 customers, mostly high-frequency trading firms, have signed up for Truth API, a licensed feed that gives insiders a first look at Trump’s posts (on his own media platform) milliseconds before the public sees them, at $60,000 to $ 100,000 per month. These posts move interest rates, oil, bonds, and entire indexes. Now, the company selling the head start to what used to be called the White House Press Office is majority-controlled by the man writing the posts, not the American people. An NYU economist told Fortune the arrangement lets Trump “monetize the role of the office of the president.” For scale, Trump Media lost roughly $405 million in the first quarter and generated only $900,000 in sales. Thus, these hedge funds are not buying this service because of what the business produces. Instead, they’re by the millisecond and will make millions from it. We’ve been banging the drum that states have at their disposal incredibly powerful anti-corruption laws and tools. In particular, NY AG Letitia James has what is easily the most powerful anti-corruption statute in the nation, the Martin Act. We’ve never seen clearer cases of insider trading, and last time we checked, Wall Street was located in New York. Every single one of those hedge funds is arguably committing insider trading, and the President of the United States is literally on record testifying to that fact. Prosecuting Trump is probably too much to ask, but charging these critical corruption enablers shouldn’t be. Grand corruption, like what Trump is institutionalizing in this country, only works when the enablers pay no price for being willing participants. America’s Founders gifted this country a uniquely powerful immune system for grand corruption at the federal level by reserving so much power for the states. But for reasons that escape us, America’s state government authorities are entirely unwilling to exercise them.

Alejandro Betancourt, the Under-Investigation Billionaire Linking Delcy Rodríguez to Trump

El País, August 17, 2026

El País and other Latin American press documents how Alejandro Betancourt, a Venezuelan billionaire who is under money laundering and tax fraud investigations in Switzerland and Spain and who is identified by Transparencia Venezuela as a co-conspirator in the $1.2 billion “Money Flight” case, became a diplomatic bridge between Marco Rubio’s State Department and Delcy Rodríguez’s Caracas. Mauricio Claver-Carone, until recently Rubio’s informal Venezuela emissary, acknowledged it. Betancourt’s UK extradition case closed in May (undoubtedly with the complicity of America’s closest “ally,” the UK). His private jet then flew from Palm Beach to Caracas in June and July. Speaking of that July flight, a manifest was altered mid-flight to erase his family’s names and substitute, among others, the chief strategy officer of Erebor, the crypto bank founded by Palmer Luckey and Joe Lonsdale and backed by Thiel’s Founders Fund. Reinforcing the point about institutionalized corruption, the same Comptroller Gould who just blessed World Liberty as a bank controversially granted a bank charter in February. This Thie-backed bank somehow managed to nab a deal on this Rubio-connected flight, set to conduct US diplomatic business with the replacement government in Venezuela, already holding a letter of intent with Banco de Venezuela.

But buckle up. Betancourt now reportedly advises Rodríguez on reopening oil and mining and on debt restructuring, while also negotiating with executives of Heeney Capital, a mining outfit whose Venezuelan gold deals are reportedly backed by the White House. Which US officials, intermediaries, and commercial actors dealt with him, and did that access overlap with oil, mining, sanctions relief, licenses, financial-system re-entry, or the debt workout? Claver-Carone already answered the first half on the record. Nobody involved seems embarrassed, so getting answers shouldn’t be difficult for people with the authority to compel them.

US Sanctions International Criminal Court President and Trial Lawyer

Al Jazeera, August 18, 2026

On Tuesday, Marco Rubio sanctioned ICC President Tomoko Akane, a Japanese judge, and senior trial lawyer Abdoulaye Seye of Senegal, freezing their US assets from September 17 and, in practice, cutting them off from much of the global banking system. Japan, one of America’s steadiest allies, called the move “very unfortunate,” which is practically a scream in Japanese. The Dutch foreign minister made a show of inviting Akane in to discuss continued support. Last June, three ICC judges sued the administration. Four human rights groups sued last week, and Pete Hegseth mused days earlier that the court might investigate American boat strikes in Latin America (ICC investigations should be the least of Hegseth’s worries. War crimes are illegal in the US). This administration generates lots of outrage with its constant attacks on the ICC. But Americans shouldn’t get hung up on one episode without considering the broader theme of these attacks. The Trump administration clearly believes that its foreign policy requires a world without courts that prosecute corruption.

Treasury Kills Corporate Transparency Act, Erases Shell-Company Database

Tech Times, August 13, 2026

We covered the announcement last week. This week, the rule took effect, releasing some 33 million American companies from ownership disclosure and initiating the deletion of everything already filed, while the long-term bill came into focus. To the uninitiated, this sounds like an item that freed businesses of endless paperwork, but that is a bad-faith argument. The only kind of business this database troubled was the one nested in layer upon layer of corporate shells – the only people who want to hide corporate ownership tend to be drug dealers, money launderers, Russian oligarchs, and, ahem, Trump Organization customers. In 2024, the US was upgraded by an international money-laundering body to “largely compliant” precisely because of this. So, don’t be surprised if the Financial Action Task Force takes this act of self-sabotage into account next year.

Previously, Congress created this registry over Trump’s veto. Marco Rubio was a vocal proponent of it. Now, Trump’s Treasury sabotaged it by rule. Secretary Bessent did the usual embarrassing justifying and called it “a victory for common sense.” But this will not help American business. In time, it will hurt foreign investment in the United States (as it should). Most of Dekleptocray’s staff have spent decades trying to improve the rule of law in Eastern Europe. Americans are going to get a civics lesson on why a stable and strong rule of law makes it safe for capital investment. Rebuilding this kind of trust takes decades. America’s cowardly CEOs know this, but their bonuses are tied to short-term performance. By the time malaise sets in, they will long since have cashed their checks. The lost decade will be someone else’s problem – your kid’s problem.

The Data Center Secret in Trump’s Financial Disclosures

More Perfect Union, August 2026

How many Trump officials are invested in data centers, we wondered out loud this morning? So, we researched it. More Perfect Union combed through the president’s disclosures and found trades in at least 25 companies tied to data center construction or leasing, with up to $25 million invested at the end of last year and dozens of trades since then, while his administration rolls out policy after policy for the AI buildout. Trade publication Data Center Dynamics itemized it. Up to $5 million each in cooling and power suppliers, Trane and Eaton in March. A stake in colocation giant Equinix in February. House and Senate Democrats have asked the Commerce inspector general to investigate whether Secretary Lutnick is boosting data centers that profit his family, Cantor Fitzgerald, which was transferred to Lutnick’s sons, is heavily invested in them. To reinforce: your utility bill effectively subsidizes these things. They eat tons of electricity, and the only way they can achieve the profitability that the tech bros and the investment class demand is if American households help pay for those enormous electricity bills. Some tech bros, like Thiel, spent millions of dollars over the past decade cultivating this moment. Their profits have skyrocketed at the same velocity as your utility bills. By design. This criminal-enterprise model of government is called government capture. Former Thiel employee and massive recipient of Thiel’s election largesse, Vice President personifies this form of government banditry.

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Princeling Monitor

Sources

Associated Press via Fortune, August 17, 2026

Common Dreams, August 17, 2026

CNN, August 17, 2026

Bloomberg, August 14, 2026

NOTUS, August 15, 2026

CNN, August 11, 2026

The National News Desk, August 11, 2026

Fortune, August 4, 2026

24/7 Wall St, August 3, 2026

El País, August 17, 2026

La Tercera, August 18, 2026

Runrun.es, August 18, 2026

La Jornada, August 18, 2026

Banking Dive, February 9, 2026

The Block, July 2, 2026

Al Jazeera, August 18, 2026

Al Jazeera, August 12, 2026

Tech Times, August 13, 2026

US Treasury and FinCEN, August 11, 2026

ACAMS, August 11, 2026

More Perfect Union, August 2026

Data Center Dynamics, July 2026

Office of Rep. Madeleine Dean, December 2025

CBS News, June 22, 2026

Coingabbar, August 3, 2026

We are reposting this blog post from our affiliated 501c3, DKP, which focuses on using transparency tools to undermine Russia. We know we have readers interested in Ukraine, so we are reproducing that post here.

This week, Russia’s high court banned the liberal Yabloko party from taking part in Russia’s parliamentary elections in September. Yabloko was the only anti-war party, and pretty much everyone knew that this was coming. The party was only at 4% in the latest poll, up from 2%. (Though, how much can you really trust Russian political polls?) The story of panicky authoritarian goons banning opposition parties is an old one. We don’t want to dwell on this story in this blog post, but instead would like to take a good look at the OTHER liberal Russian party, the “Party of New People”. This is a fake party, and it polls pretty well for one, hitting over 13% in a May poll, which would make it the 2nd most popular party in Russia (of course, behind United Russia, Putin’s party).

An old communist technology

What do we mean by “fake party”? In Russia, they usually call these things “systemic opposition parties”. They first appeared in communist regimes that were trying to pretend to have multi-party democracies and to channel potential political opposition into controlled parties, or to funnel potential opposition leaders and organizers into nice, stable jobs where the secret police could direct them. East Germany (where the practice began) had the “Christian Democratic Union of Germany” (CDU) for Christians, the “Democratic Farmers’ Party of Germany” (DBD) for rural voters, and even a National Democratic Party of Germany (NDPD) for middle-class liberals and former soldiers and Nazi Party members (this weird grouping was probably the result of Marxist-Leninist ideology that saw Nazism as just an evolved form of middle-class liberalism).

This practice of fake parties was imitated in other parts of the communist world. Before 1988, communist Vietnam had two parties: the “Democratic Party of Vietnam” and the “Socialist Party of Vietnam.” North Korea still has two: the “Chondoist Chongu Party,” associated with a 19th-century Korean neo-pagan religious movement that the regime considers “revolutionary.” There is also the “Korean Social Democratic Party,” which, for a while, published an English-language journal to convince readers that North Korea is a multi-party system. They haven’t been allowed to have seats in North Korea’s parliament since 2019. Perhaps the boss was getting nervous. In the waning days of the USSR, the communists created the “Liberal Democratic Party of Russia” (LDPR) to divide and channel democratic opposition, though after the collapse of the USSR, it quickly became an openly neo-fascist holding pen for those too crazy for any respectable party. This party remains in the Russian parliament with 21 seats.

Gravity-defying growth

The Russian cosmetics magnate Alexei Nechayev officially founded the New People party in 2020, but many reports from Russian opposition sources say the party was at least OK’d by Yuri Kovalchuk, Putin’s close friend and personal banker.

As in business, so with politics, one good indicator that corruption is at work is when a company or political party appears to defy gravity, getting regulatory approvals or avoiding investigations in ways that other entities can’t. Despite being formed in March 2020, New People had, by September 2020, somehow managed to organize campaigns across Russia and even win seats in four regional legislative assemblies! It had filed all the necessary paperwork, set up offices, and done campaigning in the face of the Russian police state in about six months! That’s gravity-defying!

In a 2021 interview with the Irish Times, the New People leader Nechayev said there were three conditions for registering a political party in Russia: 1. Don’t criticize Putin or his family 2. Avoid foreign financing, and 3. Don’t do unsanctioned street protests. “We [New People] don’t violate these three red lines,” he said. Nechayev went on to say that Russia is often presented, especially in the West, “as just Putin and Navalny”, but “Most people understand the world is not black and white”. Many Russians, he averred, want a moderate opposition.

How a fake party behaves

The New People party targets younger, urban voters who might be upset about rampant corruption and cronyism in Russian business, or who object to restrictions on mobile phone service or new traffic cameras. The party will officially criticize a government initiative, but then its representatives will either vote in favor of it or propose something Putin does not want, only to vote against it when the time comes. For a clear example: New People is publicly in favor of restoring direct elections for Russian city mayors and the heads of municipal districts, and argues for this, even introducing bills. However, in March 2025, when the Russian government basically abolished any chance of local self-government by abolishing thousands of municipalities, New People deputies voted in favor of the law.

New People is the only major Russian political party that has refrained from attacking the Yabloko party. This is probably not an oversight — the Kremlin wants to channel anti-war feelings in Russia into New People, where they can be controlled. The mask may have slipped a bit when Putin launched his massive invasion of Ukraine, and, based on an extant URL, the New People party posted an article named “New People Against the War” (http://newpeople.ru/News/novye-lyudi-protiv-vojny). Unfortunately, the page wasn’t archived, and now it’s gone.

This fake party is not just about channeling otherwise negative opinions. It can help to use fake parties to get more people at a table and make it seem legitimate. The Russian project “Election Atlas” observed that low-level politicos and officials affiliated with United Russia were being nominated to Russian electoral commissions for 2026 as New People representatives. This way, on paper, it can look like an electoral commission is multi-party, when in fact it can be all United Russia.

One analyst has even speculated that New People could become the “second leg” of Putin’s system and become the second-largest party in parliament (though still under Putin’s control). It would be a more attractive controlled opposition than the Communist Party, which is mostly for old people who are dying off, or the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), which is staffed by cranks and has burnt out its credibility inside and outside Russia.

Why this matters outside Russia

There are also some foreign benefits to fake parties. While the Korean Social Democratic Party probably hasn’t fooled anyone for a while, opposition parties can be quite useful for duping foreigners and establishing channels for influence and intelligence gathering. Just having the controlled opposition show up to conferences overseas might be enough to scare away actual dissidents. Westerners need to re-learn some of the tactics used by communist and other authoritarian kleptocracies in their ersatz democracies, especially as these practices might be headed our way. And, if a Russian “liberal dissident” wants to come to your event or interview you, make sure you double-check which party he is affiliated with and if it is real.

DKP’s website is here. Head on over there occasionally and keep tabs on what they are doing. They’re up to some interesting stuff.

Denmark has never made America ask twice. Danish troops fought and died beside Americans in Helmand, and for eighty years the Danes have been about as uncomplicated an ally as a superpower could hope for. This week we learned the exchange rate. A Texas outfit called Greenland Energy hauled drilling equipment onto Greenland’s east coast on an approval that expired in December. Seemingly relevant: They also gave Trump’s inaugural committee a $1 million check. Greenland Energy told investors on August 6 that regulatory talks were constructive. In reality, they received a formal warning from the Danish government. On August 12, the Government of Greenland (the Naalakkersuisut) ruled out drilling during this coming winter. The project is at step one of an eleven-step approval process and faces an increasingly hostile Danish government. Were the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) a serious body, it would be investigating why the company is telling investors something that seems wildly divergent from reality. But instead of that world, where we’d also have a normally functioning federal government asking why an American company is so angering one of our most steadfast allies by trampling on Danish sovereignty, Americans are getting a six-part television series by Dr Phil about a project run by a Trump donor.

This president seems to view America’s allies as spoils for him to dole out to his billionaire supporters. And to make sure those billionaires have an easier time hiding their loot, the administration spent this week killing the only federal registry recording who owns an American company. FinCEN will not merely stop collecting beneficial ownership data. It will delete what it has.

In addition, the president’s nonprofits and committees received $800 million without disclosure requirements. Trump also took in $59.5 million in foreign licensing “income,” and wouldn’t you know it? Almost all of it was Persian Gulf money, the same region where Trump found investors for his crypto business.

Oh, there’s more. A Korean conglomerate fighting a tariff case paid a Trump company $2 million. More. Belgian diamond cutters gave Trump a gold ring set with 321 diamonds, 56 sapphires, 13 emeralds, and six rubies. Purely coincidentally, it was handed over three weeks before Belgian diamonds won a tariff exemption. More: A British money laundering suspect routed $100 million into World Liberty Financial through the UAE. For dessert, the Flamingo Revolution that Jared and Ivanka sparked in Albania with their corruption passed day 68.

How Trump Allies Are Linked to Controversial Greenland Oil Drilling Plan

Newsweek, August 11, 2026

Ken Griffin, the Citadel founder who gave $1 million dollars to Trump’s 2025 inaugural committee, took a 9.3% stake in the Greenland project in May. Carol Craig, who runs Sidus Space and works on Trump’s “Golden Dome” program, joined the board in June. Chairman Larry Swets has prior ventures with Paolo Tiramani, who says he gave $10 million to the White House ballroom project. And Phil McGraw — yes, Dr. Phil, lately of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission — is fronting a six-part documentary on his own network, promising weekly live updates from the drill site. $60 million committed to an 8,100 square kilometer basin in a territory this president has spent eighteen months threatening to annex. And Trump is using the federal apparatus to bully forward this investment by his donors. Anyone who asks the Greenlanders will hear them say they do not want this. And Danes are correctly asking if the US respects Danish sovereignty. In answering that question on your behalf, Trump answered no.

