Eric Trump looked visibly uncomfortable Wednesday when pressed about a $500 million Emirati investment in the Trump family crypto business just before his father’s inauguration.
CNBC anchor Sara Eisen grilled Eric Trump and his brother, Donald Trump Jr., about a secret deal involving World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency venture co-founded by members of the president’s family and Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff. The Wall Street Journal first reported on Jan. 31 that an Emirati-backed firm acquired a 49 percent stake in the company.
Eisen brought up the “49 percent stake that was sold to an Emirati royal family member after your father was elected president” and said it has raised questions “about whether they were doing that so they could get access to AI chips.”
Citing sources and company documents, the publication identified the buyers as lieutenants of Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a United Arab Emirates royal who serves as national security adviser and manages the country’s largest wealth fund. According to the newspaper, $187 million went to Trump family entities and at least $31 million to entities connected to the Witkoff family.
Eric Trump answered by going off on a wild tangent about his family’s removal from major social media platforms, his father’s pivot to Truth Social, and the benefits of cryptocurrency.
“It’s crazy. The law of unintended consequences,” he said, boasting that after his father and other family members were booted from the platforms, “we went out and we formed Truth Social.”
He added that banks “started canceling us left and right,” prompting the family to move into decentralized finance. “We went out and we got into defi because we realized there was a future of finance,” he said, calling crypto adoption worldwide “the future.”
Donald Trump Jr. also rejected suggestions of wrongdoing, insisting, “A, my father has nothing to do with it. B, it has nothing to do with AI chips.”
“I mean, they tried all this nonsense the first time around,” Trump Jr. said. “Frankly, it’s gotten old. They were the ones that put us into this position by creating legislation to try to put us out of business. We just fought back.”
“We weren’t willing to sit in a corner, curl up in a ball, and die like they would love us to do. That’s not how we function. That’s not how we operate,” he added.
The president was accused by Sen. Elizabeth Warren of “corruption, plain and simple,” while Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee said on social media that the president “has wasted no time in his second term enriching himself and his family off the presidency while driving up costs on everyday Americans.”
Meanwhile, Donald Sherman, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, described the Emirati investment in the Trump family company as a “blatant, disgraceful conflict of interest and a possible violation of the Constitution’s Federal Emoluments Clause.”
The White House has brushed off criticism, with spokesperson Anna Kelly saying on Sunday that “President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public.”
Kelly said his assets were “in a trust managed by his children” and that “there are no conflicts of interest.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and World Liberty Financial for comment.
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