Trump’s Illegal $1.7 Billion Cash Grab

And other corruption scandals: A Contrarian Top 10 list

“Follow the money.”

That advice from All the President’s Men has never been more apt than in this second Trump administration. That’s why my Contrarian colleagues and I published our original and then our updated top 10 list of Donald Trump and his cronies’ worst corruption scandals.

(White House photo)

Since then, every entry has either metastasized or made room for something worse — which is why we have put together this third edition of the list. It features a new king of the (dung) hill. Trump’s own Justice Department is reportedly negotiating to hand him a $1.7 billion fund dressed up as the “settlement” of a lawsuit in which he sits as both plaintiff and defendant — which we are fighting back on in court, thanks as always to your paid subscriptions.

And there is so much more, as you will see below, from putrescent pardons to family funny business and from gold cards to gold phones.

1. Pickpocketing the Public

Trump sued his own IRS for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns, as detailed in my weekly column and our Contrarian Q&A. It’s a preposterous case he brought because he knew no one in his administration would stand up to him — and he was right. His own Justice Department is now poised to settle the case by creating a $1.7 billion fund at his behest for supposed “weaponzation” victims of the prior administration. This is a smash-and-grab job, pure and simple: Trump wants to raid the American treasury to line his allies’ pockets, even potentially funneling money into his own related entities.

Now Trump is trying to escape court supervision by dismissing his complaint. Well, we won’t let him. At Democracy Defenders Action, we are proud to represent over 90 members of Congress together with Platkin LLP. We have just filed a legal brief in the case explaining that the court has the power to put a stop to these shenanigans and should do so.

2. Putrid Pardon Ploys

The second spot on our list is occupied by Trump’s worst pardons, serving the same transactional logic: reward loyalty, pay back donors, neutralize perceived enemies. And if his clemency for nearly 1,600 Jan. 6 cop assaulters and other insurrectionists were not bad enough, Trump is now considering another wholesale abuse of this constitutional authority. He wants to grant 250 pardons for our 250th anniversary, turning the pardon power into a promotional ploy.

Sometimes Trump skips the pardon entirely and gets straight to the corruption. The DOJ is reportedly preparing to drop its bribery case against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, who was indicted in 2024 for an alleged $265 million scheme to bribe officials and defraud American investors, after Adani hired one of Trump’s personal lawyers, Robert J. Giuffra Jr. Giuffra reportedly walked DOJ officials through 100 slides at an April meeting and offered a “sweetener”: drop the charges, and Adani invests $10 billion in the U.S. economy and creates 15,000 jobs. At that same meeting, Giuffra reportedly worked to kill the Securities and Exchange Commission’s parallel civil case (the SEC announced its Adani settlement last week) and a Treasury Department investigation (Treasury will reportedly announce its own deal within days). That’s Trump’s Justice Department, folks.

3. Trump’s Terrible Trades

Ethics and stock market experts alike were stunned by a May 14 Trump ethics filing revealing that he or his investment advisers made more than 3,700 stock trades in the first quarter, “a flurry totaling tens of millions of dollars and involving major companies that have dealings with his administration,” according to Bloomberg.

Trump has not moved his assets into a blind trust or put them into diversified mutual funds — both structures would mean his net worth would be insulated from his official decisions. Instead, we got the news of trades involving companies in which Trump has had heavy decision-making authority, including Intel and Nvidia. He also appears to have invested on every side of the odious Paramount-Warner merger, which is under review by his administration. “A spokesperson for the Trump Organization earlier said that the president’s holdings are independently managed by third-party financial institutions,” the Tribune News Service reported. “Trump, his family members and his company play no role in making transactions … receive no advance notice of trading activity and provide no input.” But “this is an insane amount of trades,” said one Wall Streeter. Ya think?

4. Eric Trump’s Conflict-of-Interest Roadshow

Trump’s son Eric is not-so-quietly doing his level best to become a big boy corporate executive — but his ventures often seem to need something from his dad’s government. For example, he tagged along on the president’s diplomatic trip to Beijing, supposedly in his “personal capacity.” But two companies that have been linked to him are entangled with Chinese firms. Eric was, until recently, a board “observer” at ALT5 Sigma, a crypto company that recently signed an MOU with Chinese company Nano. And he also has a significant ownership stake in American Bitcoin Corp, which has reportedly received preferential treatment from Chinese company Bitmain. Separately, Republicans in Congress have said both those Chinese firms pose national security risks.

Meanwhile Eric’s “let’s create a Terminator” startup just landed a $24 million contract to build battlefield humanoid robots for the Pentagon; and he and Don Jr. have an interest in a drone company that’s trying to sell its tech to Gulf states that are caught in the Iran war crossfire — which, of course, their father started. Being a Trump is the grift that keeps on giving.