Olieboringer i år? Så langt er Greenland Energy i processen (Oil drilling this year? This is how far Greenland Energy is in the process)

KNR (Greenland’s public broadcaster), August 11, 2026

Greenland’s public broadcaster went through the checklist that the company skipped and allegedly failed to mention to investors. A project description, a 35-day hearing on it, environmental and social impact assessments, an eight-week hearing on those, a community benefit agreement…and only then a drilling authorization. Yet, the equipment has already moved to Nerlerit Inaat, despite the permit for doing so having lapsed last year. That earned a stern warning on July 30. Department head Jørgen T. Hammeken-Holm was blunt — “We are NOT agreed that they can conduct a test boring this year.” The next day, the ministry ruled out the season entirely…six days after Greenland Energy assured investors that the talks were constructive. Asked what the company had told his community, Erling Madsen, a hunter in Ittoqqortoormiit, a settlement near the prospective drill site, said, “We hear nothing from them.” From the Greenlandic perspective, this was never an energy story. It is a consent story, and our government believes that campaign donors’ profits take precedence.

FinCEN Permanently Ends Beneficial Ownership Reporting Requirements for Millions of Small Business Owners

U.S. Treasury and FinCEN, August 11, 2026

The administration just ended – and deleted – the Corporate Transparency Act’s beneficial ownership registry for every domestic entity and every US person. FinCEN will delete what has already been filed. Not seal. Not archived. Delete. The FACT Coalition’s reply the same day: “Criminals Get Free Pass in Treasury’s Rule Rolling Back Protections to Fight Dirty Money.” Co-director Erica Hanichak said Treasury “has handed a major victory to U.S. adversaries, corrupt officials, fraudsters, and tax evaders.” And drug cartels. Congress passed the CTA over a Trump veto because anonymous American shell companies had become the world’s preferred hiding place for stolen money. The United States is now, by administrative choice, a jurisdiction where you cannot find out who owns anything.

Base Group faces scrutiny over Trump ties as aluminum affiliate fights US tariffs

The Korea Times, August 7, 2026

South Korea’s Base Group, whose Keumyang arm already distributes Trump Winery wine, paid $2 million to a Trump family business in 2025, booked as a nonrefundable development fee for a golf course that has not been announced. Why? Perhaps it’s because its affiliate, Korea Aluminum, is staring down \ a preliminary Commerce ruling that would push tariffs on its exports to 105.8%. Senators Warren, Blumenthal, and Kim opened an inquiry on August 6, asking whether the payment was meant to “influence Commerce Department proceedings or otherwise secure lucrative tariff exemptions.” They followed up with a second letter about an 18-karat ring set with 321 diamonds, 56 sapphires, 13 emeralds, six rubies, and two diamond letter T’s, presented to the president on June 28 by Antwerp’s diamond sector. Weeks later, on July 24, the administration exempted European natural diamonds from Section 301 tariffs.

Trump-Backed World Liberty Financial Received $100 Million Investment From Money Laundering Suspect

Benzinga, August 10, 2026, reporting on the New York Times

Guren “Bobby” Zhou, a British national who once ran a hardwood flooring business, is under an uncharged UK money laundering investigation. He is also, per the Times, the source of an aggregate $100 million that reached World Liberty Financial through a UAE-registered foundation called Aqua 1.

If that name sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve written about it before:

“The Aqua 1 Foundation story reads like amateur money laundering fiction, except the money is real and flowing directly into the Trump family’s pockets. Reuters was unable to locate the supposed UAE-based crypto fund in any corporate registry. The Abu Dhabi Global Market stated explicitly that “Aqua 1 is not registered, licensed, or affiliated in any capacity” with them. Dubai’s crypto regulator VARA confirmed it “has not engaged with Aqua 1 or Mr. Dave Lee.”

That previous $100 payment is what seemingly unlocked NVIDIA’s most advanced AI chips for an AI company in the UAE known to have ties to the Chinese government.

In one week, Trump made beneficial ownership unknowable by design, and the president’s family crypto venture demonstrated why someone might want that. You may remember the $500 million a UAE-linked fund put into WLF before the inauguration. The UAE official who owns that company chairs the China-friendly foundation and is the largest investor in Trump’s family crypto company.

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The right to stay — Italy’s Albanian diaspora sails back to support the Flamingo Revolution

Middle East Eye, August 12, 2026

Day 68. The Flamingo Revolution — begun in May over a Kushner-backed development on the protected Vjosa-Narta lagoon and Sazan Island — has since broadened into a general anti-corruption movement demanding Edi Rama’s resignation. And now it has a flotilla. Albanian emigrants in Italy are sailing three boats from Brindisi across the Adriatic to join the protests, a deliberate reversal of the 1991 exodus that carried them the other way. Prosecutors at SPAK, Albania’s independent corruption agency, are investigating whether deeds to the coastline were forged, alleging cocaine proceeds were laundered into Albanian property using falsified titles, and have frozen roughly 110 million euros. Albanians are crossing the sea to determine who owns their coastline. The president’s daughter seems to think she could just delete the answer from an Albanian database

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Capital One closed more than 300 Trump Organization accounts in 2021 “for anti-money laundering” reasons. Not over the insurrection, like Trump claims. The bank says its financial-crimes professionals spent months studying the transaction patterns and found activity “among the types of activity flagged by federal banking guidance.” Reuters reports it is the first time any financial institution has formally tied money laundering concerns to the sitting president’s family business. The family’s response was not an explanation of the transactions. It was a lawsuit, plus a companion suit against JPMorgan Chase seeking $5 billion for the indignity.

The through-line this week is what lawlessness looks like once it becomes routine. January 6 should have been disqualifying. The money movements that made a bank’s compliance team walk away should have been disqualifying. Neither was enforced, and unenforced law is just a suggestion with letterhead. The federal government will not police this family. The current Justice Department answers to it. The last one declined to try, and the Senate just left town rather than vote on an ethics section. That leaves exactly two tripwires still functioning in America: bank compliance departments and state regulators. This week produced hard evidence about both, and a reminder that the only regulator ever to put a dollar figure on the Epstein banking scandal was a state agency. If state attorneys general do not start to use statutes like New York’s Martin Act, the story of this term will be written by the lawless.

David Kirkpatrick’s accounting in The New Yorker documents $4.05 billion and counting in family profits. House Oversight Democrats track $9.7 billion, including digital-asset paper wealth. And Reuters has counted more than $2.3 billion from crypto ventures alone since the second term began. There is ample evidence that state governments can use their powers. The thing lacking is initiative from the people in charge of them.

Capital One Says It Closed Trump Organization Accounts After Anti-Money-Laundering Review

Reuters August 1, 2026

The Trump Organization and Eric Trump sued Capital One in a Florida federal court, claiming the bank “debanked” them for political reasons after January 6. Capital One’s motion to dismiss, filed Friday night after a judge twice tossed earlier complaints and allowed months of discovery, answers that the documents and the plaintiffs’ own allegations “make clear that Capital One closed Plaintiffs’ accounts for anti-money laundering (‘AML’) reasons.” More than 300 accounts. “Months of analysis and a careful review,” by a team the bank says carries decades of law-enforcement experience. The bank is careful to note, per NPR and The Hill, that it never accused the family firm of illegal money laundering, only that the patterns it found are the kind federal banking guidance tells banks to flag, which is the sentence compliance lawyers write when they mean everything short of the word. The case is before Judge Roy Altman, a Trump appointee who has already dismissed the complaint twice. Consider the incentive structure on display. When no prosecutor will open your books, being flagged for money-laundering patterns is not a legal risk. It is a fundraising narrative and a $5 billion counterclaim industry (our money laundering Spidey Senses did not need the assist, but we appreciate a bank doing the documentation for us).

Looking the Other Way, How Wall Street Banks Enabled Jeffrey Epstein’s Sex Trafficking

Senate Finance Committee August 4, 2026

If Capital One shows what it looks like when a compliance department does its job, Senator Ron Wyden’s 67-page report shows what happens when it doesn’t. Four years of investigation, including an in-camera review of suspicious activity reports at Treasury, found that JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, and Bank of America likely violated federal anti-money laundering law in their handling of Jeffrey Epstein. The numbers are obscene. Epstein ran 134 accounts at JPMorgan. In seventeen years the bank filed just seven timely reports covering 4.3 million dollars, then, weeks after his 2019 arrest, retroactively flagged more than 5,000 wire transfers worth roughly 1.3 billion dollars, including payments to women in Russia and Belarus through banks now under U.S. sanctions. Bank of America waved through 170 million dollars from billionaire Leon Black to Epstein, then concluded years later the wires had “no verifiable business purpose.” One executive coached Epstein to route cash withdrawals through his aviation accounts. Another signed off on continuing to work with him after his termination with a one-letter email, “Y.” The report names thirteen bankers and refers the matter to the DOJ, Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the OCC, per American Banker. JPMorgan and Bank of America dispute the findings. Now, the part relevant to this newsletter. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent refused three separate requests to produce the Epstein bank records, then handed them to House Republicans instead, and Senator Mike Crapo blocked Wyden’s bill to compel production on the Senate floor. The only enforcement anywhere in this two-decade saga came from a state. New York’s Department of Financial Services fined Deutsche Bank 150 million dollars in 2020. State regulators, take the hint. The American Prospect calls it a portrait of banks protecting their “wall of cash.” We call it the operating manual for the Capital One story above, because the lesson every ultra-wealthy client just learned is that the reporting system only bites six years late, if ever.

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Trump Media Launches Truth API, Selling Faster Access to the President’s Posts

Associated Press July 16, 2026

The feed went live on August 1. Trump Media’s Truth API, announced July 16, sells financial firms a licensed, machine-readable, near-real-time pipe into the platform’s top accounts, including @realDonaldTrump and the official @WhiteHouse account, for as much as 100,000 dollars a month, with a discount to 60,000 for a three-year commitment. The president announces tariff decisions and military operations on Truth Social, often before any official channel, so a millisecond head start is worth real money to high-frequency traders. Axios distilled it cleanly. The same presidential power that moves markets now feeds a business empire that enriches the president. Senator Mark Warner introduced a bill Monday to ban the practice outright, calling it “corrupt.” Representative Jamie Raskin sent the company a letter demanding answers, and Representatives Ritchie Torres and Angie Craig asked the SEC and DOJ to investigate. Former SEC official Renée Jones notes that selling premium access to a feed the president uses for de facto government announcements could implicate the misappropriation doctrine and the STOCK Act. The company’s defense is that the posts are public. Gentle reminder: federal investigators are already probing eerily timed trades placed ahead of the president’s tariff and Iran announcements, with no evidence so far tying the family to those trades. Somebody clearly understood the value of arriving early. Now that advantage has a rate card, and the landlord is the one making the announcements. Also, NY State AG Letitia James regulates the banks and hedge funds paying the president for this. Yet, she chooses to sit this one out.

Senate Won’t Vote on Crypto Clarity Act Before Its Summer Break

CoinDesk August 6, 2026

Reminder #2: The last edition walked page by page through the CLARITY Act’s “ethics” section, the family exemption, the enforcement monopoly handed to Trump’s own Justice Department, the $500,000 penalty cap against $1.4 billion in disclosed crypto income, and the retroactive amnesty that erases every violation on January 20, 2029. This week, the Senate skipped town without voting on any of it. Majority Leader John Thune blamed “the Dems,” praised Senator Cynthia Lummis, and promised the bill is “queued up first thing” when the chamber returns on September 14. Democrats Chris Murphy, Chris Van Hollen, and Jeff Merkley formalized their opposition after a merged draft dropped the ethics language they had demanded, including provisions empowering state attorneys general. Read the negotiating posture for what it is. The bill’s sponsors would rather delay the entire American crypto framework than accept an ethics section that binds the First Family or lets a state enforce it. That priority is the tell, because the stakes are structural. The anti-money laundering system that flagged Epstein late and the Trump Organization on time runs through banks. A parallel crypto rail with a friendly regulator, a developer safe harbor, and a statutory exemption for the president’s family is engineered to route around the last working tripwire in Western finance. Every senator who votes for that architecture in September is choosing to be a willing enabler. Many states regulate the players in the crypto market. They seem to be as captured as their federal counterparts.

Albania’s Protesters Reach Night 67 Demanding Rama’s Resignation

Oculus News August 5, 2026

Flamingo Revolution update, for those keeping vigil with us. The movement over the $4.6 billion Kushner-and-Ivanka-linked resort scheme on Sazan Island and the Narta Lagoon reached night 67 this week, nightly since the end of May and now among the longest continuous civic protests in Albania’s modern history. The crowds marched from Skanderbeg Square to the prime minister’s office, chanting “Rama in prison, Berisha in prison,” and, per Balkanweb, closed night 66 with the promise “more tomorrow.” The demands have hardened from canceling the resort to the resignation of Prime Minister Edi Rama and the departure of the entire political class. Albania’s special anti-corruption prosecutor SPAK has opened an investigation into a planned development in the area, while telling CBS News the probe “does not concern any company associated with Mr. Kushner.” BIRN’s Reporter.al has meanwhile traced the Zvërnec development company to a Dutch trust structure that obscures its ultimate owners, consistent with the shell-company reporting by Lindita Cela we covered in July. Rama has not moved an inch. Now hold the two capitals side by side. Tirana has filled the streets every single night for ten weeks over one Trump-family resort. Washington closed a week featuring a money-laundering court filing, a suppressed-report scandal, and a $100,000-a-month presidential trading feed, and the streets are quiet. The outrage differential remains the most damning metric we track. As for World Liberty Financial’s federal bank charter, the one former OCC officials said was “inconceivable” to reject, no decision has been announced as of this writing, seven weeks after approval was expected within days. We are watching the docket so you don’t have to.

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You can read Part One here.

Credit: Mr. Location Scout at Pexels.com

The White House meeting is documented because Taylor Farms is the source. There is no visitor log to check because President Trump stopped keeping one in February 2025.

Four days before the inauguration, on January 16, 2025, shortly before Trump’s inauguration, Taylor Fresh Foods registered a new federal lobbying account with Sidley Austin, the law and lobbying behemoth. Taylor Foods engaged them to lobby on food safety regulations and reported $710,000 in lobbying expenses for 2025. On March 26 of that year, Taylor Fresh Foods gave $1,000,000 to MAGA Inc.

Curiously, six days before Taylor’s $1 million donation to MAGA Inc., the FDA said it intended to push the compliance date for the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) food traceability rule back by 30 months. That rule includes iceberg lettuce by name (the vehicle for the Cyclospora), requires a company to produce supply chain records within 24 hours of an FDA request, and was set to take effect on January 20, 2026, six months before this outbreak. Now, enforcement is delayed until July 20, 2028.

Then came the week of July 16. That was when the FDA and CDC formally announced they were investigating a multistate Cyclospora outbreak “linked to shredded iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell locations” in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia. It does not require more than Google to learn that Taylor Farms supplies Taco Bell.

The Taylor Farms-White House meeting occurred that same Thursday. Taylor Farms announced its voluntary recall the next day. That Saturday, the FDA found a positive sample, which it subsequently retracted on Sunday. Taylor Farms said the FDA apologized. The FDA disagreed, and the company deleted the posts.

HHS, the FDA’s supervisory agency, wrote that “nothing influences our decisions except science and the safety of the American people,” but then failed to link to any FDA decision or science. At the same time, the record does not say what Taylor Farms asked for in that room, and no administration has explained why a company at the center of a live outbreak got a White House meeting.

The FDA is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. Contrary to common belief, it is not on the statutory list of independent agencies. But Congress included an unusual clause in the mandatory food recall power it created in 2011. That authority “shall not be delegated to any officer or employee other than the Commissioner.” One person holds it.

Might the White House meeting have been to pressure the FDA into announcing a voluntary recall, so that Taylor Farms could avoid the expense of a mandatory one?

Industry has repeated a figure of roughly $10 million for the direct cost of a food recall since 2011. Peer-reviewed work published in 2025 estimates median recall costs for a producer-tier firm to be between $3 million and $72.7 million. In contrast, USDA’s Economic Research Service estimates the cost of each case of cyclosporiasis at $464.63. Multiplying by the 1,947 confirmed cases at the time and, according to the government’s own records, the total societal cost of an outbreak is only $905,000. Undoubtedly, Taylor Farms is aware of this. So, did Taylor Farms call for a White House meeting to convince the White House that pulling all Taylor Farms lettuce would cost the company several times more than the cost to the country at large?

Taylor Farms likely also feared civil liability if pinned as the cause of the outbreak. Chipotle paid a $25 million criminal fine in 2020 after outbreaks sickened more than 1,100 people. Blue Bell paid $19.35 million.

