President Donald Trump claimed he would “drain the swamp” upon being elected, but a new report on a lavish party to be held at his Mar-a-Lago estate contradicts the promises of reform embedded in that claim: The top 297 investors in his meme coin $Trump will attend an April 25th “conference” at the swanky mansion.
“According to the invitation, the top 29 holders of $TRUMP will have a ‘VIP Reception with YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT, and other Superstar guests!’” reported The Daily Beast's Mary Papenfuss on Sunday. “Join the ‘most exclusive crypto and business finance conference in the world,’ the announcement gushes.”
Papenfuss added, “The last time the president mixed his crypto business with politics was at another highly controversial crypto fête a year ago at his Virginia golf club, where the top 220 $TRUMP investors gathered. Massachusetts Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren bashed the event as an ‘orgy of corruption.’ Guests spent an average of $1.37 million (in real dollars) purchasing $TRUMP, the Daily Beast reported at the time.”
Notably the earlier dinner, which netted an average investment of $1.37 million per guest, had among its guests the crypto billionaire Justin Sun who has been accused of SEC market manipulation — allegations that were quietly dropped by the Trump administration shortly before he attended. Furthering accusations that Trump is providing favors to those who pay him or his administration, he launched one billion $TRUMP coins three days before his inauguration, collecting a transaction fee on every trade as well as on the coins he directly sells.
“It is essential that Congress fully understand the extent to which President Trump and his family are profiting off of his cryptocurrency ventures," Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Adam Schiff of California.
Indeed, Trump’s generosity to the crypto community has even been at the expense of other crime victims. Earlier this month, The Trace released a report which revealed that the Crime Victims Fund, which was created by the 1984 Crime Victims Act to fund "state and local programs including domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers and child abuse treatment programs,” has been effectively defunded by Trump. This is because the program is funded primarily by “criminal fines and penalties from convictions in federal cases, typically white-collar prosecutions." Yet his pardons have removed $113 million that would have gone to the fund, with most of the lost money occurring due to a single crypto pardon.
"Most of that figure is from a single case," The Trace report explained. "Last year, Trump pardoned HDR Global Trading Limited, the owner and operator of the crypto exchange BitMEX, which had been ordered to pay $100m in fines for flouting anti-money laundering laws. Trump issued the pardon, the first for a corporation, just hours before the payment was due. Because the pardon calls for the 'remission of any and all fines, penalties, forfeitures, and restitution ordered by the Court,' that $100m will never make it to the Crime Victims Fund."
Steve Derene, a co-founder of the National Association of VOCA Assistance Administrators who helped craft the original 1984 bill, told The Trace that “what really drives the fund are these very large, very few cases, which are all corporate cases. Just a couple settlements can really mean the difference in keeping this fund afloat.”