5. More Trump Crypto, Fewer Problems

The Trump family crypto vehicle keeps spawning new schemes. The latest, WorldClaw, is an AI-services platform that takes payment in Trump-affiliated WLFI stablecoin, requiring members to invest in these functionally worthless assets to pay for its services. But that’s not even the worst part: the company is conducting a raffle for dinner with Donald Trump Jr. at his father’s Florida home — but is explicitly excluding U.S. residents from entering. Meanwhile, there’s a pending Commerce Department inspector general investigation we demanded with Platkin LLP into whether the administration’s reversal on AI chip exports to a United Arab Emirates-backed company was quid pro quo for a $500 million WLFI investment. Despite all of this — and all the additional crypto corruption we’ve meticulously detailed — Congress just advanced landmark crypto market structure legislation out of the Senate Banking Committee, but it refused to include a single ethics provision that we called for to address any of Trump’s massive conflicts.

6. The Meme Coin Grift

Trump held another exclusive dinner for top buyers of his meme coin in April. The coin has been carnage: The Trump coin has dropped roughly 97% in value since its peak around the inauguration, and the Melania coin is down about 99%. Retail investors have lost an estimated $4.3 billion while a handful of Trump-linked insiders walked away with hundreds of millions through early-deployment wallets. Running a pump-and-dump scheme to fleece normal people into buying a worthless piece of internet code branded with Trump’s likeness — that’s almost too on the nose (or the face).

7. The Epstein Files Cover-Up

Democracy Defenders Fund has built a case that the DOJ is openly defying the Epstein Files Transparency Act — and on April 23, the OIG officially launched an audit in direct response to our three complaints. We are also litigating in court to force the release of key files, and our running review keeps cataloguing the missing 3 million pages and the DOJ-buried records NPR exposed. The cover up directly implicates Trump’s Cabinet. We also demanded Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick resign after the released files contradicted his sworn statements about Epstein. We’ve documented how banks were repeatedly forced to confront dozens of pages of horrific allegations as they did business with Epstein and how Epstein kept Steve Bannon in the loop as he advised on how a Russian oligarch could avoid U.S. sanctions. This scandal is not going anywhere — and neither are we.

8. Fool’s Gold from Phones to Cards

The Trump Gold Card has gone from corrupt to corrupt and pathetic. According to The Hill, the year-old program, which Lutnick claimed would raise $100 billion and attract 80,000 buyers, has seen exactly one applicant approved — at $1 million, down from Trump’s original $5 million pitch. But don’t worry: We are still in court to stop the scheme from displacing the scientists, researchers, and physicians the EB-1 and EB-2 categories were designed to prioritize.

Then there is the golden Trump phone. After buyers put down a $100 deposit, delivery was repeatedly delayed for a year and the terms of service were changed, making many angry. The phone is finally said to be coming, but we’ll believe it when we see it.

9. Trump’s Foreign Real Estate Boom

The Trump Organization just unveiled plans for Trump Tower Tbilisi — a 70-story skyscraper that would become Georgia’s tallest building and the centerpiece of a $2 billion development. The Tbilisi deal lands amid an exploding string of foreign licensing arrangements signed since Trump’s re-election, with the family’s foreign licensing income surging by 650% in 2024 (and continuing to climb). This part of Trump’s racket is not getting as much attention as some of the flashier schemes — but it’s no less corrupt.

10. Trump’s D.C. Renovation Racket

Trump’s vanity project pipeline keeps growing: first, he demolished the East Wing to create the ballroom he continues to obsess over. We sued over his illegal dumping in a public golf course and park of the debris from the demolition containing toxic substances. Next, he tried to rename the Kennedy Center and close it for renovation — moves we are also fighting in court.

Now we can add the latest fiasco, his deranged decision to paint the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool “American flag blue“ — a project that will apparently cost a whopping $13.1 million. There was, of course, no bidding process for that project, which went to a company that had never previously held a federal contract. At first, Trump bragged about funneling this money to people who “worked for me in the past, doing swimming pools.” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum admitted under questioning that he wasn’t “familiar” with the firm. Trump’s claim was such a corruption self-own that he felt it necessary to backtrack, later saying “I didn’t give out the contract, ‘Interior’ did, to a contractor I did not know, and have never used before.” Sure, man.

Honorable Mention: Trump’s Qatari Boeing

The Qatari plane situation has only grown more brazen. The Air Force is now apparently targeting July 4, the country’s 250th anniversary, to deploy the $400 million flying emoluments clause violation. And remember — it’s not just that $400 million: You, the taxpayer, paid nearly $1 billion to retrofit the plane, money we pulled from a nuclear weapons program. This gaudy new plane is so clearly a gift that officials are reportedly even trying to move up delivery to align with Trump’s June 14 birthday.

Gabriel Lezra is senior policy strategist at Democracy Defenders Action and Democracy Defenders Fund. Norm Eisen is the publisher of the Contrarian.

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