How to Send $2.5 BILLION to a President

This is a story of supercharged multi-billion dollar corruption and a three-way trade featuring an Emirati prince, a convicted crypto bro, and a president willing to trade America's national security for his own enrichment. In the first Trump administration, foreign leaders had to book massive blocks of hotel rooms at Trump hotels and then oopsie, forget to show up if they wanted to slip the president some cash. The corruption was basically retail. Those were the good old days. Thanks to crypto, that crift is now wholesale. Meet Changping Xiao, known to his friends as CZ. He launched Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, which claims to have more than 280 million users worldwide. In November of 2023, Binance and Xiao plead guilty to moneyaundering charges and agreed to pay $4 billion in restitution, the biggest fine in crypto history. Xiao resigned as CEO of Binance and he served four months in a low security prison in California. After which he immediately started plotting how to get his company back on track in the US, particularly since the terms of his plea deal required him to stay out of running Binance's day-to-day operations. He needs a presidential pardon. Then he moved to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, which is where we're going to find the next character in this massive pay-to-play scandal. Meet Shik Taknun Bid Zed al- Nayan. He's the national security adviser for the UAE, earning him the title the spy shake. He's the head of the nation sovereign wealth fund. He's chair of the first Abu Dhabi bank. 6 weeks before the election, Eric Trump and Don Jr. announced their new cryptocurrency venture, World Liberty Financial, a name so generic it could stand for anything. The vast majority of the profits from this enterprise flow directly to the Trump family, which owns 60% of the company and is entitled to 75% of the net proceeds from the sale of tokens. In 2021, Trump called crypto a scam. But that was before he had so much skin in the game. In 2024, he vowed to make America the crypto capital of the world. He even promised to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve, causing the price of Bitcoin to surge, at least temporarily. And when he walked back into the White House, his family had essentially opened a storefront where literally anyone on Earth can walk up and give unlimited amounts of cash to the president and his children. And they did. The way this all went down was in two discreet transactions. The first took place in January of 2025. That's when the shake secretly paid half a billion dollars for a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial. The transaction was routed through his company Aram Investments. In May, MGX, yet another company controlled by Shik Taknun, bought a $2 billion stake in Binance. He paid for it in USD1, the stable coin being manufactured from nothing by the Trump and Witoff families. The Journal says that the purchase gave World Liberty a $2 billion cash pile. So that's $2 and a half billion dollars that moved from the spy she and Binance into the Trump family's pockets at a moment when Taknun and Xiao both wanted something from the US government. and don't fate now.