Trump Humiliated in Bombshell Crypto Lawsuit

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Key takeaways

A Circle shareholder sued Donald Trump and World Liberty Financial.
The lawsuit alleges Trump violated the Foreign Emoluments Clause.
The complaint claims Trump profited from a $500 million UAE deal.

Donald Trump was sued Thursday by a cryptocurrency company that claims he violated the Constitution by profiting from deals with a United Arab Emirates official while in office.

Filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the lawsuit names the 80-year-old president, his longtime friend and special envoy Steve Witkoff, and World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture co-founded by Trump’s family, accusing them of “corruptly profiting” from more than $2 billion in deals.

Lawsuit over foreign profits

“No president in American history has profited from his office so brazenly,” said the lawsuit, filed by a shareholder of Circle Internet Group.

“The President himself has openly admitted that the lack of consequences emboldens him, not only to continue using his high office to enrich himself, but to expand the fortune he is extracting from the trust the American people placed in him.”

The plaintiff is Joel Greenberg, a shareholder in Circle, a publicly traded crypto company that competes with World Liberty Financial.

At the heart of the lawsuit, Greenberg alleges that Trump is violating the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause by profiting from a foreign government without congressional approval.

Greenberg also alleges that Trump diverted business away from Circle by accepting hundreds of millions of dollars, harming the company’s shareholders.

Deals involving UAE officials

Four days before Trump’s inauguration, for example, the Trump family sold 49 percent of World Liberty Financial for $500 million to an investment entity backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s national security adviser, the lawsuit states. Financial disclosures confirmed this purchase after he became president.

“Millions of dollars from that deal, routed from a foreign government, flowed to President Trump after he assumed office,” the suit alleged.

The suit also claims Tahnoon orchestrated a scheme to inflate the value of Trump’s crypto holdings. It points to MGX, a UAE government-created investment fund Tahnoon chairs, which announced a $2 billion investment in the crypto exchange Binance just weeks after Trump took office.

World Liberty Financial then announced the launch of its own stablecoin, USD1, which MGX used to pay for the Binance deal.

“The President brazenly violated the Constitution in order to enrich himself, his family, and his business, at a direct cost to Circle. He needs to be held accountable,” Greenberg said in a statement provided to the Daily Beast.

A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions from the Daily Beast.

Trump later made headlines for pardoning Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of cryptocurrency exchange Binance, who was convicted of money laundering.

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