Tag Archives: crypto

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Not to Worry About Trump’s Greed. It’s Personal.

A multi-million-dollar payoff to President Trump from 220 investors in his cryptocurrency is taking place tonight at the Trump National Golf Club in northern Virginia.

The dinner is being held after an auction of the president’s cryptocurrency, a $TRUMP memecoin, that brought in $147,586,796.41. The event is being promoted as the “most EXCLUSIVE INVITATION in the world,” according to an email about the event.

The top 25 crypto buyers will get an “ultra-exclusive private VIP reception” and “Special VIP Tour” with the president. Bloomberg looked at the buyers and concluded that 19 of the top 25 were individuals from outside the United States, many likely making the purchases to gain access to the Trump administration. Early on the promotion promised “a Special V.I.P. White House tour” for the top 25 coin holders. That reference to the White House visit was subsequently deleted, but the visit by 25 donors still went ahead on Friday, May 23.

Heather Cox Richardson has reported that  many of the top purchasers “dumped their $TRUMP coins as soon as they made the cut for the dinner.” The coin was launched around January 17, 2025. Its value skyrocketed to an all-time high of $74.27 on January 19, 2025. However, within two days, the price dropped by more than 50% to $31.61. The latest $TRUMP price on May 23 was $13.19.

Incredibly, President Trump has refused to identify the attendees.

“On the president’s dinner tonight, will the White House commit to making the list of the attendees public so people can see who’s paying for that kind of access to the president?” a reporter asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt at a White House press briefing on Thursday. 

“…the president is attending it in his personal time, it is not a White House dinner, it is not taking place here at the White House,” Leavitt responded.

“In his personal time”? Give me a break.

The President of the United State is president 24/7/365. He cannot go “off the clock” when he wants to avoid scrutiny. He cannot raise money from secretive donors “on his own time”. 

Leavitt also rejected any suggestion that Trump was acting inappropriately by hosting the dinner or subsequent events. “It’s absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency,” she said. 

But the fact is a business entity tied to the Trumps sits on a pile of the $TRUMP cryptocurrency and collects fees every time the coins change hands. So far, the coin has generated at least $320 million in fees, which the Trumps share with their business partners. 

In one of the most brazen excuses for Trump’s behavior, Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, explained his lack of concern about mounting allegations of corruption inside the White House with, “President Trump does everything out in the open. He’s not trying to hide anything. He’s putting it out there so everybody can evaluate for themselves.” 

Multiple media have challenged characterizations of Trump’s purity. 

“…no modern American president has positioned his family to make so much money while in the White House,” Bloomberg reported yesterday, May 21. “Already, since the early days of his reelection campaign, he’s more than doubled his net worth to about $5.4 billion. In that time, the Trump name has powered more than $10 billion of real estate projects, a multibillion-dollar valuation for his money-losing social-media company, more than $500 million in sales from just one of his crypto ventures and millions of dollars more from stakes in companies that offer financial services, guns and drone parts.” 

Where’s the outrage?

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Shemia Fagan and Oregon’s Political Rot

Political parties “…are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government…” said George Washington. 

Washington may have preferred that the United States go forward with no parties, but since we’ve got them, the next best thing is to prevent one-party rule that strangles wise and fearless public policy and emboldens the perpetual winners.

That’s where Oregon has failed over a long time and all at once.

The Shemia Fagan scandal is just the latest illustration of rot in the body politic.

Secretary of State Fagan wouldn’t have signed up for a $10,000 a month consulting contract with Aaron Mitchell and Rosa Cazarest, owners of the La Mota chain of cannabis dispensaries, if she hadn’t thought she could get away with it.  The cannabis entrepreneurs are, after all, high-profile Democratic donors.

Before the Fagan scandal erupted, the Democratic recipients of La Mota funds happily accepted them. Willamette Week’s Sophie Peel did some spade work, revealing La Mota contributions to the following Democrats:

Gov. Tina Kotek – $68,365

Secretary of State Shemia Fagan – $45,000

Senate President Rob Wagner (D-Lake Oswego) – $12,500

Senate Democratic Leadership Fund – $10,000

State Treasurer Tobias Read – $1,800

Rep. Andrea Valderrama (D-Portland) – $500

Labor Commissioner Christina Stephenson – $7,500

Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson – $1,000

Rep. Dacia Grayber (D-Tigard) – $1,000

Rep. Hoa Nguyen (D-Portland) – $500

Rep. Annessa Hartman (D-Gladstone) – $500

Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt – $2,000

U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer – $3,500

Prior to the Fagan scandal, none of the Democrats who were recipients of La Mota money were  apparently bothered by the fact the company was failing to pay its bills and taxes, according to an investigation by Willamette Week. Only after the Fagan scandal erupted did Democrats decide campaign contributions from La Mota were dirty money and scrambled to show their purity by pledging to donate those contributions to other worthy charitable causes.

