American Princelings

June 5, 2026

Voters used to (rightly) complain about the revolving door. Loyal party members served in government and then cashed out to a lobbying shop or elsewhere. Usually, somewhere in the gap before reentering government, they pretended that the public interest mattered, and the country tended to benefit more than not. Thus, the debate over the revolving door was whether the benefit was large enough to justify the system. But the Trump administration has dispensed with that gap.

This week the President named Bill Pulte acting Director of National Intelligence while letting him keep his day job running the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chairing the boards of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a man with no intelligence experience (and whose housing experience came from inheriting a housing construction fortune from his namesake grandfather) now holds the keys to the CIA, the mortgage market, and his own crypto portfolio at the same time. His sole qualification comes from being an unflinching political attack dog, who has spent months dragging Trump’s political opponents into court on frivolous charges. Trump put this Princeling attack dog in control of the nation’s $82 billion intelligence community because Trump clearly wants to turn it on Americans.

But don’t focus on the authoritarianism at the expense of the fact that they have turned the revolving door into a Princeling incubator. The administration hires loyalists to help them write rules that enrich the Trump clan. Then the clan pushes them into industry to ensure that industry continues to enrich the clan. Bo Hines spent seven months at the White House helping pass stablecoin regulations (Trump’s main crypto business, World Liberty Financial, WLFI, hawks a stablecoin, USD1). Then he became chief executive of Tether’s American stablecoin arm, whose reserves are custodied by the firm that the Commerce Secretary once ran – and now run by Secretary Lutnick’s Princeling sons. Or Don Jr.’s venture fund takes a stake in a company, the White House leans on the Pentagon, and the company’s valuation multiplies tenfold on taxpayer money. That enrichment accrues primarily to cronies loyal to the Trump clan.

Jared Kushner built the first one of these self-licking ice cream cones with his Affinity Partners, which has spent years hoovering up billions from autocratic Persian Gulf dictators who wanted Trump on speed dial. Of course, that hasn’t stopped Trump from starting a bonfire in the Persian Gulf, while underscoring the Persianness of it.

Thanks to the indefatigable corruption of Jared Kushner, we get to watch how the model plays out once mature. He hired Ric Grennel, the now-fired Princeling who helped Trump deface the Kennedy Center, to organize Affinity Partners’ first “investment” to build a Trump Tower atop a Serbian national monument. It almost sparked a revolution. Affinity Partners’ second act, to build an “Ivanka Island” resort on an Albanian national ecological refuge, threatens to burn the Albanian government to the ground. Few have noted the “investment’s” poetic justice: Former Princeling Ric Grennel was famous for interfering in Kosovar politics, an incident that the then-(and current) PM Kurti called a “parliamentary coup.” Now that Kurti is back, his anti-corruption campaign is popular among Albanians next door, not just Kosovars, and is causing heartburn for the extremely corrupt Albanian PM Rama. Rama cut the initial, corrupt deal with Kushner. We never said these deals were wise from either a business or political perspective.

However, instead of reveling in the irony, the political narrative has thankfully focused on the sheer corruption. As regular readers may remember, we wrote a three-part investigation on how one of Kushner’s anchor investors is the Syrian billionaire family linked to Assad, Russia, the Middle Eastern drug trade (and maybe to funding Hezbollah). That investor was extremely eager to get a family member off the US sanctions list. He even renamed a golf course in Syria after Trump. He also got the family member off the list. Of course, we’re not suggesting causality here.

We took this digression to show you where this corruption inevitably leads. And Trump is constructing an entire system to do exponentially more of it.

Trump names controversial housing official Bill Pulte as acting director of national intelligence

CBS News, June 2, 2026

Meet the newest Princeling, and arguably the most efficient. Bill Pulte, grandson of the homebuilding dynasty and a man who donated around $1 million to Trump’s political operation before joining it, was handed the entire United States intelligence community this week despite never having worked a single day in intelligence, the military, or national security. His qualification? He sends mean tweets about Trump’s political enemies.

