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Jessica Mendoza
Hey, everyone, it's Jess and Ryan.
Ryan Knudson
A quick heads up before we begin. Our next live show is just days away.
Jessica Mendoza
It's happening Tuesday, April 28th. The Journal podcast is gonna be in Los Angeles at the El Rey Theatre.
Ryan Knudson
We'll have Oscar and Emmy winner Riz
Jessica Mendoza
Ahmed and TV and film producer Franklin Leonard, who created the Blacklist.
Ryan Knudson
We'll be talking about the future of Hollywood, plus a few other fun surprises.
Jessica Mendoza
And there's still a few tickets left, so grab yours now.
Ryan Knudson
Find the link in our show notes.
Jessica Mendoza
See you there.
Ryan Knudson
April 28th. Can't wait to meet you.
Donald Trump
Join me live on Twitter Spaces at 8pm this September 16 for the launch of World Liberty Financial.
Jessica Mendoza
In September of 2024, in the final months of Donald Trump's presidential campaign for reelection, he sat down in front of a mic and camera in the library at Mar a Lago. He was launching a new crypto company, World Liberty Financial.
Donald Trump
It's a fledgling business and yet it's a massive business, but it has a chance to really be something special.
Jessica Mendoza
Also at the announcement was Trump's longtime friend, Steve Witkoff.
Donald Trump
People, Steve Witkoff, a great friend of mine, a great businessman.
Jessica Mendoza
Witkoff weaved in and out of the room throughout the launch. At one point he hopped on the mic to talk about how World Liberty Financial came to be. And so we had a meeting initially with Eric, Don Jr. And the President and his counsel, and we said, let's go pursue it. Trump and Witkoff had only recently gotten on board with crypto and they credited their sons for that.
Donald Trump
Eric and Don know it so well.
Angus Baric
They do.
Donald Trump
It's almost like younger people know it a lot better than older people.
Jessica Mendoza
Eric and Don Jr. Were both at the launch too excited about this new vet venture. Here's Eric.
Eric Trump
You've got countries, you've got sovereign wealth funds that are putting their entire fortunes into crypto. If America doesn't do it, we're going to be left behind. We can't be left behind in anything we do. Certainly not digital finance, right?
Jessica Mendoza
Throughout Trump's presidential campaign in 2024, the Trump family had been getting increasingly involved in cryptocurrency. But World Liberty Financial was their biggest effort to join the crypto gold rush.
Eric Trump
There's no question that this is the future, guys.
Jessica Mendoza
Trump, of course, went on to win re election and he appointed his friend Steve Witkoff to a high profile role as special envoy in the incoming administration. Over the past year, my colleagues Angus Baric and Rebecca Ballhaus have been reporting on World Liberty Financial and how much it's grown. And they found the Trump family's crypto company has been secretly working with foreign owned businesses. Here's Angus.
Angus Baric
You've got one of the most powerful officials in the United Arab Emirates who has put a huge amount of money into a company run by the President's family. And you've got the world's biggest crypto company, which isn't even allowed to operate in the United States because of its criminal conviction. That has been boosting World Liberty.
Jessica Mendoza
And those international business associates wanted something from the US Government.
Rebecca Ballhaus
It's something that is totally unprecedented in American politics and, you know, is something that I think previous presidents would absolutely have avoided because it calls into question the motivations behind your administration's foreign policy.
Jessica Mendoza
World Liberty said President Trump and Steve Woodkoff haven't been involved in the company since taking office and that Woodcoff has divested. The White House said that President Trump's assets are in a trust managed by his children and that World Liberty is run by the Trump and Wycoff sons independently of their fathers. The White House also said that there are no conflicts of interest and that President Trump, quote, only acts in the best interest of the American public. Rebecca, how much money has the Trump family made from World Liberty Financial?
Rebecca Ballhaus
Yeah, it's a pretty amazing number. So World Liberty has doled out at least $1.2 billion to the Trump family. And just to put it in perspective, with Trump's, you know, real estate empire, it took eight years for Trump's real estate, golf and brand empire to make that amount of money between 2010 and 2017. So it's safe to say that Trump is seeing an influx of wealth unlike what he's ever seen before.
