The sons of both President Donald Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick are poised to financially benefit from a secretive and lucrative deal between the Trump administration and the Kazakhstanian government, The New York Times reported Sunday, one that the outlet described as having “few precedents in American history.”
Signed last year on Nov. 6 but “not publicly disclosed at the time,” the deal grants Kaz Resources – a small American mining company owned by Pini Althaus, a rabbi who moved to the United States from Australia – access to Kazakhstan’s tungsten reserves, among the largest reserves of the rare earth metals on earth. Ahead of the deal, the Trump administration also approved “as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing” for Kaz Resources.
“President Trump, Secretary Lutnick and Secretary [of State Marco] Rubio all personally got involved,” Althaus told the Times. “President Trump did the final negotiation with President Tokayev for this deal.”
As to how Trump and Lutnick’s families would financially benefit from the deal, the Times noted that Trump’s sons – Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump – had rushed to “take a 20% stake” in the Kazakhstan mining project weeks after negotiations started.
Regarding Lutnick’s family, Lutnick’s sons Brandon and Kyle Lutnick “helped one of the lead investors working on the Kazakh deal raise $210 million in new capital for a related entity” through the investment company Cantor Fitzgerald, assistance that “typically [nets] Cantor millions of dollars in fees.”
Althaus admitted that the optics of the deal didn’t look good.
“I can see how the optics might be disturbing to some people,” he told the Times.
While the Times characterized the Kazakhstan deal as unprecedented, Trump’s family personally benefiting financially from actions taken by the Trump administration was not uncommon.
“The arrangement is hardly an outlier,” the Times’ report reads. “One or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals, including the Kazakhstan project, according to federal filings examined by The New York Times.”
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