Before 1906, federal food law barely existed. Harvey Wiley, the father of the FDA, found that 86.7% of ground coffee samples were adulterated. One sample contained no coffee at all. Congress sat on food bills for a quarter century. Then Upton Sinclair published The Jungle. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” he wrote that October, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” Theodore Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drug Act on June 30, 1906. Public disgust, not agency initiative, built the system that kept American children safe for a century. Federal government corruption is undermining that system now.

Hamilton wrote in Federalist 26 that state legislatures would be “not only vigilant but suspicious and jealous guardians of the rights of the citizens” and would “sound the alarm to the people.” He failed to see state governments on lazy autopilot in 2026.

Michigan’s agriculture director can tag food as embargoed and condemn it without a court. Ohio lets local boards of health embargo food at a restaurant. Indiana can embargo on probable cause for 15 days. Kentucky can quarantine on probable cause. West Virginia’s food code carries no embargo power at all (which is a scandal in itself).

Indiana’s Deceptive Consumer Sales Act makes it illegal to knowingly sell a product recalled “voluntarily by the manufacturer, distributor, or retailer.” A voluntary recall triggers it, which exactly describes the current situation. Sam’s Club, Walmart, Costco, Target, Whole Foods, Sam’s Club, Kroger, Trader Joe’s, and countless restaurants and other retailers continue to market Taylor Farms lettuce in Indiana. The Indiana legislature has the duty and legal tools to ensure that children in its schools are not served contaminated lettuce, but, like Bartleby, chooses not to.

Attorneys general in Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia could issue investigative demands without seeking a judge’s approval. Michigan’s attorney general must first obtain a circuit court order, but then it could ask the questions the FDA did not.

Any of these state governments could compel Taylor Farms to turn over its correspondence with the FDA and the White House, its plant sanitation records, and its own test results. As of today, no attorney general in any affected state has taken any public action.

Matthew Moore, a food safety microbiologist at Amherst College, explained to The New York Times that Cyclosporiasis spreads when the parasite is transmitted from human feces into the food supply, and that such a large outbreak could only be explained by human waste spreading to the food supply at “surprising scale.” This strongly indicates wash water. It may be Taylor Farms de Mexico, or it may be the local irrigation water.

Moore’s description does not fit the theory that the outbreak originated at Taco Bell. But instead of getting to the bottom of this mystery, Bruce Taylor appears to have focused his energy on meeting Donald Trump at the White House, after which Taco Bell seems to have become the scapegoat for the outbreak. And instead of protecting schoolchildren from a parasite that originates from human feces, state governments in the US seem content to take the word of the FDA after a meeting between the company at the center of the Cyclosporiasis and the White House with Donald Trump.

You can trace these donations and policy changes yourself using the free Quid Pro Quo Tracker tool built by our affiliated 501c3, Anti-Corruption Action. Rather than simply tracking money flowing into our political system, you can track what policy initiatives the politicians who received it pushed, the lobbyists that those special interests hired, the think tanks they supported, and the regulatory changes they called for (and often received).

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The financial disclosure the Office of Government Ethics released on June 30 shows the President’s 2025 income at roughly $2.2 billion, of which about $1.4 billion came from cryptocurrency. The New York Times spent the month running the 927 pages through a spreadsheet and reported this week that the money comes mostly from two sources – digital assets and foreign investment. That is another way of saying the President of the United States now earns his living from the two categories of transactions his own government is supposed to police. In case you are wondering, that is about $6 million a day, every day, including the ones he spent golfing.

Senator Cory Booker has spent July making a loud and accurate case that the President’s sons are pilfering the Pentagon budget. He is right, and we have covered this issue a lot around here.

But Booker is also the lead Democratic negotiator on crypto market structure, co-author of the Senate Agriculture draft that fed the bill now stalled on the floor, and one of eighteen Senate Democrats who voted the GENIUS Act into law. Trump earned $1.4 thanks to people like Booker. Just to be clear, two things can be true at once. Trump’s sons can be raiding the Pentagon budget like Uday and Quasay, AND Booker can also be one of Trump’s critical enablers, putting a legitimate gloss on the scam Trump and the Trump Princelings use to stuff their pockets.

Speaking of enablers…Elon Musk. All of this Princeling corruption is gaining more traction overseas and is causing real damage to the country’s reputation. The rest of the world has stopped giving America the benefit of the doubt (as they should). But that hasn’t stopped the tech bros. Elon Musk spent Thursday authorizing up to $120 million to elect Republicans in November.

Trump Made More Than $2B in This Term So Far, and Most of It Came From Crypto and Foreign Investments

WBUR Here and Now, July 29, 2026, carrying New York Times analysis

The filing has been public since June 30, but it was…a lot. It took a data desk to make it legible. Times data journalist Andrea Fuller walked through the findings. Crypto was the family business. CBS totaled it at roughly $2.2 billion, including $635 million in royalties from the issuer of the $TRUMP token and more than $500 million from World Liberty Financial token sales. Doral brought in $121.8 million and Mar-a-Lago $77.4 million, which now read like the hobby income of a man who found a better racket. Three former White House ethics lawyers from both parties put the other half of the ledger on the record in early July. The $TRUMP coin is down 97.7% from its high. As many as a million investors have lost a combined $3.8 billion on it. Somebody had to be on the other side of those trades. That somebody filed a 927-page disclosure and works in an office that those million investors pay taxes to maintain.

Trump Admin Pressures Law Enforcement Groups to Support Controversial Cryptocurrency Legislation

CNN, July 30, 2026

For weeks, the White House has been leaning on current and former federal law enforcement officials to endorse the CLARITY Act. Police organizations have been warning that narcotraffickers, terrorist financiers, Russia, Iran, and China want this bill. That is all true, but the crystal-clear warning sign is that Donald Trump badly wants this bill. The White House is even using the Pentagon to do Trump’s bidding. Patrick Witt, a Pentagon official who runs the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets, pressed officials at the FBI and elsewhere to sign on. An official at one law enforcement group told CNN that everyone in the field “got hammered to support that legislation.” That is the signal Booker and the 16 Senate crypto-fresh Democrats keep waiving off. Shame. We wish one reporter anywhere would ask one of these Democrats to explain why Trump wants this bill so badly (hint: it isn’t to keep cryptocurrency clean of corruption).

The National District Attorneys Association and the International Association of Chiefs of Police had written jointly to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, warning that provisions scattered throughout the bill would reduce transparency, weaken accountability, and create gaps in the anti-money-laundering and terrorist-financing framework that investigators depend on. Blanche has been campaigning for confirmation as Attorney General and can’t afford to lose the support of his audience of one – Blanche probably supports crypto anyway, frankly. Remember, he shut down crypto criminal investigations and dissolved the Justice Department’s National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team. Transparency International’s deputy executive director told CNN he had never seen ethics language so plainly tailored to accommodate one politician. When the cops say a bill helps launderers and the government responds by lobbying the cops, the President of the United States sees a business opportunity, and 16 Senate Democrats captured by the crypto industry start barking like trained seals.

Cryptocurrency and AI Scams Bilk Americans of Billions

FBI, April 2026

In the same calendar year, the President earned $1.4 billion from crypto, Americans reported losing $11.366 billion to it. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center logged 181,565 crypto-related complaints in 2025. The average loss across all fraud was about $20,000. From crypto? $62,604. Americans over sixty absorbed $4.4 billion of that. This is the industry Congress is being lobbied to deregulate, by an administration whose head of state is its largest single beneficiary, with the enforcement team that used to work these cases already disbanded.

Trump’s Sons Invest Heavily in Defense Tech as Father’s Administration Pours Money In

Washington Post, July 13, 2026

The Post built a federal contracting database spanning January 2016 through early July 2026 and cross-referenced it with PitchBook records. The result is the cleanest map yet of the Princelings’ business model. Companies backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have secured at least $3.2 billion in federal awards since the brothers invested, plus $3.1 billion in future contract options, and several have earned spots on preapproved shortlists that let them bid on nearly $200 billion in future work. Trump Jr. joined 1789 Capital within days of the 2024 election. Eric invests mainly through American Ventures and Dominari, whose offices sit in Trump Tower. In June, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth folded nearly all Pentagon drone and autonomous weapons programs into one new office, and the latest budget request earmarks $53.6 billion for autonomous platforms and counter-drone systems. The brothers have backed or advised at least four drone manufacturers, all of which secured federal business in 2025 and 2026. A White House spokeswoman says there are no conflicts of interest. Booker, quoted by La Voce di New York, put it more plainly, saying the Pentagon should not be a Trump family ATM. He is correct.

Reminder #2: In November, 2025, Booker and Chairman John Boozman released the bipartisan market structure discussion draft that became the Senate Agriculture half of the CLARITY Act. In 2025, he voted for the GENIUS Act. That law that basically created USD1, the Trump family stablecoin. A Democratic Party that spends the morning denouncing the Pentagon grift and the afternoon negotiating the crypto grift is not running an anti-corruption campaign. Or being good at politics. Or being anything but part of the problem. In Hungary, Peter Magyar went from nothing, with no national media presence, to shellacking Viktor Orbán’s kleptocratic machine by facing the corruption head-on – all of it – and never once losing focus. Prior to that, Orbán had spent 16 years defeating an opposition that couldn’t resist keeping one foot in the feed trough.

Where the CLARITY Act Stands Right Now

Disruption Banking, July 31, 2026

Stuck. No floor vote, no cloture motion, no date. Majority Leader John Thune has told reporters he does not expect the bill to reach the floor before the recess that starts around August 7, with nominations and a Russia sanctions measure ahead of it. Polymarket, the crypto-adjacent political betting market, priced 2026 passage at 28%, down from a peak of 82% in February, and Galaxy Digital cut its own estimate to 30%. Until those predictions are 0%, we will not stop talking about it.

Worth noting, New York Attorney General Letitia James has come out against the bill, warning that it would weaken states’ ability to regulate crypto and investigate fraud. Complaints to her office about crypto scams have tripled in three years, with losses approaching $500 million. We have said before that state attorneys general are the last enforcement backstop standing. Maybe this backstop feels inclined to get off the sidelines?

Billionaires Have Already Poured $433 Million Into the 2026 Midterms

Fortune, July 27, 2026

Americans for Tax Fairness ran FEC data through March 1 and found the fifty biggest-spending billionaire families had already routed $344.3 million. Our affiliated 501c3 has something to say about this, too. About 79% of billionaires’ total went to Republican candidates and conservative groups. MAGA Inc took in $89 million, America PAC $45.3 million, and the Senate Leadership Fund $36.3 million. Musk led all individual donors at roughly $71 million at that count and at least $90 million by the end of June, followed by Jeff Yass with more than $55 million. The Washington Post put Republican-leaning donors at $880 million in the first half of 2026 against $290 million from Democratic-leaning givers. Then on Thursday, The Times reported that Musk has authorized America PAC to spend $100 million to $120 million on a new field program across at least eight states. This is the man who announced in 2025 that he had gotten a little too involved in politics. A Boligarch © does not retire. The crypto industry’s own Fairshake network, meanwhile, entered this cycle with roughly $193 million in hand.

The US Slips to Its Lowest-Ever Rank in a Global Corruption Index

Semafor, February 12, 2026, on Transparency International data

In Transparency International’s most recent Corruption Perceptions Index, the United States fell to 29th out of 182 countries, its worst placing since the index was relaunched under current methodology in 2012, scoring 64 on a scale where 100 is clean. It now sits tied with the Bahamas, behind Lithuania, Barbados and Uruguay. The organization’s chief executive said plainly that they are very concerned and that the decline may continue. The surveys behind the score do not yet reflect most of 2025. Reputations are slow to build and fast to burn. Ask Albania, where the Flamingo Revolution is in its third month over a single Kushner-linked resort on Sazan Island and the Narta Lagoon. Foreign Policy reported on July 20 that groundbreaking has stalled amid calls for environmental review and an investigation by SPAK, the country’s independent anti-corruption body. Members of the Albanian party Lëvizja Bashkë told Democracy Now that they regard the project as a money laundering operation (they are likely correct). Tens of thousands of Albanians have filled the streets for weeks over Kushner’s deal. In contrast, Americans did not react to the 927-page disclosure by Kushner’s father-in-law. The US is becoming a case study in kleptocracy, and supporters of Albanian flamingos remain better organized than the US Senate.

Support Dekleptocracy’s transparency mission. Dekleptocracy Alliance is a 501(c)(4) organization that puts anti-corruption on the national political agenda by seeding an activist anti-corruption ecosystem. It is funded solely by your small-dollar donations. The Dekleptocracy Journal is supported by Substack subscriptions from people like you. Thank you for your support. Truly.

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While we make no secret of our distaste for Donald Trump and his corruption, our mission is a non-partisan one to make corruption an important part of the political narrative. Politics is, after all, how a country with 350 million people debates, and we really do need a national debate about corruption. Because of that and because we have rampant legal corruption in our political system, our national case of diarrhea is an agenda item for our upcoming national debate. Happy 250, America!

Credit: Mr. Location Scout at Pexels.com

The Nation’s Health is Too Important to Leave to Corporate Self-Regulation

The parasite diarrhea outbreak narrative dominating the news abjectly fails to dig into the structural corruption that led the country to the current situation. The narrative typically stops at the million-dollar check to the President’s super PAC, followed by a White House meeting the day before a recall.

But the family behind Taylor Farms has been writing checks in Washington since 1979 and helping write America’s produce safety rules since 2007. By the time this lettuce was contaminated, the system that should have caught it had already been built to make the parasite the American consumers’ problem, and not Taylor Farms’.

So how does a company end up policing itself? Slowly, legally, and in plain view.

Part one, forty-six years of checks

The first check sits in the FEC’s own archives. October 16, 1979. Five hundred dollars from E.H. Taylor of Salinas, California, with the employer listed as Bruce Church Inc – approximately $2,300 in today’s dollars. The recipient was Committee C00107227, the Senate campaign of Alan Cranston, Democrat of California.

The dynasty’s first federal check went to a Democrat. The million-dollar donation to Trump’s super PAC was simply the exclamation point on a bipartisan political corruption scheme endangering America’s food supply.

A little lineage helps. Thomas Bruce Church founded Bruce Church Inc. in Salinas, California, in 1926. His son-in-law, Edward H. Taylor, ran the company after Church died, built the holding company Fresh International, and launched the bagged salad brand that became Fresh Express. Ted Taylor died in July 1991. His son, Bruce, left the family firm in 1994 and founded Taylor Farms the following year. Three generations, one valley, the same crop.

Ted Taylor gave $19,050 to federal candidates and committees between 1979 and January 1991, all of it traceable in the FEC bulk files under Bruce Church Inc. and Fresh International. Modest money, mostly to the Republican Senate committee and to the moderate former California governor Pete Wilson.

The son does not give like the father. Bruce Taylor’s personal federal giving totals roughly $969,000 over 37 years, and 78% of it has been given since January 2020. Four separate $100,000 checks in 2024 and 2025 alone.

And the corporation dwarfs the man. Taylor Farms and Taylor Fresh Foods have put about $4.5 million into federal committees since 2010, nearly all of it into super PACs, with $2 million of that in 2025. Where it landed is worth sitting with. Keystone Renewal spent $80 million against Bob Casey in Pennsylvania. More Jobs, Less Government spent $28 million against Jon Tester in Montana. Heartland Resurgence spent $4.28 million against Deb Fischer’s opponent in Nebraska, six months after Bruce Taylor personally maxed out to Fischer, who sits on the Senate Agriculture Committee. There’s a clear theme here.

California got its own program. State filings show roughly $512,000 from the family, and its companies have contributed roughly $512,000 since 2000, including $100,000 to the California Republican Party in a single day in October 2010 and $50,000 to Governor Brown’s committee backing the 2014 water bond.

Then March 26, 2025. Taylor Fresh Foods wrote $1,000,000 to MAGA Inc. Bruce Taylor has confirmed this and stated what it was used for. The donation, he told Forbes, “earned me a seat at a dinner to discuss the ramifications of the tariff” on food imports from Mexico and Canada, which he said would have added more than $500 million a year to the cost of salad. He insists it had nothing to do with food safety.

Take him at his word. It makes the story worse, not better. The food safety rules were already handled.

Three weeks before that check, on January 16, 2025, the company registered its first federal lobbying account in its own name and hired Sidley Austin. The stated issue, in the filing’s own words, was “Regulation of food safety.” It has spent $810,000 since then, with $380,000 of that in the first quarter of 2025 alone.