Jessica Mendoza
Over the course of two episodes, we're diving into the secret dealings that put World Liberty Financial on the map while personally enriching the Trump family. Welcome to the Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Friday, April 24th. This is episode one, a new crypto fortune.
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Jessica Mendoza
In December of 2024, just a few months after World Liberty Financial's launch at Mar a Lago, a huge week long party was starting on the other side of the world in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.
Angus Baric
It's known as Abu Dhabi. The week normally kicks off with the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
Jessica Mendoza
Abu Dhabi is one of the most pro crypto places on the planet, known for its super wealthy investors. That week, anyone who was anyone in the crypto world was there.
Angus Baric
People within that subculture were all there swigging champagne and watching the F1 cars tear past. There was a DJ on there. If you've got money to spend and you rent the super yacht and you park it alongside the track and then you invite all your friends and customers to come first to watch the race and then you kind of party into the evening.
Jessica Mendoza
The Grand Prix is a pre game to the main event, one of the most important crypto meetups, the annual Bitcoin Middle east and North Africa Conference.
Angus Baric
This is where crypto heavyweights and policymakers in that space fly in for a couple of days. Obviously there's the appeal of trying to score meetings with these deep pocketed Emirati investors.
Jessica Mendoza
Two of the founders of the Trump family's crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, were also there.
Angus Baric
You had Eric Trump, Steve Witkoff, who by that time had been appointed President Trump's special envoy for the Middle East. It was this incredible intersection of the biggest names in crypto and the incoming President's inner circle.
Jessica Mendoza
Going into the Abu Dhabi conference, World Liberty Financial was still brand new. How was World Liberty received by the crypto industry? At least at first it was not
Angus Baric
considered a very serious project. I don't think people really kind of thought that it would be kind of a serious competitor in the industry.
Jessica Mendoza
But this conference was an opportunity for World Liberty Financial to challenge that perception. Eric Trump and Steve Witkoff were spending time in the conference's VIP room or what's called the Whale Only backroom, which was open to attendees who'd pay $10,000
Angus Baric
to get in the whales. This kind of crypto term for like guys that have a lot of crypto wealth. If you scored a whale ticket Then you had access to the whale room, which was a kind of sectioned off part of the conference where all the big dogs would go and hang out.
Jessica Mendoza
In that Whale Room, Steve Witkoff and Eric Trump mingled with crypto titans, people like crypto billionaire Justin sun and representatives of Emirati investors with access to billions of dollars. Also at this conference was a whale who had kind of been washed up on the beach. Changpeng Zhao, also known as cz, the founder of the world's largest crypto exchange, Binance. He had only recently gotten out of prison.
Angus Baric
You had CZ making one of his first conference appearances since his release from jail
Jessica Mendoza
in 2023. The Biden administration said that CZ had harmed national security by allowing criminal groups to move billions of dollars through Binance. Binance pleaded guilty to violating anti money laundering rules. CZ pleaded guilty to a related charge and was forced to step down as CEO. CZ's lawyer told the Wall Street Journal that CZ's forced resignation and imprisonment were, quote, unjust.
Angus Baric
He was the emperor of the cryptoverse to suddenly be put into a prison jumpsuit. Cz's always been this industry mogul and I think his jail sentence knocked him down a few pegs.
Jessica Mendoza
After finishing his four month stint, CZ's reputation had been tarnished. Here he is in a podcast interview.
Changpeng Zhao (CZ)
I just want to move on. I think it is what it is. I did the time, I addressed it, I just took it head on and now I can move on.
Jessica Mendoza
And his company was hurting too. Because of the charges, Binance had been barred from operating in one of its most important markets, the us. And according to Angus's reporting, which Binance has disputed, the company's top legal staff worried that the company was doomed. So when CZ showed up at that conference in Abu Dhabi In December of 2024, he and Binance had a lot of problems that needed to be solved.
