‘Those Are Paintings!’ Maggie Haberman Downplays Biden Family’s Alleged Corruption

New York Times reporter and best-selling author Maggie Haberman tried to explain the Trump family’s cryptocurrency interests to New York journalist Errol Lewis, while defending the Bidens from past allegations of corruption.

“I want to talk about the corruption, the self dealing, the billion-plus dollars just in the first year, that World Liberty — this is just one among many, but the one that I think stands out the most for my listeners, World Liberty Financial,” Lewis began. “Explain what they did there and how different it is from the run-of-the-mill kind of pay-to-play that we’ve seen in past administrations.”

“So a couple of things,” Haberman said. “Number one, we’ve just never seen self enrichment on the scale with a sitting president. We just haven’t. There were valid questions raised about Hunter Biden and influence peddling with his father and paintings, right? The donors are buying — those are paintings,” she emphasized.

“And so, what is different here is, I don’t even, I don’t know where to begin. This is gonna take a second, so I’m gonna try to do this quickly,” Haberman said, continuing:

But they formed a cryptocurrency company. Trump had previously referred to crypto as a scam. Suddenly, in 2024, it was a good thing. And he and Steve Witkoff — who’s one of his oldest friends, another real estate developer, an investor — and their children, it really was started with their children, their sons — their adult sons formed a company called World Liberty Financial. The idea was brought to them by two people with less than stellar, you know, past reputations. We write about that in the book — I shouldn’t say reputations, but at least investment history, is what, I’ll put it that way.

And they went into this business two months before, it was announced two months before the election. It was later learned that three days before the inauguration, that a company controlled by an Emirati royal had taken a 49% stake in this company. That did not emerge until incredible shoe leather reporting by…The Wall Street Journal. The New York Times has also done terrific reporting on this front.

“It’s just unheard of,” Haberman added. “And so you don’t — there’s no transparency.”

“His sons have taken an interest in, you know, investments in industries that they have no previous experience with, like the defense industry, and so forth,” Haberman said. “World Liberty Financial is now applying for a bank charter that is controlled by their father’s government, and are regulated by their father’s government. And again, I don’t know how else to describe it. There’s so much of this, and there’s so much money everywhere.”

Watch the clip above via NY1.

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