None of which is the real story either. Money buys access to the people who write the rules. This family did something more permanent than that. Part two is about how they became the people who write the rules.

You can trace these donations and policy changes yourself using the free Quid Pro Quo Tracker tool built by our affiliated 501c3, Anti-Corruption Action. Rather than simply tracking money flowing into our political system, you can track what policy initiatives the politicians who received it pushed, the lobbyists that those special interests hired, the think tanks they supported, and the regulatory changes they called for (and often received).

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CC:

Congress has finally produced a definitive answer to the question of what happens when the referee owns the team. The CLARITY Act — the 616-page crypto market structure bill now stalled in the Senate — devotes its final pages (603 through 616, for those reading along at home) to an “ethics” section that reads less like a restriction and more like a user manual for keeping a conflict of interest alive. The president may keep his digital assets. His adult children — the ones actually running World Liberty Financial — are exempt entirely. The only enforcer is the Justice Department, run by his “former” personal criminal defense attorney. Penalties cap at $500,000 (a rounding error against the $1.4 billion in crypto income Trump disclosed on June 30), the rules don’t take effect for 360 days, and the whole section evaporates on January 20, 2029 — at which point, per the bill’s own text, “no person may be subjected to any penalty, forfeiture or liability,” even for violations committed while it was in force. Retroactive absolution, drafted before the sins are committed. Martin Luther once had something to say about a Catholic Church that did this kind of thing.

The rest of the world does not need a cloture vote to see what is happening. Al Jazeera headlined the $1.4 billion. Ukraine’s Mezha tallied the family’s crypto billions for its readers. And in Albania, the Flamingo Revolution — approaching its ninth week — has turned Jared Kushner’s Sazan Island resort into a global symbol of what a captured state looks like. Keep in mind that this is as much a story about America as it is about Albania. Yes, Albania is a captured state, but so is America. Only the Albanians are further along in taking their country back. While Albanians are toppling busts of their prime minister over a single Trump-family deal, Trump’s appointee to the Treasury Department was giving his family business a bank charter while Congress was busy trying to pass indulgences for the whole thing. And lest you think this is only about Republicans, keep in mind the critical support from a few captured Democrats who are lobbying to make this Trump family indulgence the law of the land. Ruben Gallego (AZ), Kirsten Gillibrand (NY), Angela Alsobrooks (MD), Mark Warner (VA), Cory Booker (NJ), John Fetterman (PA), Catherine Cortez Masto (NV), Ben Ray Luján (NM), Elissa Slotkin (MI), Maggie Hassan (NH), Martin Heinrich (NM), Jon Ossoff (GA), Alex Padilla (CA), Jacky Rosen (NV), Adam Schiff (CA), Lisa Blunt Rochester (DE), John Hickenlooper (CO), Andy Kim (NJ), Raphael Warnock (GA) – the ”crypto sixteen – we’re looking at you. Trump could not steal from you without their critical assistance.

Fold in Elon Musk’s $200 billion Thursday, and the week’s through-line writes itself — the Broligarchy is wobbling, and the princelings are racing to pour their winnings into federally chartered concrete before anyone can stop them.

Under the New CLARITY Act, the Ethics Section Is the Conflict

WLFireside, July 23, 2026

The most useful close reading of the bill yet published walks through the escape hatches one by one. Divestment only triggers if an entity clears a 20% ownership AND 50% token-revenue threshold — a bar you can limbo under by splitting ownership or diversifying revenue. A name-and-likeness carve-out lets “divested” ventures keep minting and selling Trump-branded assets. The president can still attend crypto-issuer-funded events, still make policy for the industry he profits from, and can only be policed by an attorney general he appointed — state attorneys general and private plaintiffs are expressly barred from suing. The author’s verdict is the week’s sharpest line — “Congress did not overlook Donald Trump’s conflict while writing the CLARITY Act. It reached page 603 and began documenting how the conflict could survive federal ethics law.” Pair that architecture with Section 604’s safe harbor for “non-custodial developers” — which four national law-enforcement associations warned in June could shield actors moving illicit crypto from “enforcement scrutiny” and open “gaps in the anti-money laundering framework” — and you get our editorial conclusion, grounded in their documented one. A legal regime in which the First Family’s global crypto pipeline is exempt from ethics rules, immune from private suits, policed only by itself, and shielded by developer safe harbors is not a regulatory framework. It is money-laundering infrastructure with a congressional seal (our money-laundering Spidey Senses have not stopped ringing since page 603). And do not forget, this bill has no chance without the enthusiastic backing of the aforementioned. You’ll be shocked to learn that many receive funding from the crypto industry.

Senate’s New CLARITY Act Leaves Trump’s Core Crypto Conflicts Unchecked

Transparency International U.S., July 22, 2026

The world’s premier anti-corruption organization reached the same place through drier prose. The revised bill’s restrictions cover only officials and spouses who issue or sponsor digital assets—not how Trump made most of his crypto fortune—and preexisting ventures may continue to use his name to mint new assets after any divestment. Deputy executive director Scott Greytak notes the bill “leaves significant business, revenue, and family arrangements outside any clear requirement to divest.” When Transparency International — an outfit that spends most of its time on countries we used to lecture — starts flagging the United States Senate’s handiwork, Americans need to pay attention. We have raised this before, and we will keep raising it.

Crypto Clarity Act Still at Mercy of Ethics Section as Democrats Balk at Trump Deal

CoinDesk, July 21, 2026

The White House says Trump has agreed to “the most comprehensive and wide-ranging ethics provision in history” — while declining to share the complete language with the Democrats being asked to vote for it (a negotiating posture that tells you everything). The sticking point is enforcement. Democrats want state attorneys general empowered precisely because the alternative is an attorney general’s office that answers to the largest crypto holder in the federal government. August 7 is the pre-recess deadline. The House, with its own Republican fractures, waits until September. Every senator who votes for a self-policed, family-exempt, sunset-and-amnesty ethics regime is choosing to be a willing enabler. Remember their names.

World Liberty Nears OCC Trust Bank Approval Despite Conflict Concerns

crypto.news, July 2026

While the Senate argues about the fig leaf, the family firm is getting a federal charter. Comptroller Jonathan Gould is expected to rule “in the coming days” on World Liberty Financial’s application to become a national trust bank. Former OCC officials told NOTUS that rejection is “inconceivable.” The charter would let WLF issue and redeem its USD1 stablecoin, manage reserves, and custody digital assets under federal supervision — federal supervision of a company whose token-sale proceeds flow 75%to DT Marks DEFI LLC, an entity controlled by the sitting president. Reuters reports that more than $2.3 billion has flowed to the family from four crypto ventures since the second term began. Senator Elizabeth Warren called approval “enabling presidential corruption.” Representative Gregory Meeks asked whether the comptroller was acting as a “Trump fixer.” You may remember the $500 million a UAE-tied fund put into WLF before the inauguration — the deal that derailed crypto legislation last year (as it should have). Now imagine those rails with a federal bank charter bolted on, and the CLARITY Act’s exemptions wrapped around them. In future ̶r̶e̶g̶u̶l̶a̶t̶o̶r̶y̶ filings, this will be called “clarity.”

Thousands Swarm the Streets of Tirana in Major ‘Pink Flamingo’ Anti-Government Protests

Euronews, July 5, 2026

Flamingo Revolution update, for those keeping vigil with us. July 5 marked day 35 of continuous protest and the largest crowd yet — tens of thousands in Tirana against the $4.6 billion Kushner-and-Ivanka-linked resort scheme on protected Sazan Island and the Narta Lagoon, waving inflatable flamingos and banners reading “Albania is not for sale.” Protesters toppled a bust of Prime Minister Edi Rama in a deliberate echo of 1991, when Albanians pulled down a bust of Enver Hoxha. Rama answered with tear gas, water cannons, dozens of arrests, and the insistence that “there is no chance for this investment to stop.” By the July 4th weekend, organizers were calling it the largest uprising since communism fell, and investigative journalist Lindita Cela had traced the project’s ownership into shell companies running from Albania to the Netherlands — structures from which, she reports, it is “impossible to find out” who ultimately owns what. Foreign Policy now frames the movement as a front line against “billionaires and autocrats” generally. Don’t forget that includes the Trump and Kushner families. Locals call it “Trump Island.” Ivanka calls it her “own private island in the Adriatic Sea.” The flamingos were not consulted.

Tesla’s Worst Day in a Year Cuts Elon Musk’s Net Worth by $18 Billion

Forbes, July 23, 2026

Elon’s horrible, no-good, very bad day. Tesla fell almost 15% Thursday — roughly $200 billion in market value, the worst single-day drop since March 2025 — after Wednesday’s earnings revealed missed estimates, thin vehicle profits, and $5.8 billion of spending on self-driving cars and humanoid robots, of which Tesla has sold precisely zero. Musk’s response to investors was to promise to spend faster (“This is a massive capex year”). Per Oligarch Watch (July 24), the week also brought an NHTSA investigation into Musk’s post urging Tesla owners to “Make your espresso on the road while your Tesla drives itself,” and — the part relevant to this newsletter — Wall Street Journal reporting that SpaceX is negotiating to lease the Pentagon billions of dollars in data-center compute, which would neatly explain why the Justice Department just intervened against an NAACP lawsuit targeting the polluting turbines those data centers run on. A Boligarch © may lose $18 billion on Thursday and still spend Friday at the federal feed trough. The system works — for him.

Trump Goons Secretly Trash His Sons’ Latest Grift

Daily Beast, July 2026 (on New York Times reporting)

Even the help is embarrassed. Administration officials involved in the U.S.–Kazakhstan tungsten deal — negotiated by Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, finalized November 6, 2025, with $1.6 billion in potential federal financing signaled — anonymously told the New York Times they were disappointed to discover that Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump’s Dominari Securities had taken a 20% stake in Kaz Resources, the project their father’s government is financing. Cantor Fitzgerald, overseen by Lutnick’s sons, helped raise $210 million for lead investors because, in this administration, every deal is a Princeling affair. Kaz Resources executive Pini Althaus offered the year’s finest understatement — “I see how the optics might be disturbing to some people.” The optics. Yes. The optics.

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The Russian chip designer Baikal Electronics announced plans to take on NVIDIA directly in the AI-accelerator market. The new Baikal-AI-E1000 chip is designed for edge-AI usage (that is, directly on an AI-enabled drone, for example) and is supposed to be the equivalent of the NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX. The new Baikal-AI-D1000 is supposed to be the equivalent of the NVIDIA L40S, a datacenter GPU used for LLM fine-tuning and other generative AI applications. Both of these “Russian” chips will support the Compute Unified Device (CUDA) ecosystem developed by NVIDIA, so programs written for these NVIDIA chips would also work on these Russian ones.

Does this mean that Russia is catching up in the AI race? No. Not even close. Baikal Electronics merely announced “plans” for these chips. The company hopes to release them in 2029 or 2030. The first versions of the NVIDIA Jetson Orion NX were released in January 2023 and the NVIDIA L40S in August of that year. So, in the most optimistic scenario, Baikal Electronics will be six years behind NVIDIA, which is nearly an eternity in the chip production business.

Like NVIDIA, Baikal does not actually make its own chips. It uses contract manufacturers to produce the chips it designs and markets. Before 2022, Baikal's contract manufacturer was TSMC of Taiwan, the same one NVIDIA uses. Taiwan has cut Russian chipmakers off from TSMC, so what chipmaker could actually produce these Baikal chips? The obvious candidate is SMIC of China. NVIDIA’s Orin is made on an 8-nanometer (nm) process node at TSMC. SMIC recently claims it brought a 7nm node online, and is even producing chips on a 5 nm-class process node using clever work-arounds to achieve precision approaching the Dutch-made machines that TSMC uses (though it is not clear how scalable their technology is).

The Baikal chips won’t be made in Russian factories, that is for sure. Russia’s chip production can only achieve 350nm lithography! One ambitious Russian chipmaker, MCST, hopes to reach 28nm process technology by 2030. The 2030 date for these Baikal chips, assuming they ever emerge, might be based on a bet that SMIC or some other Chinese chipmaker will reach the scale and precision needed by then. Whatever the reason, this SMIC-Baikal partnership will subsidize demand for Chinese AI chips while establishing a proving ground to help develop China’s domestic AI chip manufacturing.

Severing the China/Russia semiconductor nexus both diminishes future Russian capability while also denying China a testing ground and funding source for its domestically manufactured AI chips.

The NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX is used directly in Russian weapons. Ukrainians sifting through the wreckage of Shahed drones have found NVIDIA Jetson Orin chips in some of them since the summer of 2025.

These NVIDIA AI chips were probably purchased openly in China or the UAE (where they cost about $500 each) and then shipped into Russia (or even carried in carry-on luggage between Shenzhen and Kazan). They allow Shahed drones to navigate while their communications are jammed and even recognize and attack targets autonomously.

Even if this new Baikal chip is going to be outclassed by the time it comes to market (if it ever does), a 5-year-old chip design may still be good enough to pilot a suicide drone. Kalashnikov automatic weapons don’t have to be advanced to kill, and computer vision AI is currently good enough for AI-guided Shaheds. Imagine Russia in 2030 building fleets of AI-enabled suicide drones to threaten Europe or Ukraine (again). Maybe that is what Baikal’s leadership has in mind, instead of trying to keep up with AI models from the US, Europe, and China.

This matters for the US because Shaheds are the weapon Iran has used to outlast the US Navy. Thus far, there has been no indication that the Shahed drones Iran has used against the US Navy have been AI-enabled. Put differently, Iran is deploying a less-capable, cheaper Shahed model against the US than the one currently being deployed against Kyiv. Not only has Ukraine proven more competent at dealing with the threat, but China is watching and learning. The Insider recently exposed how China is using this war as a learning experience. So Russian efforts to improve its military must be seen through the lens of Beijing enabling Moscow, so that China can improve the People’s Liberation Army.

Whether your interest is in Chinese or Russian aggression, slowing down China’s technological and industrial advances is key. The Trump administration and Republican theory is to resist China while befriending Russia. European governments tend to want to do the reverse. Both sides of the Atlantic have bipartisan camps of “realist” foreign policy advocates opposing the other side of the Atlantic, believing they have the correct theory of the case.

But as the Ukraine war is demonstrating over and over, Moscow and Beijing are outsmarting both of them.

This piece is a reposting from our affiliated 501c3, DKP. Please help them by sharing it widely. Americans need to understand that China is using Ukraine as a proving ground for improving the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Supporting Ukraine isn’t the only reason to help Ukraine finish this war.

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To the meat. The State Department spent the week answering a question nobody asked. Who should control $201 million in US-taxpayer-backed financing for the South Caucasus? Its answer? Konstantin Sokolov, a Russia-born, Chicago-based private equity investor who gave $11 million to Trump’s super PAC, wrote an undisclosed check for the White House ballroom and already co-owns the largest mobile operator in Armenia, the country at the center of the corridor the fund is designed to finance. He bought that operator from Russia’s MTS through a Cyprus company whose beneficial owners Armenia’s own security services initially could not identify. The Armenian press has spent two years asking who actually funds Sokolov’s acquisitions. Its verdict on the appointment, via the daily Hraparak, was a headline calling him “the most absurd part” of the entire TRIPP+ project. The US press has barely noticed. We read the foreign press so you don’t have to. On that note, Russian-aligned “Pravda” network sites framed the appointment as “The Colonial Manager” taking control of the Trump Route, a useful reminder that Moscow is watching this corridor too.

The rest of the week kept the feed trough’s familiar rhythm — Trump Media will now sell Wall Street millisecond early access to the President’s market-moving posts (yes, really), the Washington Post mapped the sons’ defense-tech portfolio against their father’s Pentagon budget, Albania’s Flamingo Revolution passed a month and a half of nightly marches, and the holiday pardon window opened for a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser. Consistency is the one virtue this administration has mastered.

A Trump Ballroom donor will lead the US State Department’s $200 million Armenia fund

The Guardian (republished by ARKA News Agency), July 15, 2026

The State Department confirmed on Friday that Sokolov will chair the new TRIPP+ Enterprise Fund, which will be $201 million in loans, equity and grants across Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and five Central Asian states, named for the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity through southern Armenia. Sokolov has never held public office. But he has held a checkbook — more than $12 million to Republican causes in Trump’s second term, including $11 million to MAGA Inc (per FEC records as read by the Guardian and NBC News), plus the ballroom contribution. He also co-owns Viva Armenia, the country’s largest mobile operator, which sits squarely inside the sectors the fund will finance — and last August, Yerevan approved an option letting his Cyprus vehicle buy back, for $50 million, the 20% Viva stake it had donated to the state, per RFE/RL. The State Department promises conflict-of-interest rules, annual reporting and independent audits. A former USAID administrator put the test more plainly — “The question is whether he can personally benefit from investment decisions. The answer must be no.” We will be watching the answer.