Angus Baric
And I think cz, he is, you know, whatever you think of him, he is most certainly a fighter. He, even in his lowest moments, I think he was searching for ways to climb back.
Jessica Mendoza
One path to climbing back, both for CZ and for Binance, could be through a pardon from the incoming US President Donald Trump. A pardon would clear CZ's name at the federal level and open a path for Binance to do business in the US Again.
Angus Baric
The company viewed the pardon as the kind of key to solving the company's legal problems because, you know, Binance was still majority owned by cz. Having this felon was really complicating their life all across the world. And a pardon, I mean, it wouldn't fix all of their problems. But in terms of re entering the US markets which they'd been banned from, the pardon would be kind of a huge step in that direction.
Jessica Mendoza
Breaking news. President Trump just pardoned one of the
Rebecca Ballhaus
most powerful people in the crypto world,
Jessica Mendoza
Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who less than one year after CZ attended that crypto conference, he got the pardon he wanted from President Trump. Zhao had pleaded guilty to failing to prevent money laundering on the platform, the
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latest recipients of a controversial presidential pardon.
Jessica Mendoza
That pardon from the president raised eyebrows. After all, CZ and Binance had pleaded guilty to some serious charges.
Angus Baric
You know, again, like just over a year before he'd been in this jail cell, you know, he was Persona non grata in the industry. And to have completed this incredible about turn within the first year of Trump's presidency to get a pardon so swiftly was surprising.
Jessica Mendoza
Angus and the team at the Wall Street Journal had been digging in and they discovered that in the months that passed between the conference and the pardon, Binance and the Trump family's crypto company, World Liberty Financial had quietly started working together. That's.
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Jessica Mendoza
Let's go back now to December of 2024, around the time of that crypto conference in Abu Dhabi. Trump had just won re election. CZ had just been released from prison and World Liberty Financial had just launched. Angus, what was World Liberty Financial at that point?
Angus Baric
I mean, it's pretty hazy. They didn't launch with a product, they didn't really launch with a kind of established roadmap to launch any product. It was kind of, you know, we're the Trump family, we're getting into crypto. You know, trust us that we're going to make this a success.
Jessica Mendoza
But the Trump and Witkoff families had an idea about how the business could eventually start to make a lot of money. They'd set their sights on launching their own stablecoin.
Angus Baric
A stablecoin is effectively, it's like a digital dollar. It's like a dollar that instead of sending it from bank account to bank account, you're sending it across the blockchain.
Jessica Mendoza
In order for World Liberty to make that stablecoin idea a reality, they needed some help. And around that Same time, Binance, CZ's crypto exchange was looking for ways to get closer to the Trumps.
Angus Baric
We know from our reporting that Binance, they set up an internal task force which consisted of a number of kind of high level executives. And this task force, its aim was to look for ways to fix Binance's legal issues in the U.S. binance was
Jessica Mendoza
exploring ways they could work with World Liberty that they could then leverage into a pardon for cz. The Abu Dhabi crypto conference was in December. At some point in the months after that, Binance stepped in to help World Liberty Financial. According to the Wall Street Journal's reporting, Binance built the technology behind the stablecoin that World Liberty Wanted, called USD1.
Angus Baric
We know through our reporting that Binance deploys engineers to build the blockchain technology that underpins the USD1 stablecoin, which would become World Liberty's first product.
Jessica Mendoza
In March of 2025, World Liberty launched that new USD1 stablecoin. They now had an actual cryptocurrency product they could sell to customers. It was a way for the Trump family's crypto company to start making serious money. But that was just the first step. Now someone needed to actually buy some of that USD1 crypto money. But who would do that? It was a new and untested product.
Angus Baric
The important thing in the crypto world that people look at to assess whether a project is kind of legitimate, they look at the market capitalization.
Jessica Mendoza
So once again Binance stepped in. According to Angus's reporting, they found someone who was willing to invest a lot of money, $2 billion into Binance. But before the investment happened, Binance asked the buyer to pay not in dollars or euros or YEN, but with USD 1, the Trump family's stablecoin. It was the first major transaction in the cryptocurrency.
