How a Trump Media deal with a crypto firm exposes potential conflicts of interest

WASHINGTON (AP) — Crypto.com was under siege.

For more than a year, the firm had been investigated by President Joe Biden's Democratic administration, part of an aggressive push to regulate the largely unregulated cryptocurrency industry. Financial regulators had told the company that enforcement action was likely.

Then Donald Trump won the 2024 election, and the company's legal peril dissipated.

Crypto.com ramped up spending to a lobbyist close to Trump and donated $11 million to political committees tied to the Republican president, records show. Within months, the investigation was dropped. By August, Crypto.com announced it was plunging roughly $1 billion worth of assets into a venture with a new partner — Trump’s social media company.

Legal and ethics experts say Crypto.com’s journey from investigative target to Trump business partner provides a case study of the conflicts of interest that have arisen in Trump’s second presidency. Unlike any of his predecessors in the modern era, Trump has allowed his family businesses to enter lucrative arrangements with companies regulated by the federal government, some of which have benefited from action taken by his administration.

In this instance, the deal struck with Crypto.com was favorable for the president’s social media company, which has lost hundreds of millions of dollars since its 2021 launch. Trump Media and Technology Group put up little cash yet received a substantial ownership stake in the new treasury for Crypto.com’s Cronos token.

Presidents have historically gone to great lengths to “avoid even the appearance that they are using the office for personal profit,” said Kedric Payne, who was formerly a top attorney for the Office of Congressional Ethics.

“It seems like another example of the pay-to-play administration,” said Payne, who leads the ethics program at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center in Washington. “There is clearly a perception that in order to get favorable policies and acts from the administration, a company needs to provide a financial benefit to the president.”

In a statement, Crypto.com spokeswoman Victoria Davis did not address concerns raised by legal and ethics experts.

“Crypto.com looks to partner with companies that are pro crypto and share our vision for its future,” said Davis, who called Trump Media “a pioneer in digital media.”

Trump Media did not respond to specific questions about the arrangement. In a brief statement, a company spokeswoman, Shannon Devine, called this story “obviously spoon-fed” to The Associated Press “by political operatives.”

The White House has repeatedly said that Trump has taken the proper steps to avoid conflicts of interest, pointing to his decision shortly after the presidential election to put his business holdings in a trust controlled by his sons.

“Neither the President nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

Trump Media and Technology Group, which is majority owned by Trump, was not established with cryptocurrency in mind. Its flagship Truth Social platform launched in early 2022, giving the then-former president a megaphone after Twitter and Facebook banned him for his role in fomenting the Jan. 6, 2021, attack by a mob of his supporters on the U.S. Capitol. Trump has been reinstated on both platforms.

Truth Social faced hurdles in getting started. A shell company — a SPAC in financial jargon — that raised money for the venture was investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for misleading investors, culminating in a multimillion-dollar penalty. A SPAC board member was sentenced to prison for insider trading.

When it went public in 2024, Trump Media was forced to fend off litigation from two co-founders who accused the company of cheating them out of shares.

Trump Media has yet to turn a profit. Just last year, it lost more than $400 million. Its stock price closed on Monday at around $10.50 a share, down from a high of about $62 when it started trading in March of last year. Over the last year, company executives have branched into new lines of business, including a streaming platform, financial services — and crypto.

The move into crypto was reflective of a complete evolution in Trump’s thinking about digital currencies. Not long after leaving office in 2021, he said Bitcoin, a leading cryptocurrency, “seems like a scam.” Three years later, during his presidential campaign, he held a very different view. His family launched its own crypto company, World Liberty Financial, started selling tokens and pledged to roll back regulation of the industry.

Among those who have had business entanglements: Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of Binance, who was pardoned by Trump several months after taking part in a complex deal with a sovereign wealth fund for the United Arab Emirates. As a part of arrangement, $2 billon was invested in World Liberty Financial to buy its new crypto stablecoin.

In a statement, Binance said it was “erroneous and grossly misleading” to describe the company’s business engagements with World Liberty Financial as a “conflict of interest.” The company added that the decision to use World Liberty's stablecoin to consummate the deal was made by the UAE's sovereign wealth fund.

The SEC also paused an investigation of Justin Sun after the crypto tycoon said he bought roughly $200 million of Trump crypto offerings.

Sun did not respond to requests for comment made through his company.

