US President Donald Trump has defended his co-ownership in World Liberty Financial (WLFI), dismissing questions about possible conflicts of interest involving his family’s crypto businesses.
He framed these concerns as a problem that all presidents before him have had to deal with and argued that his sons should not have to suspend their business operations just because he is in office.
In an interview with 60 Minutes at the White House over the weekend, Trump was asked about his co-ownership of World Liberty, which is managed by his sons and counts foreign investors linked to the United Arab Emirates among its backers.
suggested that Emirati investors could seek to exert influence through their involvement in the company and asked the president why it would have been different if the positions had been reversed and it was the Biden family’s company with Middle Eastern backers.
“You would say that sounds corrupt, right?” Douthat asked, and Trump responded that not knowing how WLFI works made a difference.
Asked why he doesn’t just divest from companies that foreign investors have invested in so as not to raise corruption charges, Trump pointed out that most of his money was in large Wall Street firms in index funds, that his children ran the family business and that he had little knowledge of what was being traded.
“My sons run the company. It’s difficult to tell them: ‘Don’t do anything for four years because I’m president,'” he explains.
This isn’t the first time Trump has had to defend his crypto plans, with similar questions raised in July in a CNBC interview where the president said he “might know about it” but that there was “nothing illegal” or wrong about it.
Recall that he made more than $1.2 billion from his crypto businesses last year, including nearly $600 million from WLFI and $636 million from selling coins tied to his name, and when Douthat pointed out that no previous president had owned a crypto company, Trump responded that his predecessors owned “everything that crypto was at the time,” including oil, suggesting that cryptocurrencies are just this era’s version of all the great assets that heads of state have always held.
“Every president has had this problem,” Trump insisted.
The interview was accompanied by scrutiny of the first family’s crypto interests, which took it up a notch after Senator Richard Blumenthal. sent letters to World Liberty and Fight Fight LLC, a key entity behind the Trump coin, as well as Binance and USDT issuer Tether, demanding that they turn over documents requested of them by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations by January 4, 2027.
The investigation into WLFI and Fight Fight Fight reportedly concerns a possible conflict of interest in the Trump family’s digital asset operations, although no definitive conclusions have been reached.
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