If you haven’t been tracking this Princeling career, Pulte now simultaneously runs the agency that regulates roughly 70% of the American mortgage market, chairs the boards of the two companies that dominate the mortgage market and that are regulated by that agency, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), while overseeing the awesome powers of the CIA and the NSA. He spent his FHFA tenure not on the housing crisis but on filing mortgage-fraud criminal referrals against the President’s enemies, including New York Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff, and Fed Governor Lisa Cook, referrals the President then cited to justify trying to fire Cook, a firing now sitting before the Supreme Court. The Government Accountability Office is investigating whether he misused federal authority in doing so. The reward for weaponizing one office was a second one. Even the Senate’s top Republican balked, which tells you something, because that bar is buried deep underground.

US regulator orders Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac to consider crypto for mortgages

The Global Government Forum, June 25, 2025. We are posting this year-old article because this policy is due for a nationwide rollout imminently.

We need to review what the new spymaster was doing with the housing job. Pulte ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to count borrowers’ cryptocurrency holdings as mortgage reserves without first converting them to dollars, a structural change to underwriting across half the nation’s home loans. This change adds risk to the entire market, because the cryptocurrency market regularly implodes. Any mortgage secured against overvalued cryptocurrency would be instantly underwater. We’re old enough to remember 2008, when far less suspect speculative schemes injected systemic risk into the US housing market and, upon implosion, almost took the entire global financial system with it. By this month, this Very Good Idea™ will have become nationwide policy. America, you have been warned.

Also, Pulte has personally disclosed investments in Bitcoin and Solana. A regulator with a crypto portfolio orders the institutions he regulates to treat crypto as good as cash for the largest purchase most Americans ever make. Senators Merkley, Warren, Van Hollen, Hirono, and Sanders wrote to ask whether bolting a volatile asset class onto the mortgage system might end badly for everyone who is not Bill Pulte. Millennials still struggling to catch up from the last housing crisis have an opportunity to speak up. Because Trump’s America is so serious, his intelligence briefings may present interesting platforms for Members of Congress to demonstrate they know how to stick up for their constituents, who are at serious risk from this.

Tether unveils USAT stablecoin for US maUS, names Bo Hines to lead new division

CoinDesk, September 12, 2025, launched January 27, 2026

Here is the incubator working exactly as designed. Bo Hines, all of 29, served seven months as executive director of the White House crypto council, where he helped shepherd the GENIUS Act into law, the federal framework that legitimizes dollar-backed stablecoins and which seems to have been crafted especially to help the Trump family business. Two weeks after he resigned, he took a senior role at Tether, the Salvadorian-regulated (!) stablecoin giant that had spent years operating on the fringes of US regulation. By September, he was named chief executive of Tether’s new American arm, and in January the company launched USAT, a stablecoin built to comply with the very law Hines helped write. The reserves of USAT are custodied by Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm formerly run by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. So a former White House official runs the company, a sitting cabinet secretary’s old firm holds the money, and the product exists because of a law the former White House official drafted. Hines said he had fielded offers from fifty crypto projects. One wonders what, exactly, they were bidding on.

The White House Intervened to Get a $620 Million Deal for a Company Tied to Donald Trump Jr.

ProPublica, May 2026, with Senate follow-up June 2, 2026

Reminder #2 that the incubator also works in reverse, pulling taxpayer money toward Princeling portfolios. In August 2025, Don Jr.’s venture firm, 1789 Capital, took a stake in Vulcan Elements, a rare-earth magnet startup then valued at around $200 million. ProPublica reports the White House then leaned on the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital to hand Vulcan a $620 million loan, the largest that office has ever made. Vulcan’s valuation promptly ballooned toward $2 billion, a tenfold jump in five months underwritten by the public. This week, Senators Warren and Crow, joined by colleagues, demanded that the White House explain itself, noting that the Defense Department appears oblivious to the corruption risk posed by funneling contracts to firms owned by the President’s sons. It is not an isolated case. Don Jr. also advises and holds a stake in Unusual Machines, a drone-parts maker whose stock leaped more than 65% on news the Pentagon was in talks to take an equity stake. Unusual Machines is in the running for a $1 billion drone contract after cornering the market on Ukraine’s cutting-edge drone technology. It’s worth noting two things there: 1) Trump once humiliated Ukrainian President publicly by blowing off Ukrainian offers to Ukraine’s amazing drone technology; 2) the US has been humiliated in the Persian Gulf by Iran using the very Russo-Iranian drone technology Ukraine is expert at defeating. The portfolio is the policy. Or is it the other way around?

Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s Albania luxury project sparks massive protests and corruption probe

BreezyScroll and Dean Blundell, June 2026, building on Senate Finance Committee findings

You may remember Jared Kushner’s Belgrade tower, the one that collapsed in December after Serbia’s culture minister was indicted for stripping the site of its protected heritage status to clear the way for a Trump Tower. Serbia’s Balkan neighbor Albania is now running the sequel. Serbia almost resulted in a Kushner-inspired color revolution against Serbia’s Trump- and Russia-friendly corrupt government. In the Albanian sequel, Affinity Partners is building an ultra-luxury resort on Sazan Island, part of a protected national marine park. The Senate Finance Committee found that the Albania and Serbia deals make the host governments profit-sharing partners and put them in charge of delivering the permits and protected-status changes the projects need. The referee owns a piece of the team. Albania’s anti-corruption prosecutors, SPAK, are now investigating how protected wetlands quietly lost their status, and Albanians have taken to the streets in protest.

We’d urge the Senate to dig more and stay tuned to this Substack. The land deal appears to be mobbed up and oozes with Middle Eastern and Syrian money, as we have already reported. Affinity is funded almost entirely by Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari sovereign wealth, the same Gulf region where Kushner, holding no Senate-confirmed office, negotiates American foreign policy. Albanians appear rightly angry that the government sold a national park to the President’s son-in-law.

Albania is showing Americans the proper way to react to corruption, and America has an election coming up. For over a year, we have been urging the pro-democracy coalition to beat the drum over corruption. In our wildest dreams, we never imagined that Jared Kushner and protesting Albanians could present one of the best platforms and opportunities to launch a nationwide campaign.

World Liberty Financial warns transactions linked to sanctioned addresses may be rejected

PANews and Bitcoinist, June 3, 2026

The Trump family crypto venture issued a public compliance notice this week warning that its smart contracts may delay or reject transfers tied to sanctioned wallets, a tidy bit of housekeeping that arrives, we are sure, by coincidence, just as Senators Warren and Reed renew their scrutiny of the venture. World Liberty Financial is the firm in which an Abu Dhabi vehicle tied to the UAE national security adviser bought a 49% stake for $500 million days before the Inauguration, sending roughly $187 million straight to Trump entities and another $31 million to entities tied to envoy Steve Witkoff’s family. Witkoff retains a financial interest in the same firm while serving as the President’s Middle East envoy. Also this week, congressional Democrats cited World Liberty as the textbook conflict of interest in a push to keep crypto out of Americans’ 401(k) retirement plans. The compliance notice is the venture clearing its throat before regulators. The 60% of voting power held by nine insider wallets is the venture telling you who actually runs it.

Trump’s pardon of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao draws corruption concerns

TIME, March 2026, following the October 2025 pardon

No edition is complete without the pardon desk. Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the Binance founder who pleaded guilty to failing to stop money laundering on a platform used to move funds tied to terrorism and child sexual abuse, asked the President for a pardon, boosted a Trump crypto venture, and received his full and unconditional pardon. The connective tissue is World Liberty Financial again, whose USD1 stablecoin Binance accepted as payment for a $2 billion Abu Dhabi investment in the exchange. Asked on national television why he pardoned CZ, the President said he did not know who he was. This is the same defense he spent years insisting was implausible when Biden used it. The favor flows one way, the memory fails conveniently, and the richest man in crypto walks free. Everyone in this arrangement was a willing participant. They appreciate the opportunity. Remember their names.