Oregon’s Democratic Party also wouldn’t be so cavalier about all the campaign contributions it took from disgraced executives at FTX, the now bankrupt crypto company if they didn’t think they could get off scot free.

In their unbridled pursuit of power, Tina Kotek and the Democratic Party of Oregon chose to keep company with Nishad Singh, the 27-year-old wunderkind director of engineering at FTX. They welcomed his $500,000 contribution to the party’s campaign coffers in 2022. 

But the wheels of justice have turned since Singh made the contribution. On Feb. 28, 2023, he pleaded guilty to six criminal counts, including conspiring to commit securities and commodities fraud, during a hearing in federal court in Manhattan. 

He also pleaded guilty to defrauding the U.S. in a campaign-finance scheme in which he made illegal donations to political-action committees and candidates using funds from disgraced cyypto manager Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto hedge fund Alameda Research.

John Ray III, the new boss of the bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, wants the $500,000 back, but the Democratic Party of Oregon has so far refused. 

Fagan’s behavior is also reminiscent of the sudden downfall of Jennifer Williamson, a former House majority leader and a leading contender to be Oregon’s next secretary of state in 2020. Williamson suddenly dropped out of the race, attributing her action to a forthcoming story in Willamette Week about questionable expenditures of campaign funds when she served in the House.  

Then there was Democrat Governor John Kitzhaber, who resigned in February 2015  amid a growing influence-peddling scandal involving him and his fiancee, Cylvia Hayes, becoming the state’s first governor to resign in disgrace.

 

Gov. Kitzhaber and Cilvia Hayes

Kitzhaber ‘s resignation came in the face of a state criminal investigation and a string of demands from top state officials to step down.

There have also been questionable actions by other Democratic leaders. 

At one extreme, there was Neil Goldschmidt, a former governor, former Secretary of Transportation under President Jimmy Carter and ex-mayor of Portland. Goldschmidt, while Portland’s mayor during the mid-1970s, had sex on many occasions with a 14-year-old girl. Goldschmidt tried to define his actions as “an affair”. 

He started having sex with the girl when he was 35 and married. She was a babysitter for his young children and the daughter of a neighbor who worked in his office. 

A key element tying all these scandals together is the long Democratic rule in Oregon. It has led too many in the party to act with impunity, just as Richard J. Daily and the Democratic political machine ran Chicago with bare-knuckle politics for 21 years as dozens of politicians fed on the city’s political corruption.

Oregon hasn’t elected a Republican governor since 1982, when Gov. Vic Atiyeh won re-election.  Republican s have also failed to achieve majorities in the Senate and House for ages.

Oregon has been ill-served by the concentration of political power in Democrat’s hands for so long that the party has an overpowering stench to it. As former U.S. Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) put it, “Unchecked power pushes parties to excess regardless of which party is in power.”

In Oregon, it’s been the Democrats for far too long.

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Crypto Corruption: A Campaign Finance Cover-Up in Oregon

Like the notorious Anna Delvey, who came out of nowhere to seduce gullible New Yorkers, Carrick Flynn emerged from the ether in February 2022 to announce he was running in the Democratic primary for Oregon’s new Congressional District 6 seat. 

In the following months it came out that his biggest financial backer was a political action committee, Protect Our Future PAC, funded largely by a crypto billionaire, Sam Bankman-Fried, a 30-year-old American “Master of the Universe” who lives in the Bahamas. 

Then, late in the race, the Justice Unites Us PAC, which said it was all about mobilizing Asian voters, pumped $846,000 in independent expenditures Flynn’s campaign, a white guy if there ever was one. Justice Unites Us identified itself online as “A project of the Family Friendly Action Fund, a section 50©4) social welfare organization.”

“AAPI people are literally under attack,” says the PAC’s website. “We need to build political power and ensure our voices are heard in the political process.”

Who was behind the Justice Unites Us PAC? Oregon voters didn’t know. 

Like pop-up stores that show up during the Christmas holidays, the PAC only popped up on March 22, 2022 (FEC Committee ID #: C00810606). In its report to the FEC for the first quarter of 2022, the PAC reported raising and spending zero dollars. After the end of the quarter, it disclosed it had disbursed $846,581.14 on April 5, 2022 for “canvassing” in support of Flynn.

On April 15, 2022, the PAC filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission so it could delay filing its next report and identifying its donors, until after the May 17 primary:

Flynn lost the race, but only now do we learn that every single penny of  the money Justice United donated to Flynn’s campaign came from a donation Sam Bankman-Fried’s Protect Our Future PAC  made to Justice United.

Why Bankman-Fried felt this subterfuge was necessary is unclear, since he was already publicly identified as the man behind Protect Our Future. Whatever his reasons, it allowed his money to hide behind campaign finance reporting rules and prevented Oregonians from full knowledge of Flynn’s backers.