Crypto.com spent much of 2023 and 2024 battling potential regulatory action by the Biden administration. After Trump defeated Biden, the crypto firm began doling out donations to the political committees affiliated with the president-elect.

Crypto.com gave $1 million to Trump’s inauguration last December, followed by a $10 million contribution in February to MAGA Inc., the president’s super PAC. In late 2024, Crypto.com began ramping up lobbying spending to Jeff Miller, a Trump world powerbroker and GOP fundraiser who served as a finance chair of the incoming president’s inaugural festivities.

Miller, who did not respond to a request for comment, lobbied the White House and the SEC on regulatory matters, according to disclosure reports. The investigation was formally dismissed on March 27.

A spokeswoman for Crypto.com said Miller “had no involvement” with the SEC investigation. The company declined to comment on the nature or severity of the charges the SEC intended to pursue against it.

Agency commissioners during Biden’s presidency authorized bringing charges against Crypto.com. But attorneys for the company negotiated with the SEC to delay the filing of any enforcement action until after Trump took the presidency. In exchange, Crypto.com withdrew a countersuit filed against the SEC. Such negotiations are common before the SEC brings an enforcement case.

“Ultimately, the investigation was closed because there was no legitimate case to pursue,” said Davis, the spokeswoman. “There is absolutely no connection between that decision and Crypto.com’s” political activities.

“Any assertion to the contrary is entirely inaccurate,” she added.

Days before Crypto.com disclosed that the SEC’s investigation had been dropped, Trump Media was making news of its own.

When it launched a series of investment funds in March with a “Made in America focus,” Trump Media announced that Crypto.com was tapped to be the funds’ digital host.

Trump Media was eyeing even more deals, though, and the early foray between the two companies offered a glimmer of what was to come.

In April, officials for the social media company signaled that they were hunting for a telecom, media or technology company to acquire. They joined forces with a financial services firm and launched a SPAC to raise the money for the venture.

Four months later, Trump Media and Crypto.com announced the formation of Trump Media Group CRO Strategy. They said the new company would serve as a treasury for Crypto.com’s Cronos token, though company officials have not revealed many specifics.

Under the terms of the deal, which has not yet been finalized, Crypto.com is obligated to contribute the lion’s share of capital, plunging what was then valued at $1 billion worth of its Cronos token into the venture. Yorkville Advisors, a financial services firm that has worked closely with Trump Media, is providing a line of credit. Trump Media’s contribution is more limited and includes “a license to use certain intellectual property,” according to an SEC filing.

All three companies will have “majority ownership” in the new venture, according to a company press release. But how much of a stake Trump Media will hold has not yet been disclosed.

“When you consider the investigation into (Crypto.com) was dropped, the economics of this look more like a plea deal than a business deal,” said Corey Frayer, a cryptocurrency policy expert who was a senior official at the SEC during Biden’s presidency.

Hilary Allen, a law professor at American University who specializes in banking and cryptocurrency, said the deal was troubling from an ethical perspective.

With Crypto.com, “we have an investigation being dropped and an investment (in a Trump company) after the fact,” Allen said. “People can draw their own conclusions.”

Trump Media Chairman and CEO Devin Nunes told a conservative commentator in August that the new company offered consumers “two names” — Trump Media and Crypto.com — “you can trust.”

“This is really going to become the future of finance,” said Nunes, a former congressional Republican and close Trump ally.

Crypto.com appears eager to cement other deals with Trump Media. The crypto exchange announced in October that it was creating an online marketplace that will allow Truth Social users to wager on an array of world events.

Among those that users will be able to bet on: the outcome of elections.

Follow the AP's coverage of cryptocurrency at https://apnews.com/hub/cryptocurrency.

FILE - President Donald Trump, center, sits as Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, from left, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and from right, Bo Hines, a member of the presidential council of advisers for digital assets, and White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks attend the White House Crypto Summit in Washington, March 7, 2025. (Pool via AP, File)

FILE - The download screen for Truth Social app is seen on a laptop computer, March 20, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)

FILE - A Crypto.com Arena sign hangs outside Staples Center before an NBA basketball game in Los Angeles, Dec. 23, 2021. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)

FILE - Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks at the Bitcoin 2024 ConferenceJuly 27, 2024, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Susie Wiles, President Donald Trump’s understated but influential chief of staff, criticized Attorney General Pam Bondi’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case and broadly defended the president’s aggressive second administration in a series of interviews published Tuesday in Vanity Fair.

