Is Trump Taking Chinese Bribes?

And acting as the frontman for a massive Chinese intelligence operation?

Last week, we discussed how a non-existent UAE foundation “invested” $100 million in the president’s crypto venture. We decided to dig deeper, and it gets far worse. The constellation of corporate shells, state-owned enterprise connections, and blockchain surveillance platforms orbiting President Donald Trump’s World Liberty Financial (token: $WLFI) gives the appearance of being a bonanza for Chinese intelligence. When a situation presents a fact pattern this stark, the onus is on the president to prove that his company isn’t a conduit for bribes to him and that his company isn’t the beard for a massive Chinese intelligence operation.

Let’s dive in. Just to summarize last week’s note…Dave Lee, who doesn’t appear to exist, runs the Aqua1 Foundation, which also doesn’t appear to exist, but paid Trump’s company $100 million just weeks before Trump made the inexcusable decision to provide the UAE with sensitive AI microchips. That UAE company has proven Chinese ties. It also shares infrastructure with Web3Port, a firm that Binance banned for allegedly engaging in coordinated market manipulation. If Lee is David Jia Hua Li, as David Silverman reports, Li’s LinkedIn shows him working at China National Petroleum Corporation, a state-owned enterprise under direct Chinese Communist Party (CCP) control. Li also worked for Web3Port. The money trail originates from unknown sources through the OKX Exchange (which earlier pleaded guilty to laundering $5 billion) and ultimately ends up in Trump’s pockets.

The EU is reportedly investigating Chinese-founded but now Seychelles-domiciled crypto exchange OKX for allegedly facilitating the laundering of the proceeds from the BytBit hack. Along with BytBit and Binance, OKX is one of the major exchanges listing Trump’s WLFI tokens.

MovaChain

Got all that? Because it gets worse. Aqua1 also co-led a $100 million investment round for MovaChain. MovaChain’s founder, Stephen Wong, runs the Belt and Road Blockchain Association. This is literally China’s vehicle for implementing blockchain surveillance across a region it aims to build into its sphere of influence.

Through its MovaChain investment, Aqua1 is positioning itself to be the “leading UAE web3 investment fund.” Given the UAE’s penchant for acting on Beijing’s behalf, that should land them on our national security radar.

MovaChain is building a “global payment infrastructure,” and, with it, China appears to be building a cat’s perch to monitor international crypto transactions. So, is China paying WLFI to be its frontman for embedding China’s surveillance tools into Western financial systems?

Focus on the network

Don’t look at this scheme as one trying to control Trump. China is probably wise enough not to tie itself to complex quid pro quo arrangements with someone as erratic – and given his age and habits, as potentially temporary – as Trump. As I previously argued, they can simply buy policy outcomes when needed (as such, Taiwan should take note and prepare its checkbook). However, China’s CCP needs to control financial flows through the crypto ecosystem. To pull this off, China needs a substantial presence in the cryptocurrency sector, and indicator after indicator points to WLFI as the handmaiden for that effort.

Every pension fund forced to buy tokens through index inclusion should consider itself a potential unwitting participant in Chinese intelligence gathering. Every transaction processed through a network interconnected with Chinese infrastructure feeds data to entities bound by Chinese law to share it with their intelligence services. Thus, every partnership WLFI announces expands China’s surveillance reach into the American and financial infrastructure.

In the Free World, we worry about cryptocurrency being a vector for illicit transfers – and it is that. But the authoritarians who run China have tended to worry about it because it is a threat to their power. Cryptocurrency could be a transmission mechanism for capital escaping their repressed financial system, and too much capital fleeing the system is a threat to China’s political stability. Beijing needs to surveil that release valve, and, as we all know, cryptocurrency is deliberately designed to be difficult to surveil – which is why governments, including our own, have made great efforts to monitor the blockchain. Now, the Chinese can circumvent this with a surveillance architecture that masquerades as a legitimate part of the actual cryptocurrency infrastructure. And who better to provide that cover than the crypto-gaga president of the United States?

The libertarians and techbros see in crypto a path to economic liberation, so they bought a US president. But in a spectacular demonstration of the rule of unintended consequences, by purposefully overlooking that president’s corruption, they may be funding a surveillance system by the CCP and forever branding crypto as a tool of the CCP and global authoritarianism. And the techbros don’t want to share power with Beijing or give it veto power, while still accessing Chinese markets and infrastructure. With Trump’s active assistance, China appears to be wiring the global crypto system to voluntarily feed data to Beijing’s intelligence collection systems. It’s evil but brilliant. Mr. Andreessen, call your office, your lapdog is shredding the drapes.

Justin Sun

We don’t draw this conclusion based solely on MovaChain and Acqua1. Justin Sun is another major investor in WLFI. If you remember his name, it’s probably because the SEC “coincidentally” dropped charges against him months after his purchase of Trump’s memecoin, $TRUMP. Or maybe you know of him because groups like TRM Labs identified his Tron network as facilitating over half of all global illicit crypto transactions in 2024. But we’re focused on the point that Sen Jeff Merkley made: his CCP connections. For example, he was a Deputy Leader in a blockchain research project at the prestigious Communist Party School.

China’s National Intelligence Law requires all Chinese companies to cooperate with intelligence gathering. Sun doesn’t have a choice – he’s an asset whether he wants to be or not. And Trump rehabilitated him.