The Most Absurd Part — Who Is Sokolov, the Head of the TRIPP+ Project?

NEWS.am, citing the Armenian daily Hraparak, July 16, 2026

Armenian journalists have been mapping Sokolov far longer than Washington has, and the pattern in their reporting is consistent — repeated purchases of assets divested by Russian state-linked or sanctioned sellers, through offshore layers whose ultimate funders are never named. His Cyprus vehicle, Fedilco Group, bought Viva from Russia’s MTS in January 2024, after Armenia’s regulator first rejected the transfer in 2023 because, on the security services’ advice, the real beneficiary could not be identified (a restructured application was approved within days). In 2026, Viva absorbed fiber operator GNC-Alfa (OVIO) from Rostelecom, the majority-Russian-state carrier that sits on OFAC’s non-SDN menu-based sanctions list. Sources cited by RFE/RL and CivilNet link him — unconfirmed — to the Teghut copper mine sold by sanctioned VTB this month through a newly formed shell whose buyer refuses to be named. Hetq’s investigation concluded that Sokolov and his Chinese partner, Zhe Zhang, “represent the actual beneficiaries” — managers for owners who remain hidden, with unspecified “family trusts” cited as the source of funds. To be precise and fair, none of these purchases is unlawful on its face. Sokolov appears on no sanctions list, and a Cypriot liquidation petition alleging fraud and naming him as a beneficial owner was dismissed in December 2018. But our sister 501c3 has a history with MTS. It submitted evidence to the SEC concerning MTS-linked entities back in 2022, when the company was still NYSE-listed (it went private after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine). Nothing happened, of course, because the US doesn’t enforce laws anymore. We do not allege any connection between those matters and these acquisitions. We do suggest, as loudly as we can, that investigative journalists start pulling these threads before $201 million in US financing flows through the same neighborhood. This week’s graphic maps the web.

Trump Media launches paid data service to help Wall Street track Trump’s posts

CNBC, July 16, 2026

Trump Media will launch “Truth API” on August 1 — licensed real-time feeds of the platform’s top ten accounts, pushed to subscribers “within milliseconds.” High-frequency trading firms and financial news organizations have already signed up. Strip away the product language, and this is the business model: The President announces tariffs, firings and market-moving policy on his own family’s platform, and the company sells the first look at this market-moving data to Wall Street. These financial houses will have algorithms to trade on Trump’s posts. They do not care about the corrosive impact on American democracy because they will be making money hand over fist.

At the same time, and without blushing, the Trump administration is going after the White House teleprompter operator who has been running the beta version of this model by taking bets on Kalshi on what the president will say. The Washington Post reported that the White House aide who has run Trump’s teleprompter since 2016 was placed on unpaid leave after allegedly “winning” more than $100,000 on Kalshi’s “Mentions” markets by wagering on whether the President would say particular words in speeches the operator could read in advance. Kalshi flagged the trades to the CFTC, which found bets on more than a dozen speeches over three months, and the aide is reportedly in settlement talks. Meanwhile, Wall Street is eagerly answering the call of Trump’s dinner bell as he monetizes the presidency, delivered as a data product, at enterprise pricing.

Trump’s sons invest heavily in defense tech as their father’s administration pours money in

Washington Post, July 13, 2026

The Post gave the sons’ portfolio the full interactive treatment. Funds linked to Don Jr. and Eric hold stakes in more than a dozen defense-tech and federal-facing companies, most of which were acquired since their father won a second term, as Pentagon priorities and spending shift toward exactly those firms. The White House and Pentagon say there is nothing inappropriate about the President’s sons investing in companies that benefit from federal business. You may remember last week’s story about the sons investing in the Kazakh tungsten concern weeks after receiving $1.6 billion in US financing. Remember when Republicans melted down over Hillary Clinton’s Uranium One controversy? Whatever the truth of that matter, it involved $145 million, 9% the size of the Trump sons’ Kazakh mine.

How Jared Kushner’s Luxury Hotel Sparked a Protest Movement in Albania

The American Prospect, July 17, 2026

An update from the Flamingo Revolution, which we covered at length last week. The nightly marches have now run more than 45 consecutive evenings, and what began as an environmental objection to the Kushner-backed resort in the Vjosa-Narta protected area has hardened into a national anti-corruption movement demanding Prime Minister Edi Rama’s resignation (CBS News calls it a snowballing movement). Rama insists that the project will proceed. The frozen 110 million euros and the allegations of forged documents from OCCRP’s June reporting still hang over the land assembly. Belgrade proved these projects can be stopped. Tirana is testing whether nightly persistence can do it again. Jared is proving, single-handedly, to be the spark reawakening Eastern Europe’s animal spirits that shook the region free of the last wave of authoritarianism. In the 1980s, Pope John Paul II lit that flame. To be sure, Jared is no John Paul II, nor do they share the same motivations. But we will settle for Jared’s bumbling corruption and entitlement sparking color revolutions, if that’s all America can muster. Does anybody have his number? We hear there are some great investment opportunities in Moscow. In Washington, DC, too.

Trump’s pre-July 4 news dump included pardons for 11 people, including an ex-Abramoff partner

Fortune, July 4, 2026

A story we missed through the fireworks’ acrid smoke (really, it was terrible in the DC area the next day). Trump celebrated the holiday with a weekend clemency batch that included Adam Kidan, Jack Abramoff’s former business partner, who pleaded guilty in 2005 to fraud over a SunCruz casino-boat purchase and has more recently worked as a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser. Also pardoned: nine people convicted of disabling vehicle emissions controls, whom the President described as imprisoned “for fixing their cars.”

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RESEARCH NOTES (source archive)

Sokolov / TRIPP+ appointment

The Guardian via ARKA, July 15, 2026 — ballroom donor to lead the $200M fund; State confirmed July 10

NEWS.am citing Hraparak, July 16, 2026 — “The Most Absurd Part”

NEWS.am, July 2026 — Guardian summary; Sokolov also invested in Armenia

Armenpress, July 2026 — Sokolov to lead TRIPP+ enterprise fund

MassisPost, July 2026 — appointment coverage

Horizon Weekly, July 2026 — Trump-connected investor to lead $201M fund

Asbarez, July 2026 — ballroom donor to lead TRIPP+ fund

Hetq (Russian), prior reporting — Posparon Investments litigation; petition dismissed December 2018

disclosure.ru — Kompressorny Kompleks board filings (K. Sokolov, I. Sokolov, Katoraychik, Tonkacheyev)

Domestic threads

CNBC, July 16, 2026 — Truth API paid data service

Bloomberg, July 17, 2026 — traders to pay for faster access to Truth posts

CNN Business, July 16, 2026 — Truth Social sells Wall Street quicker access

Washington Post, July 16, 2026 — teleprompter operator placed on leave after betting on Trump speeches

ABC News, July 2026 — operator made more than $100K betting on Trump’s speeches

NBC News, July 2026 — Kalshi bets, CFTC involvement, unpaid leave

Washington Post, July 13, 2026 — sons’ defense-tech portfolio interactive

TechCrunch, July 5, 2026 — NYT/Nansen $3.8B memecoin losses

Fortune, July 7, 2026 — ~1M losing wallets vs. $636M presidential payout

Fortune, July 4, 2026 — Kidan pardon, Mar-a-Lago fundraiser

Washington Post, July 4, 2026 — pardons for a major donor and Clean Air Act violators

The Block — WLF nears OCC approval for federal trust charter (status unchanged this week)

Bloomberg, July 15, 2026 — the presidency, deals and the new age of grift (framing reference)

Kushner / Albania

The American Prospect, July 17, 2026 — how the hotel sparked a protest movement

CBS News, July 2026 — protests snowball into anti-corruption movement

Responsible Statecraft, July 2026 — the Kushner-Israel nexus behind the Flamingo Revolution

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) handed Vladimir Putin a gift he could not win on the battlefield. This week, the IOC provisionally reinstated the Russian Olympic Committee, clearing a path for a full Russian team at the 2028 Los Angeles Games. The decision came one day after Russian missiles flattened apartment buildings in Kyiv, killing dozens of Ukrainians. America hosts the next Summer Olympic Games.

We have the power that the IOC refused to use.

A ban that was never about the war

The IOC suspended the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) in October 2023, but the suspension had nothing to do with Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The IOC acted only because Russia’s committee absorbed the regional sports councils in the occupied regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. That was a paperwork offense. Kill thousands of civilians, and the IOC shrugs.

But when Russia redrew its org chart, it began clearing the path for the Russian flag to fly here.

The IOC’s release rests on one assurance. Russia told the IOC what it wanted to hear. “It does not, and will not, conduct any activities in these territories.” But at home, Russia’s Ministry of Sport told Tsargrad, a hard-line Russian outlet, that this is simply temporary and a paperwork issue. No competitions will be staged in those regions for now, “for security reasons.” Athletes from these associations continue to qualify anywhere else in Russia, exactly as before. The Kremlin simply deleted the names of the sports councils in the occupied territories from EGRUL, the state register of legal entities. The athletes, the money, and the flag all stay. Moscow and Lausanne wrote each other a permission slip that they believe gives Russia the right to fly the Russian flag in Los Angeles.

Remember what the IOC chooses to ignore

Russia launched its full invasion in February 2022, in the middle of the “Olympic Truce” for the Beijing Games. Russia itself co-sponsored that truce at the UN weeks earlier. At the time, the IOC condemned the breach in the strongest terms. Then it spent four years shrinking the offense down to a filing error. The war has killed, wounded, or left missing more than 2 million soldiers on both sides, per the think tank CSIS. That toll likely tops the Battle of Stalingrad. The day before the IOC’s announcement, Russian missiles and drones killed at least 26 people in and around Kyiv, most of them asleep in their homes.

I cannot tell you what happened behind closed doors in Lausanne. No one has shown that Russia bought this decision. But the IOC has demonstrated itself susceptible to corruption before. Ten of its members were expelled or resigned after Salt Lake City’s bid committee plied them with more than $1 million in cash, gifts, and scholarships. Regardless of whether it involved corruption, the IOC’s minimizing of Russia’s Ukraine invasion hardly makes it the paragon of spinal fortitude.

When a body with that record hands someone like Putin what he wants, it should trigger an investigative feeding frenzy.

This is who the IOC thinks should march in LA

Russian Olympic sport is state-owned. CSKA, the club that anchors the national Olympic team, states in its own charter that it is subordinate to the Ministry of Defense and part of the armed forces. Some Russian athletes are literally employees of the Russian military. Its sister club, Dynamo, answers to the interior ministry and the security services. At the Tokyo Games, athletes holding military ranks won 86% of Russia’s medals. A Russian team in LA means hosting an arm of a state waging a war of aggression that our NATO allies oppose vigorously.

The IOC’s own “neutral status” rules barred any athlete contracted to the Russian military or security agencies. But on Tuesday, it threw that standard away.

Demonstrating that spinal fortitude again, the IOC still refuses to invite Russian government officials to its events. It will do favors for Putin, but it doesn’t want its reputation tarnished by the association. Laussanne thinks Americans should do the explicit reputation laundering.

Three demands

Just because the IOC refused to do the right thing does not mean Americans must follow suit.

1. There should be no athletes representing the Russian state at LA28. The flag that flies over Bucha and Mariupol has no place in an American stadium. Period.

2. The US federal government should deny US entry to anyone who is sanctioned, holds a military or security service rank, works within CSKA or Dynamo structures, or has publicly backed the war. This asks the State Department to enforce the exact standard the IOC just abandoned. Nobody can call that anti-Olympic. I am guessing the Trump administration will try to resist this, which is all the more reason Americans should demand that they act. The theme of President Trump’s presidency has been that visas are our call, or, in this case, has the administration traded America First for Swiss bureaucrats first?

3. No Russian flag, anthem, or state officials on American soil, whatever the IOC decides about symbols later. The IOC itself still bars Russian officials from its own events. Asking the US to match that posture is airtight.

These are not ridiculous or unachievable demands, but they do require that Americans relearn how federalism works and that Democrats get better at politics.

Start in Los Angeles

The LA City Council should pass a resolution supporting all three demands and move first. State legislators and California’s members of Congress should follow. This should be a grassroots movement. Every community and every candidate on a 2026 ballot anywhere should answer one question on the record. Do Russian state athletes belong at an American Olympics while Russia bombs Ukrainian cities?

American communities across the country going on record demanding the Russian flag be blocked from Los Angeles, while it is leveling apartment blocks in Kyiv, will force action from the administration. It will leave them with a choice: Are they going to allow it or not? If Democrats send a petition or Chuck Schumer makes a speech about it, it will be easy for the administration to ignore. But communities across the country demanding this is a different story. They would have to explain and spin how they are not normalizing Russia hundreds of times. Leave it to Chuck Schumer and, yeah, MSNOW will cover it, but none of the MAGA propaganda outlets masquerading as news sites will touch it, and millions of Ukraine-supporting Americans in our vast news deserts won’t hear a peep about this.

In politics, if you’re explaining, you’re losing, but Democrats in Washington seem not to realize that press releases to the national media do not make it to these information deserts. This political malpractice lets Republicans off the hook by not even forcing them to respond. This time, it will mean that Russia will proudly march in Los Angeles.

But current polling shows that supporting Ukraine has actually increased since Trump’s re-election. That’s right. Only only 3% for Americans Russia, the benefactor of Trump administration policies. If, after America’s communities and grassroots speak, let the Trump administration explain to the 61% of Americans who support Ukraine why it has sided with 3% of Americans (and even fewer likely voters).

Few, if any, Americans want to see Russia’s flag marching around that stadium. But simply complaining about that in Congress is a surefire way to let the administration off the hook and make sure it happens.

The United States is an enormous country and, as the Democratic Party has proven time and again, one-size-fits-all political and policy solutions are ineffective at standing up to MAGA. That goes for politics, too. A 60/3 % issue, with momentum on the 60% side, and the sitting administration firmly invested in pushing the 3% position, is the kind of wedge issue political strategists dream of. But it will not simply evolve into one. The grassroots and our communities must force it to be one.

Failure to do so almost certainly means Russian flags marching in Los Angeles.

Dekleptocracy Journal is supported by Dekleptocracy Alliance, a Texas 501(c)(4), an investigative transparency activism fund that incubates independent transparency organizations that put corruption at the top of the US political agenda.

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We spent the past two weeks in Ukraine, and Albania used the time to teach a master class in what citizens can do when a Princeling project lands on their coastline. For 40 consecutive nights, Albanians have filled the streets over a $4 billion luxury resort tied to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump in a protected lagoon that shelters flamingos and more than 2,500 other species. They call it the Flamingo Revolution, and it is the biggest unrest since communism fell. What began as an environmental protest is now a referendum on a political class that rewrote a country’s laws so a presidential son-in-law could build a beach club — and it may bring down Prime Minister Edi Rama’s government.

Back home, the feed trough never closed. The President’s own financial disclosure shows $1.4 billion in crypto income, his sons’ investments keep landing next to federal money with remarkable punctuality — tungsten in Kazakhstan, Tasers for ICE, drones for the Air Force — and even the Wall Street Journal editorial board has now said the quiet part out loud. Americans are beginning to pay attention. Albanians could teach Americans a thing or two about dealing with corruption.

Albania’s Flamingo Revolution — Protests Against Kushner-Trump Luxury Resort Could Bring Down Gov’t

Democracy Now, July 9, 2026

Ivanka Trump told a podcast that she and Kushner “swam to the island” of Sazan and admired “five miles of beachfront” across from it. How idyllic! Then the Albanian government stripped the Vjosa-Narta ecosystem of environmental protections to permit the construction of a five-star resort. Nightly demonstrations began in late May. Yesterday marked day 40. Tens of thousands marched over the July 4 weekend. Rama, who chairs the national territorial planning council that signs the construction permits, told Reuters the resort is “a bless for the country.” He also insists the outrage is really about Kushner’s name and the “shadow of Trump”. We agree with him in part.

Albanian court frees protesters who rallied against Kushner-linked resort

Al Jazeera, July 5, 2026

When protests reached parliament on July 2, police answered with tear gas, pepper spray, and water cannon. 15 officers were injured and 25 people detained. The crackdown backfired spectacularly. A July 4 “Free the boys” rally became the largest gathering since the movement began, with the Albanian diaspora joining in. A Tirana court released 19 protesters the next day without charges. Every act of repression has made the movement bigger. That is the lesson Americans should be writing down.