Angus Baric
So suddenly it went from this minnow, which nobody was really paying any attention to, to one of the largest stablecoins by market cap on the market.
Jessica Mendoza
Before the transaction, World Liberty's stablecoin was valued at $127 million. After that, market value jumped to 2.1
Angus Baric
billion, which was something that World Liberty then started trumpeting, saying that we are, look at us, we're one of the fastest growing stablecoin issuers on the planet.
Jessica Mendoza
The transaction was a huge moment for World Liberty. It legitimized the company and USD 1 in the eyes of the crypto world and it would also ultimately give the company some serious income. It's complicated, but World Liberty couldn't just pocket the $2 billion they needed to hold onto it as backing for their stablecoin USD1. But they could invest that money into US treasury bills. And interest on $2 billion is not nothing. What did that mean for World Liberty?
Angus Baric
They suddenly had a product which was going to be generating about $80 million in income each year.
Jessica Mendoza
About a month after that huge USD 1 transaction took place, Binance formally applied for a pardon for cz. And by the time that CZ got his pardon In October of 2025, World Liberty was thriving.
Donald Trump
I gave him a pardon at the request of a lot of very good people.
Jessica Mendoza
That was Trump. At a press conference the same day the pardon became public, he was asked about it again on 60 Minutes. Why did you pardon him?
Donald Trump
Okay, are you ready? I don't know who he is. I know he got a four month sentence or something like that, and I heard it was a Biden witch hunt.
Jessica Mendoza
World Liberty said it played no role in CZ's pardon and that its business interactions with Binance have been routine and that there are no conflicts of interest. The company also said that neither Binance nor CZ played a role in, quote, USD1's design, coding or issuance. The company also said that Binance's help was, quote, not in exchange for anything. Binance has said neither the company nor CZ have financed or helped World Liberty and disputed that the company created a task force. Binance also said that the company's involvement with USD1 was limited to services that are similarly available to others. A lawyer for CZ said that there was no link between the pardon and and any business decisions and that it came after a formal review process. So to sum it up, one year into Trump's presidency, World Liberty Financial had grown into a major crypto company, CZ got his pardon and Binance was on its way to a comeback. But there's another player here that we haven't told you about. The buyer who had made that huge $2 billion transaction using World Liberty's stablecoin.
Angus Baric
So instead of using dollars or any of the other kind of much, much more established kind of stablecoins on the market, this investor picked a currency which at that point in time had barely been used for anything else.
Jessica Mendoza
In May of 2025, Steve Witkoff's son Zach, who by this point was the CEO of World Liberty, announced who that buyer was. It's a company called mgx. We thank MGX and Binance for their trust in us.
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And I think it's only the beginning.
Jessica Mendoza
MGX is a company from the United Arab Emirates and it's run by a member of the country's royal family.
Angus Baric
This major UAE investor called MGX and World Liberty announced that MGX would use USD 1 to make this $2 billion payment.
Jessica Mendoza
MGX was the buyer, the one that had been willing to pay so much money and ended up boosting world Liberty's cryptocurrency USD1. But why would they do it?
Angus Baric
We were always left with an open question about why would MGX be so willing to use the President family's own currency.
Jessica Mendoza
Here's what the company said about it. An MGX spokeswoman said that Binance asked for the transaction to be settled in cryptocurrency. She also said MGX had selected World Liberty's USD1 for reasons including, quote, business suitability. A lawyer for Binance denied that the company had asked MGX to use World Liberty's USD 1, saying MGX made that choice of payment method itself. World Liberty Financial denied that Binance helped to arrange the use of USD1 in the deal. For Angus and the Wall street journal reporting team, MGX's decision to use USD1 for the deal still seemed peculiar at the time.
Angus Baric
It was like, that's strange, strange that MGX would be using this UAE investor, would be using USD1 to invest in Binance. Even people who were connected to this deal raised questions about why would the Emiratis pick this very, very niche currency to make this payment when there were so many other kind of options available.