Not only did Trump’s “independent” SEC drop the charges against him, but Trump’s company made him an advisor after he saved WLFI’s struggling launch. Sun and WLFI are currently at odds due to (surprise, surprise) allegations of market manipulation. However, he may already have served his purpose. He saved the president’s company, which created a vehicle to assist China in building a strategic listening network.

Beyond finance…

And it has already metastasized beyond finance. The fashion in the crypto world is the “tokenization” (i.e., the securitization with crypto) of real-world assets (#RWAs). Well, Aqua1 is tokenizing precisely what China needs. On September 4th, it invested $20 million in the Canadian agriculture tech company Above Food Ingredients, Inc.

But in July, to great fanfare, Trump’s Agriculture Department had launched an initiative to intervene in China’s ability to do such things in the US. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.) introduced the “Protecting Our Farms and Homes from China Act,” which bans Chinese companies and individuals tied to the Chinese Communist Party from acquiring or leasing American farmland and homes. At a joint press conference attended by the Secretaries of Defense, Agriculture, and Homeland Security, standing alongside the governors of Arkansas, Tennessee and Nebraska, the Trump administration announced an initiative to “claw back” farmland that has been purchased by foreigners in the name of national security.

They did not raise the possibility of the president’s biggest investor creating threats to American farmers or presenting a fresh national security threat for Canada, our second largest trading partner and existential ally.

Funding proxies?

If you were China and wanted to dominate the crypto space, could you design a better operation? For the low, low price of $100 million, you would have a compromised US president (albeit one already so compromised you need special software to see all the connections) to promote your platforms – and with that, the legitimacy that the US presidency conveys (for now) . You’d have access to financial data from the world’s largest economy, enough ownership in the president’s company to manipulate him and the ability to generate profits through market manipulation.

Seen through this prism, the massive Bytbit hack makes more sense. There, North Korean hackers stole $1.5 billion in cryptocurrency in one of the largest financial hacks ever. A hack that initially appeared state-sponsored suddenly seems more plausible. Why risk a transfer payment to your authoritarian client state when you can build the infrastructure to monitor the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem and then simply instruct the client state on how to steal it?

Pump-and-dump with Chinese characteristics

The Movement Foundation gave the world one of the more spectacular crypto market manipulation scandals last December. It’s complicated and tedious. If you’re interested, click here. However, the tl;dr is that it is an alleged pump-and-dump scheme that generated $38 million in illicit profits and resulted in an 86% decline in the MOVE token price. At the center of it was the Movement Foundation, described as “backed by Trump’s World Liberty Financial.”

Also at the center was, again, Web3Port. As the site CoinCatcher put it: “​​Internal contracts show that Rentech, a company with almost no digital footprint, appears on both sides of the transaction: on the one hand, it is a subsidiary of Web3Port, and on the other hand, it appears as an agent of the Movement Foundation, raising questions about ‘self-dealing’ behavior.” Also at the center of it was Galen Law-Kun, who founded, among other things, the Hong Kong-based Double Peak Group to “create a bridge connecting the innovations in decentralized technologies emerging from China and India with the broader international markets.”

Double Peak has co-invested with Sequoia Capital, an entity Select Committee on the CCP once noisily investigated for trying to help secure advanced AI chips for China – the very thing the president of the United States green-lit after receiving a $100M “investment” from a phantom UAE foundation that began this very tedious story.

The circle of life

On January 28, 2025, WLFI invested $1.5 million to acquire 3.42 million MOVE tokens. The day before, on January 27, Web3Port invested $10 million USDT in 200 million WLFI tokens. Of course, WLFI denies any swap deal; however, if one existed, you would have a circular relationship where someone made $38 million in profits from a pump-and-dump scheme, and then WLFI helped launder the China-linked Web3Port profits back into the crypto ecosystem.

This isn’t some complex conspiracy theory requiring elaborate assumptions. Tedious, yes, but it’s a straightforward reading of documented connections and financial flows. MovaChain, Aqua1, Sun, and all the others certainly have all of the appearances of being a Chinese intelligence operation. A bare minimum request should be that a sitting president of the United States explain his involvement given the set of facts set out here.

The above-mentioned Select Committee on the CCP, which claims to be serious about US security and non-partisan, should investigate every connection, every server, every transaction. To double-check their homework, state attorneys general with subpoena power can demand AWS records for these shared servers. Is Trump profiting off Beijing’s attempt to hijack blockchain infrastructure, thereby creating a pipeline for intelligence gathering?

If so, we’ve allowed China to build a financial surveillance network with the president of the United States as their brand ambassador. When you have Chinese state enterprise associates routing $100 million through criminal exchanges to the president’s personal profit center, when the funded platforms openly promote Belt and Road initiatives, when every major investor has documented CCP connections – you don’t get to claim this is legitimate business. You have to prove it’s not an intelligence operation.

This isn’t a redux of the excesses of Russiagate – the very branding of which is a deliberate way for America to collectively ignore the president’s very real and long-standing Russian ties. China knows (and Russia, along with the crypto bros, is finding out) that Trump is too unreliable to be an agent. Rather, his greed, narcissism and – above all – his unceasing and bottomless corruption are weapons to advance China’s strategic objectives. In other words, China doesn’t need to control him. They can simply fund him and let his animal instincts for corruption do the work. They’re not buying a president. They’re investing in a Silicon Valley-subsidized global spokesperson for surveillance capitalism that appears to be contributing to a generational intelligence failure and strategic corruption of such grand scale that it boggles the mind.

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