Albanian Drug Trafficking Investigation Overlaps with Probe into Planned Resort that Sparked “Flamingo Revolution”

OCCRP, June 18, 2026

Albania’s special anti-corruption prosecutors (SPAK) sought 20 arrests in an international cocaine trafficking and money laundering ring. The case has an explicit overlap with the Kushner resort probe. A June 10 court order froze a bank account holding more than €110 million ($127 million) from a resort land sale between Artur Shehu, whom a separate order identifies as suspected of money laundering and participation in an organized crime group, and Albania Land Development sh.a. (joint stock company). Prosecutors allege much of the resort land was assembled using forged documents. The ownership chain runs through Dutch shell companies — one founded with a single euro and directed by a trust-management firm — up to the Al Khayyat brothers. If that sounds familiar, it’s because the Al Khayyat brothers are “investors” in Kushner’s company. Entirely coincidentally, President Trump lifted sanctions on their uncle, who had helped finance the Assad family and was close to the Syrian drug trade. We wrote about it here. Neceassary caveat: the court does not implicate Albania Land Development, Kushner, Ivanka Trump, or the investors in wrongdoing. Earlier in June, OCCRP reported the initial asset freeze, private guards beating of residents at Zvernec, and Rama calling the guards’ conduct “disgusting” while defending the project as Albania’s ticket to the “Champions League” of tourism. Greece lodged formal protests after a Greek citizen was injured, and the European Commission warned about the repeated extension of Albania’s strategic investments law.

Flashback: Kushner-Linked Firm Drops Belgrade Project

(Yes, Albania is the second Balkan country that Kushner’s corruption has brought to the brink of revolution)

RFE/RL, December 16, 2025

You may remember our Serbia coverage. Affinity Partners walked away from its $500 million Belgrade Trump Tower project hours after Serbian prosecutors indicted Culture Minister Nikola Selakovic for stripping the site of its cultural heritage status. There, as in Albania, the government stripped a heritage site of legal protections, clearing the path for Princeling. As the government teetered, prosecutors crawled in. Albania’s SPAK has confirmed an inquiry into changes to protected status and possible circumvention of public tender procedures, and more than 40 NGOs have accused authorities of corruption. Belgrade proves these projects can be stopped.

Two Major Trump Corruption Plots Revealed in Just 24 Hours

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The New Republic, June 29, 2026

The New York Times reported that Washington awarded $1.6 billion in federal financing to Kaz Resources for a tungsten project in Kazakhstan. Weeks later, a firm partly owned by Trump’s sons took, with partners, a 20% stake in a corporate entity related to the project. Howard Lutnick’s sons raised capital for a project investor. The Times counts the Trump and Lutnick families tied to at least 14 companies working with the federal government on mining deals.

Trump is rearming America. His sons are invested in the companies that sell them weapons.

MS NOW, July 2, 2026

The sons are linked to investments in at least 10 companies with military applications, which have collected roughly $3.7 billion in federal funds since the second term began — versus about $2.8 billion in the equivalent late-Biden period. Three are at record Pentagon funding; three had never held a federal contract before. Powerus announced a reverse merger with Aureus Greenway, a golf company partly owned by the brothers, after the February 28 Iran strikes; about seven weeks later, the Air Force placed a limited order for interceptor drones following an Arizona demonstration. The 1789 Capital portfolio continues to collect, including Anduril’s Army contract worth up to $20 billion.

Trump bought up to $5 million in Axon stock before ICE’s Taser contract notice

CNBC, June 29, 2026

Trump bought up to $5 million in Axon shares roughly two weeks before ICE issued a notice seeking a $220 million contract for some 17,800 Tasers. The notice does not name Axon — but experts say the specifications match only Axon products, and Axon makes 90 percent of Tasers sold in the US. The President’s defense, offered on CNBC and repeated since, is that he does nothing related to his business because “my kids run it” (ABC News). The kids, as documented above, are very busy.

Trump Reports Over $1 Billion in Income From Crypto Ventures

TIME, July 1, 2026

Trump’s 927-page federal ethics disclosure shows more than $2 billion in 2025 income, with $1.4 billion from crypto. Fortune’s breakdown finds $635 million-plus in memecoin royalty income, roughly $600 million via World Liberty Financial, and about $263 million in net proceeds tied to selling 49% of WLFI to Sheik Tahnoun’s Aryam Investment, a deal longtime readers will remember. TIME counts $550 million-plus from WLF token sales alone, nine times the prior year. The Trump-appointed head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) is now expected to hand WLF a national trust bank charter. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal editorial board — not exactly the resistance — published a July 8 op-ed slamming the family for “cashing in on the presidency.” When Rupert Murdoch’s flagship notices the feed trough, the country is catching up.

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CRYPTO CORRUPTION IN FOCUS

The man leading the polls to become Britain’s next prime minister took £5 million from a crypto billionaire, then privately pressed the Bank of England to change policy in ways that would make that billionaire richer. On July 2, Labour MP Phil Brickell reported Nigel Farage to Parliament’s standards watchdog over exactly that sequence.

The billionaire is Christopher Harborne, a reclusive British investor living in Thailand who owns roughly 12% of Tether, the company behind USDT, the world’s most traded cryptocurrency. USDT is a stablecoin, a digital token built to hold a fixed $1 value, and it is the plumbing of the global crypto market. The Guardian revealed in April that Harborne gave Farage an undisclosed £5 million personal gift in 2024, months before he ran for Parliament. Farage’s story about the money has shifted from paying for his security, to a reward for Brexit, to the answer he gave in June. “What’s it got to do with you?”

The new complaint alleges that in September 2025, Farage privately urged Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey to scrap plans for a state-run digital pound and to drop a proposed £20,000 cap on personal stablecoin holdings. Both policies threatened Tether’s business. UK rules bar MPs from lobbying officials on behalf of anyone who paid them in the prior 12 months. Farage has since claimed credit for the Bank softening its stance.

Americans should care because the pattern is not British. It is global, and it runs through Washington. Crypto money buys politicians who will protect it, and it shows a striking fondness for politicians friendly to Moscow. Farage once called Putin the leader he most admired and still blames the West for provoking the invasion of Ukraine. Tether’s USDT, meanwhile, moved tens of billions of dollars for Russia-linked users through the sanctioned exchange Garantex before US enforcement froze its wallets.

THE ENABLER WATCH

This week, the enabler is a law, and the two cabinet officers holding its keys.

The GENIUS Act is the federal stablecoin statute Congress passed in July 2025. It forces American issuers to hold real reserves and submit to federal examination. Then it cuts a door in the wall for foreign issuers. Tether, which moved its legal home to El Salvador, does not meet American standards. Under Section 18, the Treasury Secretary can simply declare El Salvador’s rulebook “comparable” to ours, and the Treasury separately holds the power to issue licenses, waivers, and safe harbors for foreign issuers, including ones it has designated as noncompliant.

The Treasury cabinet colleague, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, spent years vouching for Tether on television. Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street firm that Lutnick ran for three decades before handing it to his sons, custodies most of the roughly $184 billion in reserves behind USDT and negotiated a 5% stake in the company worth about $600 million. You’ll also be shocked to hear that one of Tether’s other co-founders, child-star Brock Pierce, was accused in suits brought by minors of rape, assault and death threats. You’ll be further shocked to learn that Pierce had close ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

In twelve years, Tether has not completed a single independent audit. It publishes “attestations,” one-day snapshots that no accounting standard treats as an audit. The closest anyone came to forcing the books open was New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose office concluded that “Tether’s claims that U.S. dollars fully backed its virtual currency at all times was a lie,” collected $18.5 million, and banned the company from New York. The CFTC fined it $41 million.

Thus, a company banned from New York and never audited is part-owned and custodied by the Commerce Secretary’s family. At the same time, the decision to bring it to the American market is his cabinet colleague’s. It has given a £5 million “gift” to a politician trying to undermine the rule of law in America’s closest ally. And that politician happens to be pro-Russian. Since 2026, the hat company has also had a worrying association with people credibly accused of abusing and trafficking in children.

THE MONEY TRAIL

Harborne’s money bought a reach in London. Beyond the £5 million gift, Farage took two £25,000 donations for foreign trips, and Reform UK accepted £15 million from Harborne between August 2025 and February 2026. Tom Burgis, the Guardian journalist who profiled Harborne, has calculated that his money accounts for two-thirds of everything the party has ever raised. Britain has since banned crypto donations to political parties outright.

In Washington, the sums are bigger. Trump’s annual disclosure filed July 1, revealed roughly $1.4 billion in crypto income for 2025, including $594 million from World Liberty Financial and about $635 million tied to his meme coin. Senate Democrats are now demanding an ethics provision in the CLARITY Act, the pending crypto market bill, that would bar presidents and their families from profiting off the industry it regulates.

ENFORCEMENT TRACKER

Since the crypto industry captured US regulators, US market policing is mostly dead. The SEC removed crypto from its FY2026 priorities. The DOJ disbanded its crypto enforcement team in April 2025. Occasionally, the Treasury Department acts. OFAC sanctioned the Russian sanctions-avoidance network A7A5 last August, Britain sanctioned eighteen more entities in May, and the Secret Service charged two men in June over a $389 million laundering service.

ORDINARY AMERICANS HARMED

Chainalysis estimates that $17 billion was stolen from ordinary people through crypto scams and fraud in 2025, a record. That works out to about $46 million a day, most of it through pig butchering, a long con in which scammers build a fake romantic or financial relationship before draining the victim’s savings. Gentle reminder, Trump’s company, World Liberty Financial, signed a business deal with one of the companies involved in those scams. Scams run with AI tools now extract 4.5 times more per operation, about $3.2 million each. And North Korean hackers stole more than $2 billion in crypto in 2025 to fund the Kim regime. All of that corrupt crypto money moves unhindered through the same lightly-policed rails as the “legit” crypto money – by design.

CORRUPTION RECEIPTS

ONE THING TO WATCH

Greenberg has not said whether the lobbying complaint will become a formal inquiry. Watch also for the Bank of England’s answer to Labour MP Joe Powell, who has asked Governor Bailey to release details of the September meeting. If minutes exist, they will show what a £5 million gift buys.

Putting anti-corruption atop the national political agenda.

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Two hundred fifty years ago today, our founders staked everything on one idea. Ordinary people could govern themselves. This week, a congressional oversight report laid out what happened to the party the country had been planning to honor those ideals. Our national birthday was captured, walled off from public view, and offered for sale. That is a hard sentence to write on Independence Day. It should be a hard one to read.

Benjamin Franklin saw this coming. He was too frail to deliver his own closing speech at the Constitutional Convention on September 17, 1787. James Wilson read it for him. The new government, Franklin predicted, “is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.” Notice what he feared. Not a corrupt leader. Corrupt leaders come and go. He feared a corrupted people, because only a corrupted people would learn to shrug. Hold his words as you read on.

Follow the money

Freedom 250 LLC was registered in October 2025 inside the National Park Foundation. That is the charity Congress chartered to raise money for our national parks. Weeks later the White House made it the lead vehicle for the 250th. But back in 2016, Congress had already created a bipartisan commission called America250 to run this party. It wrote disclosure rules for it which is probably why we ended up with a private LLC tucked inside a charity. Now, money flows in, and connected insiders get rich off you celebrating American ideals. This structure shields who gave the money, how much they gave, or what they were promised in return.

Some promises surfaced organically. Sponsorship packages ran from $500,000 to more than $10 million. The top tiers included a speaking slot at the July Fourth event, a private reception, and a photo with the President. The foundation confirmed cash gifts from Lockheed Martin, ExxonMobil, Northrop Grumman, John Deere, Mastercard, UnitedHealth Group, and Chevron, among others. Many sponsors hold federal contracts or await federal decisions while they give. They gave for those reasons, not to celebrate our founding principles

The most serious claim involves potential wire fraud. According to sources cited in the report, donors who meant to give to America250 were handed Freedom 250’s routing and account numbers instead. Their gifts flowed to the newer entity without their knowledge. If true, the report states, that conduct could amount to wire fraud. A felony. Freedom 250 calls the claims categorically false. It also states that every major sponsor got paperwork naming Freedom 250 before any money moved. You can weigh both accounts for yourself, but obfuscation seems to have been the point

Congress set aside $150 million for the 250th. The commission Congress chartered has received $25 million of it. Federal grant records show at least $68.3 million moving from the Interior Department to the National Park Foundation. The foundation passes funds along to Freedom 250. A $10 million museum grant was transferred away from the commission to finance Freedom 250’s mobile exhibits. Then there is the event firm whose former leader handled logistics for the January 6th insurrection. That firm has collected roughly $40 million in federal awards since the start of 2025. It also holds a master contract worth up to $100 million that runs to 2030.

Then came June 14. A fight ring rose on the South Lawn for a UFC event held on the President’s birthday. You got in with a personal invitation or a $1.5 million partner package. Fighters got bonuses in a stablecoin issued by a Trump family crypto venture. Weeks after the event was announced, the President bought between $15,000 and $150,000 of stock in UFC’s parent company.

The foundation says it created the LLC at the National Park Service’s request. Of course, the executive branch runs the National Park Service. Regardless, the administration directed the sponsorship tiers, the funding shortfall, the contracts, and the stock purchase sit in public records that nobody disputes.

The secrecy is a design choice, and design choices have authors.

Franklin’s remedy

Franklin buried the cure inside the warning. Despotism becomes possible only when a people grow so corrupted that they accept it. The corruption of a people is a habit, formed one shrug at a time.

But habits can be changed. We paid for this celebration. We own the lawn it was staged on. We hold every right to an accounting.

So act like an owner of this country — and not just citizens, but state governments. Yes, demand public hearings, the complete donor list, and a ledger of every federal dollar. Yes, the inspectors general at the Interior Department and the Institute of Museum and Library Services to audit these grants. But all of these crimes were state crime, not just federal. Wire fraud, donor fraud, embezzlement, etc. are all illegal at the state level, too. Freedom 250 LLC is domiciled in Washington DC and registered there as a nonprofit. Thus, it must comply with nonprofit laws in Washington DC. What could be more American than the District’s City Council wielding the wire brush and forcing transparency on this corrupt enterprise? The District of Columbia not only has the authority but the duty. A general failure to enforce laws is how America has found itself in its current state. If the District doesn’t enforce its laws, that will be just one more shrug

The money is still moving and the paper trail is still warm. The District could catch these companies feeding at the trough.

Waiting until the next federal elections means waiting two years, and that’s assuming the Democrats can make themselves sufficiently likable to win. This should not take a back seat to all those variables. Honoring America’s 250th means enforcing the law — and it be delicious irony if the District of Columbia would give the country a much-needed civics lesson on Federalism

Two hundred fifty years from now, Americans will read about this birthday. They will see either another shrug, or the year we noticed and took it back. I grieve that this is how our 250th will be remembered. I refuse to grieve for what comes next, because that part still belongs to us.

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Credit: Hugo Cornuel, via Unsplash

Apologies for the silence last week. We unexpectedly spent the week in Ukraine (as one does), which has become a warning to us all about the chaos that comes for a country consumed by authoritarian corruption. To be sure, we are far from the exact outcomes (hopefully) that Ukraine is experiencing, but the Trump administration’s astonishing levels of corruption and self-dealing aren’t happening in a vacuum. It is slotting the US into a system. Trump’s corruption is the American chapter of an international ecosystem of corrupt authoritarians. Think of it as the Communist International, but rebranded for the present. Then, the “communism” just enabled the authoritarian power structure. Now, it is corruption because the most effective restraint on modern authoritarianism is the rule of law — so it’s only logical that so much effort goes into debasing its coin. I’ve long held the theory that the growing international corruption ecosystem is just the new Communist International, with some caveats, of course.

We’ll be back on our regular schedule tomorrow, but we wanted to ease back into the week with a deeply weird poem by Kash Patel’s Russian counterpart. Enjoy!

In the US and Europe, Russian propagandists excel at portraying their state as the real “conservative” Christian power, the last bastion of “traditional values” in Europe and a leading opponent of the far-left “woke” global establishment. Russia even offers an “anti-woke” visa for foreigners who want to get away from the decadent West.

As a recent BBC report highlighted, those who take up this offer may find Russia disappointing. One couple who arrived in Russia had had their savings stolen, leaving them homeless. Others note that divorce and abortion are widely practiced and accepted, hardly the kind of thing an ultra-conservative American or European Christian would expect in a “conservative” society. Anyone Westerner who has spent any time in Russia outside of a package tour or some kind of government-sponsored junket could have told these emigrants what to expect.

