Friday, August 21, 2026

Breaking the Law

A Break in the Public’s Trust?

A Simple Standard

Most of us learned a basic rule early in life: when someone puts their trust in you, you don’t betray that trust to enrich yourself and your friends.
Besides friends and family, this rule applies to police officers, to judges, to teachers — to anyone who holds a position of authority, especially to the highest offices in the land. What would you think about a judge who rules in favor of someone who just hired her spouse? A public official who steers a government contract to his own family’s company? We recognize these things as corruption. The power of office comes from the people it serves, to be used on their behalf. Not to enrich the person who holds it.
The Founders wrote the Constitution to make sure that no President could abuse that public trust to benefit themselves, their family, or their friends.
Are those protections holding? I want to walk through four situations with sourced facts you can check for yourself. As we review them, ask yourself: does this look right?

One: Pardons in Exchange for Donations

The president has the power to pardon people convicted of federal crimes. That power is real and legal.
Trevor Milton founded Nikola, an electric vehicle company. A federal jury convicted him of lying to investors. The court was moving toward ordering him to repay roughly $680 million to the people he defrauded. But Milton and his wife had donated at least $3 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign — documented in Federal Election Commission filings. Before the court could act, Trump pardoned him.
Congressional investigators consider this a serious issue. A bipartisan group has sent letters to 17 pardon recipients, asking about their financial connections to the president. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, described the pattern as reflecting “an increasingly casual perspective on public corruption.”
The question isn’t whether he had the power to pardon. He did. The question is what this tells us about whose interests are being served.

Two: The Crypto Coin

Three days before his inauguration, Trump launched his own cryptocurrency, $TRUMP. He personally profits from it by collecting a fee on every trade.
In April 2025, he announced that the top 220 investors in the coin by May 12 would be invited to dinner with the president. The top 25 would receive a private reception and White House tour. The price jumped more than 50 percent. Some buyers said outright they purchased it hoping for political favors in return.
A Bloomberg analysis found that 19 of the top 25 coin holders were likely foreign nationals. Charles Dent, a Republican and former chair of the House Ethics Committee, said the arrangement was “completely out of bounds” for ethical, legal, and constitutional reasons.
Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis found that the Trump family and partners earned more than $320 million in trading fees — acquired in mere months from a coin he created while occupying the Oval Office.

Three: The Trump Sons and a Father’s Influence

Four separate business deals share one recurring sequence: Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump invest in a company; their father’s administration shapes that industry through executive orders, diplomatic negotiations, or federal purchasing decisions; a significant federal financial commitment follows; and requests for congressional oversight go unanswered.
(1) Rare earth magnets. In August 2025, Trump Jr.’s venture firm took a stake in Vulcan Elements, a rare earth magnet startup. Three months later, at the personal direction of White House adviser Peter Navarro — a close personal friend of Trump Jr.’s — the Pentagon issued the largest loan in its strategic capital office’s history: $670 million, approved in weeks rather than the months normally required, without the independent technical review that a Trump executive order had waived. Vulcan’s valuation jumped tenfold.
(2) Military drones. Beginning in late 2024, Don Jr. and Eric began advising and acquiring shares in companies positioned to profit from government drone projects — Don Jr. in Unusual Machines, and both brothers through Dominari and American Ventures. In June and December 2025, President Trump signed orders prioritizing domestic drone production and banning imports of foreign-made drones. In October 2025, Unusual Machines received U.S. Army orders for drone motors and components. Through subsequent mergers, the brothers’ investment gave them an interest in Powerus Corp, a military drone company. Unusual Machines also invested in Powerus and became a supplier of its parts. On April 30, 2026, the Air Force awarded Powerus a contract — value undisclosed — through a limited procurement order rather than competitive bids.
(3) Tungsten in Kazakhstan. In August 2025, the brothers invested in Skyline Builders, which through mergers became Kaz Resources. In September 2025, President Trump personally joined a call with Kazakhstan’s president and helped secure for that group the rights to the world’s largest undeveloped tungsten deposit. The U.S. government committed up to $1.6 billion to back the project.
(4) Firearms retail. The Trump administration has also proposed — not yet finalized — significant rollbacks on gun sale regulations, including allowing licensed dealers to ship firearms directly to buyers without in-person background checks. Donald Trump Jr. has sat on the board of GrabAGun, an online firearms retailer, since December 2024, and holds a 1.1 percent stake. GrabAGun’s CEO said the proposed changes could be “the most significant change to firearms retail distribution in decades,” and that the company is “uniquely positioned for this opportunity.”
Kathleen Clark, Professor of Law at Washington University and a government ethics expert, described what she sees across all of these situations:
“It’s bribery. It’s graft. It’s exploitation of public power for private financial gain.”
Four investments. Taxpayer and consumer dollars steered toward sectors where the president’s family held private stakes. Congressional subpoenas blocked. No competitive bidding. No disclosure. No accountability. A clear pattern emerges. Does this look right?

