UAE ‘Spy Sheikh’ Bought Secret 49% Stake In Trump Crypto Company, World Liberty Financial

A government official and top royal from the United Arab Emirates purchased a $500 million stake in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture last year, months before the Trump administration greenlit the sale of advanced AI chips to the UAE, The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.

Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan — also known as the “spy sheikh” — is the Gulf nation’s national security adviser and manager of its largest wealth fund. Aryam Investment, a Tahnoon-backed company, took a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial, according to the Journal. The deal would make Aryam the largest shareholder of World Liberty, and the company’s only known investor besides the founders, the Journal reported.

World Liberty is behind the stablecoin USD1, which is pegged to the U.S. dollar and backed by short-term U.S. government treasuries, U.S. dollar deposits, and other cash equivalents.

The company counts President Donald Trump and his special envoy Steve Witkoff as co-founders emeritus, and is run by members of the Trump and Witkoff families.

The deal, according to the Journal, was signed by Eric Trump in the days before his father’s second inauguration as president. It came as Tahnoon was seeking access to advanced artificial intelligence chips from the U.S., which the Biden administration had blocked over concerns that the chips would end up in China.

According to the Journal, the agreement saw roughly $187 million flow to Trump family entities and $31 million to Witkoff family entities.

In May, months after the deal between Tahnoon and World Liberty, the U.S. agreed to allow the UAE to purchase hundreds of thousands of advanced artificial intelligence chips from American chipmaker Nvidia. The agreement called for a fifth of the chips to go to Tahnoon’s own AI company, G42.

The Journal report has prompted new scrutiny of the Trump administration’s dealings with the UAE and Tahnoon, with some in Congress warning of potential conflicts of interest or corruption.

“This is corruption, plain and simple,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee. “The Trump Administration must reverse its decision to sell sensitive AI chips to the United Arab Emirates.”

Warren called on Witkoff, White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to “testify in front of Congress on mounting evidence that they sold out American national security in order to benefit the President’s crypto company — and about whether any officials lined their own pockets in the process.”

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told the Journal that “[t]here are no conflicts of interest.” She added that Witkoff is working to “advance President Trump’s goals of peace around the world.”

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche also defended the president on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.

“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office,” Blanche said, without providing evidence.

Republicans and Trump have long accused the Biden family of corruption over the former President Joe Biden‘s family’s business dealings abroad. Though an impeachment inquiry was launched in the House over the matter, evidence of wrongdoing by Biden never materialized.

“I don’t have a comment on it beyond President Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons,” Blanche said. “This idea that there’s something untoward or unprecedented is just a repeated story that isn’t true.”