Russia is a deeply corrupt country, and if there are values that the Russian state and the Russian elite aspire to, it’s usually not the values of conservative Christianity, even conservative Russian Orthodox Christianity. Aside from a few of the high elite like Konstantin Maloveev, Russia’s leaders tend to be either dead set on stealing as much as possible or are pining for the USSR (or both). Putin, the kleptocrat-in-chief, has bemoaned the fall of the USSR, even though in the USSR he could hardly have amassed all his private wealth.

Of course, in that system, as a secret police official or a member of the top nomenklatura, or as a high state official, he might not have much personal wealth, but he would be functionally wealthy, with his every desire satisfied. One thing the USSR wasn’t, though, was “conservative” in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the word. The Soviet elites weren’t just “woke,” they were full-on communist, against private property, and contemptuous of our free society. Now, it is true that the later USSR was a highly prudish society (and maybe that would be enough to make a certain kind of person believe that the USSR was “better” than the US), but it wasn’t because the USSR wanted to save people’s souls, and it certainly was not as if there was no illicit sex in the USSR. There was plenty of prostitution, illegitimacy, and divorce. Likewise, the late USSR was officially against corruption and had regular high-profile corruption prosecutions, but the actual experience of people at every strata of society was intimately connected to corruption - to secure jobs, get grades at school, keep the police off your back or just find something to eat.

This widespread nostalgia for the USSR among the Russian elite and among a significant portion of the Russian populace is rarely translated into Western languages by Russian propagandists - this would interfere with the image of being a “Christian” “conservative” power. As a public service, we are translating a poem by none other than Alexander Bastrykin, a longtime friend of Vladimir Putin from law school and the current Chairman of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation. That makes him the rough equivalent of the Attorney General or the head of the FBI within the Russian system. Bastrykin read this poem aloud at the annual St. Petersburg Legal Forum on June 26. You can see a video of him reading this deeply weird poem, to loud applause at the end, here on YouTube

I want to go back to the USSR

The land in which I was born.

Having cast off the lies and the heavy debts

Freed from fantasies

From all freedom and mortgages

From rising prices and inflation

From long streams of empty talk

From lying facades.

From the Central Bank, with its key

The ever-rising rate of interest

Like a vile fight

With a perpetual barking bitch

I want to return to the former world,

Where nations are all brothers

And where wealth is not an idol

Nor is the rate of pay

But where there’s always the certainty

That our future

Always depends on our work,

And that tomorrow will be more beautiful

And only honest, common labor

And equality, and brotherhood,

Will bring happiness to the nation,

And where our state

will restore to us the power of goodness

And faith in justice again

And once more the winds of October

Will reinstate intransigence

Against the one who loves to oppress

To cheat, and to rob.

(Against) He who does not stand by the machine in the workshop,

But instead tricks the workers.

And the newly-awakened people

Will return to supreme power

And will again adorn the heavens

Not out of a passion for profit,

But for our country’s Star, the symbol

That has united us

We were all born to it

And in this lies our strength

The reference to the Central Banker and the “barking bitch” might refer to Elvira Nabiullina, the head of the Russian central bank, who, according to many accounts, is responsible for keeping the wheels of the Russian economy turning during sanctions and war. She recently disappeared for two weeks, leading to rumors that she had finally fallen out of favor with Putin’s set. The official explanation was that she was ill. She re-emerged a few weeks ago to announce a cut to interest rates. Kevin Warsh, call your office.

Show this poem to the next person who tells you that Russia is a good partner to the US and a supporter of “traditional” values. They might be traditional values in Russia, but the tradition is mostly authoritarian and communist.

The Dekleptocracy Journal is supported by the Dekleptocracy Alliance, a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization that puts anti-corruption on the national political agenda by seeding an activist anti-corruption ecosystem. You can support Dekleptocracy’s transparency mission directly or subscribe above. We are funded solely by your small-dollar donations and Substack subscriptions. Thank you for your support.

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The Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool is built to mirror the monument. However, this week it mirrored America’s 250th under Trump. Eleven days after the President announced the renovation was finished, done properly, and good for 100 years, the water turned the color of pond scum, and a fresh sheet of American-flag blue sealant peeled off the bottom and floated to the surface. On the eve of the country’s 250th birthday, the pool reflected the nation at itself, and the nation came out less than appealing.

Two no-bid contracts, two friends of the family. The $14.7 million paint job went to a Virginia firm. A separate contract worth almost $2 million for the water-purification system. It went to a company called Greenwater Services, which we wish we were inventing, owned through a trust run by John J. Cafaro, the shopping mall heir and Trump donor, Mar-a-Lago neighbor, and a two-time federal felon who once pleaded guilty to bribing one of the most corrupt Members of Congress, James Traficant. The President calls him a fantastic man because, of course. This is what governing by Princeling rules looks like up close. The reflecting pool is the metaphor. The Pentagon, where a quiet office is steering billions toward firms the President’s eldest son happens to hold stakes in, is the same story but with more zeros and at an earlier stage.

The paint is already peeling in Trump’s renovated Washington reflecting pool

Reuters, June 18, 2026

The President spent months talking about this pool, often unprompted, the way a man talks about a renovation he is sure will impress the neighbors. Trump even drove his motorcade on it. Workers refilled it on June 5, he declared victory on June 6, and by the following week they were pouring hydrogen peroxide into the basin to fight an algae bloom that had turned the water green instead of the dark blue he had personally chosen. A visitor from Colorado told Reuters he wanted his money back and thought the pool was beautiful before all the attention. So did the algae, apparently.

Firm tied to Trump donor got a no-bid contract to clean the reflecting pool

New York Times, June 18, 2026

Federal contracting records show the Park Service skipped the competitive bidding normally required and awarded Greenwater Services of Brookfield, Ohio, a $1.7 million contract in April to install an ozone nano-bubble system intended to kill algae. The firm had received exactly one prior federal contract. Its owner of record is the J.J. Cafaro Investment Trust, led by John J. Cafaro, who, by the Times’ count, has given more than $300,000 to committees connected to the President since 2016, owns a Palm Beach mansion near Mar-a-Lago, and whose wife chaired the Red Cross Ball at the club in 2017. The Times also reported that David Schutzenhofer, the general manager of the President’s Bedminster golf club, advised the Park Service on the project and was in contact with Greenwater. The water still turned green, which suggests the system’s one reliable output is disgusting irony.

Cafaro’s company gets the reflecting pool contract, and his record comes along with it

The Vindicator, June 19, 2026

Cafaro is a familiar name in northeast Ohio. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery in the case that brought down Representative James Traficant, admitting he funneled nearly $27,000 in benefits to the congressman, then testified for the prosecution. The Vindicator reports that he was fined $150,000 and placed on probation, and that Traficant was convicted on all 10 counts and expelled from the House. That is felony number one. Felony number two, per the Plain Dealer’s contemporary reporting, was a federal campaign-finance crime tied to an undisclosed loan to his own daughter’s congressional run. This loan was never repaid, for which he served five days in jail over a judge’s unhappiness with his financial disclosures and paid a $250,000 fine. So the man the government chose to purify the nation’s most photographed pool of water – a pool of water meant to reflect the monument to Abraham Lincoln – has, twice, been caught polluting something else.

Company owned by Trump donor won the no-bid pool contract, and everyone says the President had nothing to do with it

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CBS News, June 19, 2026

The choreography of denial is by now a genre. The White House said it played no role in the selection. The Interior Department said the company was chosen for its expertise, workforce, and materials, and added, with a straight face, that it had not been aware of Cafaro’s years of support for the President. Cafaro himself told his hometown paper that Mr. Trump does not know a thing about the work, that he would never put a friend in an awkward position by mentioning it, and that he has no idea why any of this is an issue.

The reflecting pool is one line item in a no-bid renovation spree

Irish Times, June 19, 2026

Zoom out and the pool stops looking like a fluke. The same drive to remake Washington at speed, around the usual planning safeguards, has already taken down the East Wing of the White House to make room for a ballroom and lined up a massive arch near Arlington National Cemetery. The administration has also moved to put a $400 million jet, a gift from Qatar, into service as Air Force One, a plan that security experts warn would cost a fortune and take years to make safe. The connective tissue is the no-bid contract and the friendly vendor. A republic that once made presidents sell off their peanut farms now lets the family pick the contractors and choose the paint color.

The White House intervened to get a $620 million Pentagon deal for a company tied to Donald Trump Jr.

ProPublica, May 28, 2026, still the clearest map of the pattern

If the pool is the metaphor, the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital is the machine. Stood up under the last administration to wean the country off Chinese minerals, it has been handed to former Wall Street dealmakers and had its lending authority swollen from about $1 billion to roughly $200 billion. ProPublica documented how a request to lend Vulcan Elements, a North Carolina rare-earth startup, hundreds of millions was processed in weeks rather than months after a call, in one official’s telling, came from the White House. 1789 Capital, the fund in which Don Jr. is a partner, took a stake when Vulcan was valued at nearly $200 million. After the $620 million loan commitment, the valuation reportedly approached $2 billion. The office is also weighing an investment in a drone-parts maker that the President’s son advises and owns shares in. Everyone insists outside affiliations play no role. The valuations keep tripling anyway. The New Yorker has documented billions in family profits since the inauguration, and House Oversight Democrats put the figure even higher, a tally we flag as worth refreshing each edition.

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Image by smuldur from Pixabay

The Trump administration’s dismissal of charges against the Indian billionaire Gautam Adani highlights, in one court filing, its policy of entrenching a two-tiered justice system. Adani was accused of bribery but hired the president’s personal lawyer. He dangled a $10 billion investment, and then he watched a serious criminal case vanish.

It is the blueprint for a country where the rich simply buy their way out of justice while you cannot.

What the government said Adani did

In November 2024, federal prosecutors indicted Adani and seven others. According to the indictment, they had agreed to pay more than $250 million in bribes to Indian officials to lock up solar power contracts worth billions, prosecutors said. The group then lied to American investors about its anti-bribery practices while raising money on US markets.

The SEC said the Adanis told bond buyers the company would not pay bribes, even as the alleged scheme ran.

A separate Treasury arm later settled with Adani Enterprises for $275 million over apparent violations of Iran sanctions. It was a sprawling case showing Adani to be a critical enabler who helped the Mullahs build the very things Trump is spending billions to blow up.

Trump turned it all into a deal

Adani hired Robert Giuffra, who is one of President Trump’s personal attorneys. Giuffra walked into the Justice Department and argued the case lacked evidence and jurisdiction. He also stressed that Adani wanted to invest $10 billion in the United States and create 15,000 jobs – touching, but not technically a legal consideration; more arm-twisting. The billionaire said he could not spend that money while the case dragged on.

In May, the Department dropped the criminal charges with prejudice, meaning they can never be brought again. Its entire public explanation was that it had decided, using its prosecutorial discretion, not to devote further resources to the charges—just a shrug, on a case about hundreds of millions in alleged bribes.

The department that killed the case is run by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who also served as Trump’s personal attorney. Thus, the two counterparties to this settlement that allowed a billionaire to buy criminal immunity were two people who had served as the president’s own lawyers.

An old bribe in a new wrapper

The Trump administration has proudly waved the promised $10 billion and 15,000 jobs as the new twist that justified this sudden perversion of justice. But Adani floated the same promise—$10 billion, 15,000 jobs—back in November 2024. He posted it while congratulating Trump on his election win. Eighteen months later, the same dangle slid across a table at the Justice Department as the price of a dismissal.

Adani is widely seen as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s closest ally. Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi has long accused Modi of protecting him. After Trump and Modi reached a trade deal, Indian opposition figures suggested the dismissal as a favor to Modi’s favorite tycoon.

In other words, Trump sees the Justice system as leverage for his dealmaking

Forget, for a second, whether one wire transfer can be traced. The rule of law functions when like cases get treated alike, and your bank balance does not buy you a different legal system. But Adani’s wealth bought him exoneration with the mere (repeated) dangle of investing billions. An ordinary person cannot hire the president’s lawyer. An ordinary person cannot credibly offer a government $10 billion to make a felony go away.

The administration paused enforcement of foreign bribery laws by executive order in 2025, claiming they were a drag on dealmaking. With the Adani dismissal, we are seeing their goals come to fruition. Impartial justice must first be filtered by the veto of the rich. They must first decide whether the law applies.

An oligarchy arises at the hands of a small circle of the wealthy, lawyers, and loyal officials, quietly deciding when the public process should stop. Congress writes the laws. Regulators build the rules. Prosecutors bring the case. But a few connected people connive to decide whether it applies to one of their own. Democracy and the rule of law are hurdles, if they get in the way at all, not requirements.

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You may feel inclined to ignore this. Don’t.

Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis still must sign off on the dismissal, and it’s easy to shrug this off as something for our over-complicated legal system. However, that process has no bearing on the fact that Trump’s project is about seconding the rule of law to his whims. And to the whims of global oligarch elites that Trump and his supporters like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel believe should be unconstrained by democracy. For years, Thiel and his supporters (including J.D. Vance) have preached what they call the “Dark Enlightenment.” Strip away all the deliberately impenetrable pseudo-philosophy pablum, and they’re just preaching a corrupt system whereby the wealthy oligarchy operates above the rule of law.

And more Americans should be alarmed at Trump’s handling of Adani because this is the institutionalized system of corruption for which they have been advocating.

As a nation, we have a rule of law to prevent exactly this sort of thing and to constrain the executive branch. Most Americans will ask why they should care about an Indian billionaire bribing the Indian government. They may not even care about his Iran sanctions. Yet, the Adani affair represents a theft of something that belongs to you, the plain idea that the powerful answer to the same courts you do.

You should care about the Adani case dismissal because it not only indicates where Trump is headed by constructing a two-tiered justice system, but also that it is already here.

Events like this can feel intangible or not relevant to your life. But they are. Please help us explain them more clearly, so more people understand why it’s important.

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CRYPTO CORRUPTION IN FOCUS

A federal appeals court told Sam Bankman-Fried no this week, and now the only person who can set him free is Donald Trump.

On June 12, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan upheld the fraud conviction and 25-year sentence of Bankman-Fried, the founder of the collapsed crypto exchange FTX. He stole roughly 8 billion dollars from customers who believed their money was safe. The three judges, two appointed by Democrats and one by a Republican, were unanimous and blunt. They called the evidence against him, in their words, conservatively stated, robust.

Here is why this matters to you. Four days before the ruling, Bankman-Fried formally asked Trump for a pardon, a presidential act that erases a conviction and its punishment. Trump said in January he had no intention of pardoning him. But Trump has since issued more than 1,400 pardons, and last October he pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the founder of the giant exchange Binance, who had pleaded guilty to breaking money-laundering laws. The courts have done their job. The open question is whether the president undoes it.

That is the state of crypto enforcement right now. Convictions stand. Pardons decide who pays.

What to watch. Whether Trump reverses his January position, and whether Bankman-Fried asks the full appeals court or the Supreme Court to step in.

THE ENABLER WATCH

This week the enabler is a regulator most Americans have never heard of, and he is about to hand the president’s family a bank.

Jonathan Gould runs the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the federal agency that licenses and supervises national banks. He is a Trump appointee and a former bank-industry lawyer. On January 5, World Liberty Financial, the crypto company co-founded by Trump and his three sons, applied for a national trust bank charter. This federal license lets a company move and settle money like a bank. Gould’s decision is expected within weeks, and two former agency staffers told the news outlet NOTUS that approval is all but certain. One called a denial inconceivable.

Think about what that license does. It would allow World Liberty Financial to issue its dollar-pegged stablecoin, a cryptocurrency designed to hold a steady value of one dollar, directly to the public and take a small cut of the money flowing through it. A company wanting to court the president would have a tidy reason to route deals through his family’s platform. A consumer advocate told NOTUS that for the first time a president is leaning on a bank regulator to give his own private business the implicit backing of the federal government, and called it outrageous.

Gould has already approved about a dozen crypto firms for charters, cut the wait time from as long as two years toward a 120-day goal, and trimmed his staff by more than a quarter. When a senator pressed him in February, Gould rejected the suggestion that the president would do anything improper.

THE MONEY TRAIL

Follow the money, and you find the same family on both ends of the deal.

World Liberty Financial has made the Trumps a fortune while its outside investors lose money. Trump reported personally earning 57 million dollars from the venture in 2024 alone, and analysts expect the figure since then to run into the hundreds of millions. The public company that made the largest bet on the project, a firm now called AI Financial, has seen its holdings of the World Liberty token fall by about 72 percent and its own stock drop by more than 90 percent.

