UAE National Safety Consultant, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan meets with U.S. President Donald Trump in the White Home on March 18, 2025.
Courtesy: Donald J. Trump | By task of Truth Social
A executive official and high royal from the United Arab Emirates purchased a $500 million stake in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture final yr, months sooner than the Trump administration greenlit the sale of evolved AI chips to the UAE, The Wall Avenue Journal reported on Saturday.
Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan — additionally known as the “spy sheikh” — is the Gulf nation’s national security adviser and manager of its largest wealth fund. Aryam Funding, a Tahnoon-backed firm, took a 49% stake in World Liberty Monetary, in step with the Journal. The deal would procure Aryam the largest shareholder of World Liberty, and the firm’s handiest identified investor besides the founders, the Journal reported.
World Liberty is on the abet of the stablecoin USD1, which is pegged to the U.S. greenback and backed by momentary U.S. executive treasuries, U.S. greenback deposits, and various money equivalents.
The firm counts President Donald Trump and his particular envoy Steve Witkoff as co-founders emeritus, and is drag by people of the Trump and Witkoff households.
The deal, in step with the Journal, was once signed by Eric Trump in the days sooner than his father’s 2d inauguration as president. It came as Tahnoon was once searching for entry to evolved man made intelligence chips from the U.S., which the Biden administration had blocked over concerns that the chips would cease up in China.
Per the Journal, the agreement noticed roughly $187 million plod along with the fling to Trump family entities and $31 million to Witkoff family entities.
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In May perhaps well perhaps, months after the deal between Tahnoon and World Liberty, the U.S. agreed to allow the UAE to aquire tens of millions of evolved man made intelligence chips from American chipmaker Nvidia. The agreement known as for a fifth of the chips to plod to Tahnoon’s delight in AI firm, G42.
The Journal report has triggered fresh scrutiny of the Trump administration’s dealings with the UAE and Tahnoon, with some in Congress warning of most likely conflicts of passion or corruption.
“This is corruption, plain and simple,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., the tip Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee. “The Trump Administration must reverse its decision to sell sensitive AI chips to the United Arab Emirates.”
Warren known as on Witkoff, White Home 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 Home 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 Home didn’t straight respond to a CNBC demand of for comment.
Deputy Attorney Total Todd Blanche additionally 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 offering evidence.
Republicans and Trump own long accused the Biden family of corruption over the extinct President Joe Biden‘s family’s alternate dealings in a international nation. Though an impeachment inquiry was once launched in the Home over the topic, evidence of wrongdoing by Biden by no manner 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.”