Trump lands in Senate's crosshairs over $500 million UAE investment in his crypto venture

Senate Democrats called for immediate hearings into UAE officials' huge investments in President Donald Trump's family crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, and subsequent decisions by the Trump administration that seemingly favored the Gulf country, in a letter dated June 23.

Senators Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal, Gary Peters, Richard Durbin, and Ron Wyden requested that multiple Senate committees hold hearings on a deal in which lieutenants to an Abu Dhabi royal signed a deal with the Trump family to purchase a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial for half a billion dollars.

The deal closed four days before President Trump's inauguration last year, the letter said, adding that as part of the agreement, foreign buyers reportedly paid $218 million upfront to entities tied to the Trump family and Steve Witkoff, President Trump's lead diplomat for the Middle East and Russia.

The arrangement was reportedly backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE's National Security Advisor. This "marked something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president's company," according to the letter.

CoinDesk reached out to both WLFI and the UAE government for a comment on the matter.

The investment bolsters concerns about foreign influence, originally stemming from a major investment by MGX, a UAE state-backed investment company, that boosted the market capitalization of the Trump family's stablecoin by almost $2 billion overnight.

Here's where it gets interesting. Within months of the deal, the Trump Administration took policy decisions that benefited the UAE, according to the letter. In May 2025, it approved a $1.4 billion arms sale to the country, despite congressional concerns about weapons flowing to armed groups in Sudan where more than 150,000 people have died.

In the same month, Treasury created a "Known Investor Pilot" program to streamline investment approvals through CFIUS, a fast-track process that the UAE had lobbied for.

The Department of Commerce also rescinded Biden-era chip export restrictions, allowing the UAE to receive up to triple or quadruple the number of advanced chips it previously could have imported. It authorized G42, a UAE AI company chaired by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, to receive 35,000 Nvidia Blackwell chips. The deal was worth over a billion dollars.

But U.S. intelligence officials reportedly caught G42 providing U.S. technology that was used to enhance China's missile capabilities. Though G42 allegedly committed to divesting its Chinese holdings, reports suggest the firm attempted to obfuscate its ties to Beijing by moving its business holdings in China to a new investment firm.