The branding push has not slowed. On June 14, Trump’s 80th birthday, World Liberty paid 250,000 dollars of its USD1 stablecoin into the prize pool of a UFC fight night staged on the White House South Lawn.

None of this can be cleanly outlawed while Trump is in office, because the one bill that might address it has stalled. The CLARITY Act, which would split crypto oversight between two agencies, sits on the Senate calendar with its conflict-of-interest section, the piece meant to stop a president from profiting off crypto, still unwritten. Democrats will not move without it. The White House says it will not accept a bill that singles out the president.

ENFORCEMENT TRACKER

The clearest signal of where federal crypto enforcement is heading came on June 11, when a bipartisan pair of House members introduced a bill to build a Federal Cryptocurrency Theft Task Force. This team pulls together different agencies under one roof.

This one would sit inside the Justice Department, answer to the attorney general, and bring in the FBI, Homeland Security, and the Treasury. Its job would be narrow on purpose. It would help victims of crypto theft and hacking, not police the industry. Representative Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat, said that despite 11 billion dollars in thefts and scams last year, victims have nowhere to turn.

Here is the part that tells the story. The reason victims have nowhere to turn is that this same administration tore down the team that used to help them. In April 2025, the Justice Department disbanded its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, the unit that led crypto-crime cases, arguing that it had been regulating the industry through prosecution. So Congress is now trying to rebuild, voluntarily, a smaller piece of what was demolished a year ago. The direction is plain. Enforcement against powerful insiders is giving way to pardons, while enforcement for ordinary victims is being rebuilt from scratch, if it passes at all.

ORDINARY AMERICANS HARMED

Start with a number that has human faces behind it. Americans lost about 11 billion dollars to crypto theft and scams last year, and most never saw a dollar of it again.

That figure is the whole reason for this week’s task force bill. It covers retirees drained by romance and investment scams, people whose digital wallets were emptied by hackers, and small investors wiped out when tokens collapsed. The bill effectively admits that the government left these people without a single phone number to call.

The losses are not only from criminals. They come from the products too. People who invested in the public company tied to World Liberty Financial have lost most of their money, with the stock down more than 90 percent, while the Trump family collected its fees up front. When the people who design a token keep the gains and the public absorbs the fall, the line between a scam and a sanctioned product gets very thin.

CORRUPTION RECEIPTS

This section tracks ongoing crypto corruption stories across editions. A case stayed this week, a donation next week, a policy change the week after. The pattern only emerges through persistent monitoring.

ONE THING TO WATCH

Watch the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Within weeks, Comptroller Jonathan Gould is expected to decide whether to grant World Liberty Financial its bank charter. Approve it, and the president’s family business gets the federal government’s stamp and a fresh pipeline for money to reach the president. It would be the clearest test yet of whether any line still separates the administration’s crypto policy from the Trump family’s crypto profits.

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On the Adriatic coast this week, thousands of Albanians waved inflatable flamingos outside the prime minister’s office and chanted that their country is not for sale. They were protesting a luxury resort tied to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, planned for a protected lagoon and a former military island. The flamingos are charming. The thing they are fighting is not.

What is unfolding on Sazan Island and the Narta lagoon is a textbook case of state capture, and it is worth slowing down to name it. This edition is less about the princelings than about the people who make princelings possible, because that is where the real machinery sits. Some of those enablers are foreign autocrats. Some are Republicans studying their shoes. And some, we regret to report, are Democrats who keep voting to hand the crypto industry the legal cover it has been begging for.

What state capture means

State capture is not ordinary bribery. It is the moment when private interests gain enough leverage over a government that they can rewrite the rules themselves, the laws, the land titles, the permits, the protected-area maps, all bent to serve a few insiders rather than the public. Analysts coined the term for post-Soviet oligarchs who bought whole ministries. The American version wears fewer Adidas tracksuits.

Jared Kushner is the clearest indicator we have. People like Kushner and the Trump children do not land 99-year gratis leases, custom-built investor laws, and national parks to bulldoze because they are brilliant at business. They land them because their family controls the government. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund put $2 billion into Kushner’s firm in 2021 even after its own screening committee, according to congressional investigators and reporting compiled by AGBI, recommended rejecting him over his inexperience and excessive fees. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman overruled them because he recognized what this was. America didn’t because we’ve had the luxury of not having to exercise those muscles for decades (and arguably centuries).

Happy birthday, America! You can go to a monster truck rally or ultimate fighting (UFC) match and celebrate

Roughly 99% of Affinity Partners’ “investment” comes from foreign governments, mostly Gulf states, and the House Judiciary Committee is investigating it. We ask why on earth the Democrats are putting all their eggs in these investigations when it’s clearly – clearly – access being priced and sold?

Investigate, of course. Put all this on the record. But do something about it. In very many cases Congress doesn’t have the power to stop this. State governments do. We cite specific examples. Every. Single. Week. It should exasperate us all that the party positioned to lead the pro-democracy opposition, instead of wielding the raw power they have in spades, chooses to bang away at things in Congress, which they don’t control and which doesn’t have the power to stop some of this anyway.

Sigh.

Thousands rally in Albania in largest protest yet against the Kushner resort

Al Jazeera, June 11, 2026

The protests are now in their second week and growing. Demonstrators have branded the movement the Flamingo Revolution, after the birds that nest in the Vjosa-Narta wetland where the resort and a companion development on Sazan Island would rise. The wetland also shelters seals and sea turtles, and supports nesting sites. This week, the crowd stretched half a mile down a Tirana boulevard under banners reading “Albania is not for sale,” with some carrying signs saying they do not want their country turned into Dubai. Prime Minister Edi Rama, in power since 2013, told Reuters on June 8 that the work goes ahead no matter what, pitching the projects as a windfall worth up to 5 billion euros for one of Europe’s poorest economies. Ivanka Trump, for her part, told a podcast last month that she and Kushner discovered the island while sailing and were captivated after swimming ashore and hiking barefoot to the top. The flamingos were not consulted. Nor the Albanians. For those keeping track, this is now the second Balkan nation in which Kushner’s corruption has almost sparked a color revolution. Before Kushner’s corrupt project in Belgrade almost got him thrown out of office, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić pulled the plug. Pro tip for autocrats thinking of buying influence through Kushner: He is building a track record of being a trigger for color revolutions. Buyer beware.

Albania opens a corruption inquiry into the Kushner-linked land deal

Al Jazeera, June 4, 2026

We can thank Kushner for giving Americans a civics lesson on state capture. The reason Eastern Europeans are reacting so viscerally to this is that they know from experience how this ends. Americans do not. Our implicit mission is to help teach our fellow citizens before they have to learn the hard way. Back to Albania…the government held no public consultation before the bulldozers arrived. Residents say the first they knew of it was machines cutting roads through the dunes, and the government has still not published the development permit it claims to hold, the conservation group PPNEA told CBS News. The government gave Kushner’s company a strategic investor designation in December, a designation granted by a committee that Rama himself chairs. That let a Kushner-linked company bypass the law and start bulldozing a national park. This week, SPAK, Albania’s special anti-corruption prosecutor, opened an investigation into how the land titles were acquired and sold to the investors. The same office is already prosecuting a deputy prime minister whose arrest the socialist-majority parliament has voted to block. Similar events almost ended Vučić’s rule.

For those wanting a primer on Kushner’s Serbian fiasco

Popular Information’s December post-mortem is quite good.

In Serbia, Affinity secured a 99-year lease, for free, to raze a national monument and war memorial and replace it with a Trump Tower. On Kushner’s behalf, the government lifted the protection using a forged document. The official who signed off (not Vučić, of course) was arrested. Serbian prosecutors indicted the culture minister and three others. Affinity withdrew. The fast-track law enabling the project is still on the books, but Vučić’s government barely escaped intact. Albania is speed-running the same play. Rama seems not yet to realize that the public is now in charge of whether it gets finished. The longevity of his government may hinge on how quickly he learns this lesson.

The CLARITY Act reaches the Senate floor calendar as a crypto vote nears

crypto.news, June 9, 2026

Now, to the state-capture enablers in our own Congress. The crypto market structure bill, the CLARITY Act, landed on the Senate floor calendar on June 1 and could get a vote before the August recess. However, floor time this week was consumed by a fight over the expiration of surveillance authority. Galaxy Digital’s research head cut his odds that the bill will become law this year from 75% to 60% on the calendar crunch alone. We’re rooting for failure. The bill would hand the crypto industry the light-touch federal rulebook it has wanted for years, yet it still contains no provision to stop the president from profiting from the industry it governs. Two Democrats, Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland, already crossed over to advance it in committee. Mark Warner co-wrote the Democratic framework that gave the effort its bipartisan veneer, and Elissa Slotkin voted last year for the GENIUS Act, which legalized stablecoins, the money-laundering dream now minting money for the Trump family. We get that none of them want to admit they were duped. But they were. Roughly seven Democratic votes will decide whether this becomes law.

Andreessen Horowitz is outspending Musk and Soros in the midterms

Latin Times, citing New York Times reporting, May 2026

None of those crypto-friendly Democrats are operating in a vacuum. They are operating within a money field built by a single venture capital firm. Andreessen Horowitz, the Silicon Valley fund known as a16z, has become the largest disclosed donor bloc of the 2026 midterms, pouring more than $115 million into federal politics, nearly double what it spent in 2024. That puts it ahead of George Soros, Elon Musk, and Jeff Yass. About $48 million of that went to Fairshake, the crypto super PAC, with another $50 million to an allied artificial-intelligence PAC. Fairshake is deliberately bipartisan, funding a Democratic arm and a Republican arm, which is the entire point. It rewards crypto-friendly candidates of either party and threatens the rest. Marc Andreessen, who advises the White House on technology, and fellow travelers like Peter Thiel did not build this on-ramp by accident. His former VR colleague put it bluntly: These corrupt billionaires are buying off our democracy. The princelings are just riding the rails that the broligarchy laid. Welcome to state capture.

Trump’s World Liberty Financial froze user wallets, and an exchange dumped its stablecoin

99Bitcoins via TradingView, June 7, 2026

Around June 5, the Trump family’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, froze a batch of crypto tied to the exchange HTX, citing a sanctions-compliance review after Britain sanctioned the entity behind HTX over roughly $1.5 billion in suspected Kremlin-linked flows. HTX, run by early World Liberty backer Justin Sun, responded by delisting the family’s USD1 stablecoin and threatening to sue. Set aside for a moment the drama of Trump freezing assets on the platform of his largest investor, a man with credible allegations of ties to the Chinese Communist Party and for whom Trump’s SEC quashed a major criminal investigation. A company half-owned by the sitting president’s family can now freeze the dollar balances of ordinary people outside the rule of law. USD1 has swollen to about $4.6 billion in supply, a top-five stablecoin custodied by BitGo with reserves at BlackRock, and on June 9, Binance began dangling double-digit yields to attract more. Corruption is an ecosystem. The petty thievery, Serbia, Albania, 1789 Capital, etc., all froths downstream from Trump’s Death Star of corruption, WLF, because that’s fueling the profits for the cryptobros who are buying our elections. So when you hear any Democrat rationalizing their support for crypto, Jared Kushner’s embarrassing chicanery is what they’re ultimately rationalizing.

One more thing

Donald Trump Jr. married Bettina Anderson in late May on Little Pipe Cay, a 38-acre private island in the Bahamas that has been featured in James Bond and Pirates of the Caribbean films. We note, for the record, that the family has a multigenerational thing for private Caribbean islands.

Princeling Monitor

Where the running threads stand this week.

Dekleptocracy Journal is published by Dekleptocracy Alliance, a 501(c)(4) organization that puts anti-corruption on the national political agenda by seeding an activist anti-corruption ecosystem. For example, they are restoring the DOJ database to the public that the Trump administration tried to erase. Before they did so, Dekleptocracy Alliance copied it and will be bringing it back online in the next week or so. If you want to support projects like that, you can do so here. Or, if you found this newsletter useful, you can subscribe above. Both organizations are funded entirely by your small-dollar donations and Substack subscriptions from people like you. We sincerely appreciate your support!

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Credit: G. Edward Johnson

Why haven’t we paid more attention to the companies that poured rocket fuel on a design disaster that evokes a car crash between Liberace and Saddam Hussein’s designers? A building debacle even worse than the metaphors used to describe it. Understandably, Trump’s embarrassing taste matters. But the timing of “donations” and the makeup of the “donors” don’t pass the smell test, and should be a bigger part of this story. So, let’s follow the money towards that more odious smell.

The companies that cut those checks all had billions of dollars riding on contract and regulatory decisions before the Trump administration.

Did Trump leverage his stewardship over a national monument and the powers of the federal government to shake down businesses?

The donors and the money

Public Citizen counted 27 corporate donors to Trump’s ballroom. Within six months of the East Wing coming down, more than half of them won as much as $50 billion in new or expanded federal contracts.

Lockheed Martin alone picked up about $44 billion. You do not hand that kind of money to a man and then walk into his offices as a stranger.

The funding deal let donors remain anonymous. Senator Richard Blumenthal had to write the secret givers directly and press them on whether deals got made in exchange for the cash. When the list of who paid for a public building has to be pried loose, that tells you plenty.

Donations or “donations?”

Look at what these donors needed from Washington, and the timing gets loud.

By now, we know the crypto bros threw historical sums at Trump’s election. But was that enough? Weeks into the new administration, the SEC dropped its fraud case against Coinbase. Ripple, another crypto donor, watched the SEC walk away from its appeal. Both firms had spent years fighting the government. Then the fight just ended. Was this all due to the campaign donations, or did the check they wrote to Trump’s vanity project also play a role? In other words, which money was the pay-to-play, if any?

The Justice Department cleared T-Mobile’s merger with US Cellular and closed the books around the time of T-Mobile’s donation to the ballroom. Union Pacific also gave to the ballroom. And it has an $85 billion merger before the Surface Transportation Board right now. Last August, Trump fired the board member most likely to ask hard questions, weeks before the panel even started its review. Senator Tammy Baldwin called it a favor to the railroad owners – and some of them just happened to donate to the ballroom.

Or take the techbros. Meta is fighting an FTC antitrust case. Nvidia is tangled in export controls on its chips in China. OpenSecrets found several ballroom donors were poised to cash in on an AI plan they helped shape. The country has not explored the timing in enough detail. They paid the king. Now the rules are bending their way.

None of this proves causality.

To be sure, nobody has produced a smoking-gun email in which a CEO trades a donation for a verdict. And I doubt they ever will. The oligarch-style money laundering and thievery that Trump allegedly practices never presents so clearly. Brazen, yes, but the law-breaking never fits cleanly into paint-by-numbers squares that tell you where to apply which statute.

But Trump’s ballroom does present as a distinct pattern that should feel unsettling. Twenty-seven companies, billions in pending decisions, secret money flowing to the president’s pet project, and a run of friendly rulings landing right after.

A pattern that only becomes clear over time, but only if we expand our thinking beyond the obvious issue of the ballroom being an affront to good taste.

This does not give companies a pass

Far from it. The firms have shown no remorse for their role in defacing a national monument.

They weighed the cost of doing so and decided it was worth it. The issue of violating the rule of law never seems to have crossed their minds. And they clearly thought the gaudy monstrosity scarring the White House grounds should carry their brand.

And carry their brand, it should

Because you do not live in Washington, you can take this further

These companies bankrolled the destruction of the East Wing to buy a seat at the table while their own cases sat live before federal agencies. Those two facts leave only the question of whether they are connected. Were they coerced, complicit, both?

Congress is not the best body to answer that.

T-Mobile is based in Bellevue, Washington. Vantive is based in Deerfield, Illinois. Lockheed is based in Bethesda, Maryland. Few residents of those states hold the ballroom in high esteem. And each of them has regulatory and subpoena power over those respective companies. Even when not domiciled in a state, the states can still regulate it. For example, the daddy crypto company Tether calls El Salvador home, but they’re regulated under New York Securities law. Palantir thought they were escaping accountability by moving to Miami. But they were based in Denver at the time of this “donation.” Importantly, many of these companies have contracts with state governments. All state governments have clauses in their contracts requiring that their vendors abide by all federal laws. Violating that comes with hefty consequences, and the people charged with enforcing those laws are state officials.

Tell your local government officials to subpoena these companies and find out which one. It’s literally their job. Trump’s clan may have left no “smoking gun” email about the ballroom. Still, my experience has taught me that Corporate America tends not to write 10-figure checks without a paper trail – and state government officials have the subpoena powers to find out.

Sunlight is the whole game here. Local government – not Congress – has the power to shine it where Trump is most vulnerable, and Trump has no power to stop it.

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