Jessica Mendoza
After a few more months of reporting, Angus and his team discovered that there was more to the story. There was another huge deal that had been left undisclosed.
Angus Baric
I think it blew my mind. I think. I think I was about to get on the London tube and I think it stopped me dead. Through our reporting, we discovered that the connections between not only Binance and World Liberty, but also World Liberty and MGX and the Emiratis ran much deeper than we knew previously.
Rebecca Ballhaus
A foreign government official taking a stake in the President's company right now, before he becomes president, is a first and is not something we've seen in modern American politics.
Jessica Mendoza
On tomorrow's episode, Rebecca Ballhaus reveals that someone had quietly bought up half of World Liberty Financial and that they too would get what they wanted from the Trump administration.
Rebecca Ballhaus
The fact that this was done in secret certainly makes you wonder what else we might not know about.
Jessica Mendoza
That's all for today. Friday, April 24th. This episode was produced by Sophie Kodner and edited by Laura Morris. Additional reporting in this episode by Elliot Brown, Sam Kessler and Patricia Kausman. Fact checking by Mary Mathis. The theme remix in today's episode is by Nathan Singapak. The Journal is a co production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. The show's made by Catherine Brewer, Pia Ghidkari, Isabella Japal, Sophie Codner, Ryan Knudson, Matt Kwong, Colin McNulty, Annie Minoff, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Allen Rodriguez Espinosa, Heather Rogers, Pier Singh, Jeevika Verma, Katherine Whalen, Tatiana Zamis and Meek, Jessica Mendoza. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapak and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by so Wiley. Additional music this week by Bobby Lord, Emma Munger and Blue Dot Sessions. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.
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The Journal. | The Crypto President: Part 1
April 24, 2026
Hosted by Jessica Mendoza & Ryan Knutson | Reporters: Angus Baric & Rebecca Ballhaus
The first installment of a two-part investigative series explores how the Trump family, through their new cryptocurrency venture, World Liberty Financial, amassed extraordinary wealth by capitalizing on the global crypto boom. The episode reveals previously undisclosed connections between World Liberty Financial, the world’s largest crypto exchange (Binance), influential investors from the United Arab Emirates, and a controversial presidential pardon.
Eric Trump at the launch:
“There's no question that this is the future, guys.” ([02:24])
Rebecca Ballhaus on the family payoff:
“World Liberty has doled out at least $1.2 billion to the Trump family…” ([04:17])
Angus Baric on Abu Dhabi’s crypto scene:
“There was a DJ… If you've got money to spend and you rent the super yacht and you park it alongside the track and then you invite all your friends...” ([07:11])
On the undercover Binance-World Liberty partnership:
“Binance deploys engineers to build the blockchain technology that underpins the USD1 stablecoin, which would become World Liberty's first product.” ([16:11])
Jessica Mendoza on the significance of the new stablecoin:
“The transaction was a huge moment for World Liberty. It legitimized the company and USD1 in the eyes of the crypto world…” ([17:59])
Rebecca Ballhaus on the implications:
“A foreign government official taking a stake in the President's company right now, before he becomes president, is a first and is not something we've seen in modern American politics.” ([23:22])
Rebecca Ballhaus on secrecy:
“The fact that this was done in secret certainly makes you wonder what else we might not know about.” ([23:46])
The episode maintains a narrative-driven, investigative tone, combining detailed reporting with conversational host exchanges. It balances complex financial and political maneuvering with personal commentary, making the stakes clear for both the Trump family and the nation’s political landscape. The reporting feels urgent, yet rigorous, as the team follows money trails few have seen.
This episode of The Journal uncovers how the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial leveraged international partnerships, behind-the-scenes deals, and its own influence in the White House to rapidly transform from a latecomer crypto venture into a multibillion-dollar powerhouse. The fallout includes questions about ethics, influence, and unprecedented personal enrichment—capped by a controversial presidential pardon and a secret Emirati stake still to be fully revealed in part two.
For further details, tune in tomorrow for part two, as the investigation delves into concealed foreign ownership and deeper implications for American politics and global crypto power.