Wiles told the magazine in a wide-ranging, revealing series of conversations that she underestimated the scandal involving Epstein, the disgraced financier, but sharply criticized how Bondi managed the case and the public’s expectations.

After the story was published, Wiles disparaged it as a “disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history.”

“Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story,” she wrote in a social media post. “I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.”

Wiles did not deny the comments that were attributed to her.

In her rebuttal, Wiles argued that Trump had accomplished more in 11 months than any president had in eight years because of his “unmatched leadership and vision.”

“None of this will stop our relentless pursuit of Making America Great Again!” she said.

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt also rose to Wiles' defense, writing on the X platform that, “President Trump has no greater or more loyal advisor than Susie. The entire Administration is grateful for her steady leadership and united fully behind her.”

In the interview, Wiles said Trump wants to keep bombing alleged drug boats in the waters off the coast of Venezuela until that country's leader, Nicolas Maduro, “cries uncle.”

And at one point said she and Trump had a “loose agreement” that his retribution campaign would end before the first 90 days of his second term — but it continues well beyond the three-month mark.

Trump tapped Wiles after she managed his winning 2024 campaign. She is the first woman to ever serve as White House chief of staff and is known for shunning the spotlight. It is rare for her to speak as extensively and openly as she did about the president to the magazine, which published its lengthy interview with her — and other members of the White House staff and the Cabinet. Wiles has been speaking to Vanity Fair since just before Trump took office last January.

Asked about Epstein, Wiles said hadn't really paid attention to “whether all these rich, important men went to that nasty island and did unforgivable things to young girls.”

She said she has read the Epstein file and that Trump is “not in the file doing anything awful.” He and Epstein were friends before they had a falling out.

The Justice Department is facing a Friday deadline to release everything it has on Epstein after Trump, after objecting to the release, signed legislation requiring that the papers be made public.

Wiles criticized Bondi's handling of the case, going back to earlier in the year when she distributed binders to a group of social media influencers that included no new information about Epstein. That led to even more calls from Trump's base for the files to be released.

“I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,” Wiles said of Bondi. “First she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.”

Wiles, over the series of interviews, described the president behind the scenes very much as he presents himself in public: an intense figure who thinks in broad strokes yet is often not concerned with the details of process and policy. She added, though, that he has not been as angry or temperamental as is often suggested, even as she affirmed his ruthlessness and determination to achieve retribution against those he considers his political enemies.

Trump, she said, has “an alcoholic’s personality,” even though the president does not drink. But the personality trait is something she recognizes from her father, the famous sports broadcaster Pat Summerall.

“High-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities,” she said, adding that Trump has “a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”

On Venezuela, Wiles said Trump wants to keep the pressure on Maduro.

“He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.” Her comment, though, seemed to contradict the administration's position that the strikes are about stopping drugs and saving American lives, not regime change.

She said the administration is “very sure we know who we're blowing up.”

The continued strikes and mounting death toll have drawn scrutiny from Congress, which has pushed back and opened investigations.

Wiles described much of her job as channeling Trump’s energy, whims and desired policy outcomes -- including managing his desire for vengeance against his political opponents, anyone he blames for his 2020 electoral defeat and those who pursued criminal cases against him after his first term.

“We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over,” Wiles said early in his administration, telling Vanity Fair that she does try to tamp down Trump’s penchant for retribution.

Later in 2025, she pushed back. “I don’t think he’s on a retribution tour,” she said, arguing he was operating on a different principle: ”‘I don’t want what happened to me to happen to somebody else.’ And so people that have done bad things need to get out of the government. In some cases, it may look like retribution. And there may be an element of that from time to time. Who would blame him? Not me.”

Asked about the prosecution of New York Attorney General Letitia James for mortgage fraud, Wiles allowed: “Well, that might be the one retribution.”

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Barrow reported from Atlanta.

FILE - White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles waves after disembarking Air Force One, June 25, 2025, at Joint Base Andrews, Md. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, File)

FILE - White House chief of staff Susie Wiles listens as President Donald Trump meets with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office of the White House, Feb. 4, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

FILE - Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks with reporters during a news conference at the Department of Justice, Nov. 19, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)

FILE - White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles listens during a cabinet meeting at the White House, April 30, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)