Supposedly, Flynn’s campaign was unaware of the subterfuge, just as supposedly, Protect Our Future didn’t coordinate with Flynn’s campaign in producing a barrage of radio, television and digital ads, lawn signs, direct mail, and get-out-the-vote phone calls.

Voters deserve better. 

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Carrick Flynn: Oregon’s Crypto Candidate

Top executives at FTX, a major digital currency trading platform, are financing a high-priced communications war on behalf of Carrick Flynn, who hopes to outrun a primary field of Democrats seeking election to Oregon’s new Congressional District 6 seat. The primary will be held on May 17, 2022.

Carrick Flynn
Source: Northwest Observer

If Flynn wins the primary he will owe his win lock, stock, and barrel to wealthy crypto supporters.

Is this how we want our political campaigns to be financed? Do Oregonians really want candidates to be captured by special interests, particularly so early in the political process? And in this case, are we OK with the capturers being major players in the controversial and risky business of cryptocurrencies? 

If you’ve paid attention to the plethora of television campaign ads already running in the Democratic primary race, you’ve noticed that the ones by the other candidates note at the end “paid for by” the candidates campaign committee. In Carrick Flynn’s case, most have said “Paid for by Protect Our Future PAC”.

The major backer of the PAC is FTX founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, a 30-year-old American “Master of the Universe” billionaire who lives in the Bahamas.

FTX is incorporated in Antigua and Barbuda and headquartered in the Bahamas. The company officially opened its doors for trading in May of 2019. It enables trades of a variety of digital assets, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and Dogecoin. 

Sam Bankman-Fried
(Source: New York Magazine)

Super PACs cannot legally coordinate with candidates, but many candidates find creative ways to work in concert with them that stretch the legal boundaries.

According to data filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC), as of April 11, 2022, Protect Our Future had made independent expenditures in support of Flynn totaling $4,932,464.73 in 2022. The expenditures have been devoted to a wide range of activities, including radio, television and digital ad production and time purchases, lawn signs, direct mail, and get-out-the-vote phone calls.

On April 12, 2022, OPB reported that a political action committee affiliated with national Democrats, the House Majority PAC, had also purchased roughly $1 million of ads to help Flynn. The PAC’s television ads are already appearing.

Six of the nine Democrats seeking to win the primary put out a statement denouncing the move. “We strongly condemn House Majority PAC’s unprecedented and inappropriate decision…” the joint statement said. “We call on House Majority PAC to actually stand by our party’s values and let the voters of Oregon decide who their Democratic nominee will be.”

Interestingly, some of the money Flynn received from the House Majority PAC could be considered as a pass-through from Bankman-Fried. According to OpenSecrets,a research and government transparency group tracking money in politics and its effect on elections and policy, Bankman-Fried has also made substantial donations to the House Majority PAC.

It’s not hard to decipher Flynn’s potential appeal. He’s a climber with a hard luck story about his youth and a touch-all-the-bases career of prestige academic success at Yale Law School and international social justice-oriented work.* But to really pop in Oregon’s political world, he needed money, and FTX has given him a jump start.

“…the company’s executives are quietly emerging as crypto kingmakers in the nation’s capital as they spend millions to launch super PACs, bankroll congressional campaigns and recruit former government officials with an inside track on looming crypto regulations,” Politico observed in February. In other words, the “Our” in Protect Our Future most likely means the crypto industry.

Down the road, FTX may also have other interests that could bring into play a need for political support. The Generalist, a tech-focused weekly online publication, has speculated that the company may try to grow its footprint in sports betting, banking and social media.   In this regard, Bankman-Fried has openly talked about his desire to build out a fully-fledged financial giant, a kind of monetary super-app handling payments, custody, and of course, investing across asset classes. 

If Flynn wins the primary** and the election, will he be indebted to FTX’s interests as much as to Oregon’s. It’s damn hard not to think otherwise. 

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*Flynn’s efforts to position himself as a true Oregonian resemble Nicholas Kristoff’s efforts to do the same in his failed quest to become Oregon’s governor.  Flynn, 35, was born in Oregon, grew up here and graduated from the University of Oregon in 2008, but he has spent a substantial part of his adult life elsewhere, much of that overseas: 

·      2009: Legal Clerk, The Carter Center, Monrovia, Liberia

·      2010: Legal Consultant, The Asia Foundation, Dili, Timor-Leste

·      2011: Volunteer, Volunteer, Progressio UK, Dili, Timor-Leste

·      2011-2012: Program Associate / Legal Consultant, The Asia Foundation, Dili,    Timor-Leste

·      2013-14: Bernstein Human Rights Fellow, New Delhi Area, India

·      2014: Bernstein Human Rights Fellow, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia

·      2015: Lecturer, Jimma University, Jimma, Ethiopia

·      2015-2018: Assistant Director, Center for the Governance of AI (GovAI), Oxford, England, United Kingdom

·      2018-2022: Research Faculty, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.