NYT Bombshell: Steve Witkoff at Center of Shady Crypto Deal Enriching Trump Family
(AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)
Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, the businessman who has been given a sprawling foreign policy portfolio by President Donald Trump, is at the center of a pair of a shady deals that have seen Witkoff and Trump’s families enriched, alleged The New York Times in a story published on Monday.
From the Times’ story:
This summer, Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East envoy, paid a visit to the coast of Sardinia, a stretch of the Mediterranean Sea crowded with super yachts.
On one of those extravagant vessels, Mr. Witkoff sat down with a member of the ultrarich ruling family of the United Arab Emirates. He was meeting Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a trim figure in dark glasses who controls $1.5 trillion of the Emiratis’ sovereign wealth.
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At the heart of their relationship are two multibillion-dollar deals. One involved a crypto company founded by the Witkoff and the Trump families that benefited both financially. The other involved a sale of valuable computer chips that benefited the Emirates economically.
While there is no evidence that one deal was explicitly offered in return for the other, the confluence of the two agreements is itself extraordinary. Taken together, they blurred the lines between personal and government business and raised questions about whether U.S. interests were served.
In May, Mr. Witkoff’s son Zach announced the first of the deals at a conference in Dubai. One of Sheikh Tahnoon’s investment firms would deposit $2 billion into World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency start-up founded by the Witkoffs and Trumps.
Two weeks later, the White House agreed to allow the U.A.E. access to hundreds of thousands of the world’s most advanced and scarce computer chips, a crucial tool in the high-stakes race to dominate artificial intelligence. Many of the chips would go to G42, a sprawling technology firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon, despite national security concerns that the chips could be shared with China.
The Gray Lady’s investigation found that the elder Witkoff, as well as David Sacks, Trump’s A.I. and cryptocurrency czar, advocated on behalf of the Emirates as the administration weighed whether to allow the Middle Eastern country to obtain the computer chips, despite joint military exercises that the U.A.E. had performed with China.
“The choice is do we want these countries to be the piggy bank for American A.I. or for Chinese A.I.?” asked Sacks on a podcast in May.
“Some administration colleagues also expressed concern because Mr. Sacks had once invested in the A.I. industry and had longstanding business relationships in the Gulf,” reported the Times, citing four American negotiators.
World Liberty announced that Steve Witkoff was divesting from the company in May but the White House told the Times he is “still in the process of divesting,” while insisting that he was “working with ethics officials and counsel to ensure he is in full compliance.”