Four: The DOJ Agreement

On January 29, 2026, Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against his own government — the IRS and Treasury Department — over a contractor’s leak of his tax returns. He withdrew the lawsuit on May 18. That same day, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — Trump’s former personal criminal defense lawyer — announced an agreement in Trump’s favor.
So, first Donald Trump personally sued the government he controls. Then he dropped the case before any judge could look closely. And immediately afterward, his own appointee signed an agreement in his favor. It was called a “settlement.”
Andrew Weissmann, a lead prosecutor on the Mueller investigation, described it on NPR:
“It was entirely collusive. This is just one party making an agreement with the same party.”
In plain terms: Trump dictating terms on both sides — escaping tax investigations, and creating a fund to reward those whose loyalty he depends on.
The agreement did two things. First, it created a $1.776 billion fund, drawn from the U.S. Treasury — your tax dollars — to pay people who believe they were targeted by the government. The President appoints, and can remove, five people to manage the fund. Weissmann noted that Blanche would not rule out January 6th defendants — convicted of attacking the Capitol, then pardoned by Trump — applying for payments from that fund.
Second — and this stopped legal experts cold — the IRS was permanently barred from conducting any future tax examinations of Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization.
Thirty-five former federal judges asked the court to reopen the case. In response, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams asked Trump’s legal team: was this ever a real lawsuit at all, or was it filed just to make a backroom agreement look like something a court had blessed? Were the court and the public, in the judges’ own words, “the victim of a fraud”?
A second federal judge, Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia, has ruled the fund unconstitutional — finding it bypassed Congress’s authority over public spending — and blocked it by court order.

What’s to Be Done?

The answer can be seen in every House and Senate seat on the ballot this November. The people who can tighten the laws and penalties for graft, monitor and enforce ethics rules, assure ethical appointments to federal offices, and curb unchecked presidential power — they sit in Congress. They write the laws. They hold the hearings. They control the purse.
You hire them. You can fire them — with your vote, your voice, and your presence at the polls.
Make sure you and everyone you know is registered and ready to vote by checking at vote.org.
In November, vote as if it’s the most important vote you’ll ever cast. Because for the safety and stability of this country, it may be.

Sources (in order of appearance)

Milton conviction / FEC contributions: U.S. v. Milton, S.D.N.Y.; FEC.gov; CBS News, 5/7/26.
Bipartisan Congressional probe (17 recipients): CBS News, 5/7/26.
Cato Institute quote: NPR, 5/13/26.
$TRUMP coin / dinner announcement / price jump: CNBC, 1/17/25; CNBC, 4/23/25.
Buyers seeking political favors: New York Times, April 2025.
Bloomberg 19/25 foreign nationals: Bloomberg analysis, April 2025.
Charles Dent quote: NPR / CBS News, April 2025.
Chainalysis $320M+ trading fees: Chainalysis, cited by CNBC, 5/6/25.
Vulcan / Navarro / $670M loan: ProPublica, DoD records, 5/28/26.
Brothers’ drone investments (Unusual Machines, Dominari, American Ventures, Powerus): SEC filings; CNBC; Bloomberg, 4/30/26.
U.S. Army orders to Unusual Machines, Oct. 2025: Unusual Machines press release / SEC filing.
Drone executive orders (Jun. & Dec. 2025): Federal Register.
Powerus Air Force contract, Apr. 30, 2026: Bloomberg, 4/30/26; Air Force announcement.
Kaz Resources / Kazakhstan tungsten / $1.6B: Financial Times, 4/30/26; SEC investor filings; bne IntelliNews.
ATF proposed gun rule (not finalized): ATF proposed rulemaking; Reuters; NPR.
Trump Jr. GrabAGun board (Dec. 2024); 1.1% stake: Washington Post, 7/2/26; company filings.
GrabAGun CEO quote: earnings call, May 2026; IBTimes, 7/3/26.
Kathleen Clark quote: Los Angeles Times, citing Clark, professor of law, Washington University in St. Louis; June/July 2026.
DOJ lawsuit filing (1/29/26) and dismissal (5/18/26): Senate Finance Committee letter; CBS News, 5/18/26.
Weissmann NPR quote: NPR, 5/20/26.
$1.776B fund / Blanche non-denial on Jan. 6 defendants: CBS News, 5/20/26; NPR, 5/20/26.
IRS audit bar: Settlement addendum; CBS News, 5/20/26.
35 judges / Judge Williams order: CourtListener.com, Case No. 26-20609-CV-WILLIAMS, DE 65, 5/29/26.
Judge Brinkema ruling: E.D. Virginia, Democracy Forward v. Treasury, 6/12/26.
Voter registration: vote.org (nonpartisan).

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