Corruption Watch: The Trump Family Profits $5 Billion, Susan Collins Carefully Considers While Pocketing $2 Million, Congressmembers Unveil a Stock Trading Ban

Getting $5 billion from an industry you are rapidly deregulating is not draining the swamp.

Pocketing $5 BILLION from an industry you are rapidly deregulating is not draining the swamp. Trump and his family have profited at least $5 billion on paper after their company World Financial Liberty opened a new cryptocurrency to trading, reports the Wall Street Journal. Yes, five billion dollars. This comes at a time when Trump has deregulated cryptocurrency, and he and his sons are invested in multiple business propositions that stand to benefit from lax crypto and tech rules. While he is President of the United States. There are lots of layers to this one, so stay tuned for more on Trump’s crypto grifts next week from Democracy News.

Either flagrant corruption or flagrant racism and sexism – or both. For at least the second time, the Department of Justice has dropped charges against a client represented by United States Attorney General Pam Bondi’s brother Brad Bondi, ABC News reports. Biden Administration prosecutors had filed charges against a property developer, accusing him of lying about hiring women-and-minority-owned subcontractors to get tax incentives. The Trump appointee who withdrew the Justice Department’s case last week said that the Department was no longer pursuing those types of “race-and sex-based cases.” Even if that’s not a cover for blatant nepotism, it’s not reassuring.

So much for eliminating government waste. ICE gave a no-bid, $2.25 million contract to a Republican donor with a history of fraud, according to a report published by Zeteo. After Congress’s megabill gave ICE an unprecedented $75 million, ICE awarded Hendrick Motorsports LLC a contract to purchase 25 Chevrolet Tahoes, which means the government spent $90,000 on each vehicle. The LLC’s owner is a major Republican donor.

Will Congress cut down on its own corruption? On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of House lawmakers unveiled legislation that would ban lawmakers from trading individual stocks. An overwhelming majority of Americans support a stock trading ban – and for good reason. As Democracy News previously reported: According to End Citizens United research based on Capitol Trades data, in 2022 members of Congress collectively traded $265 million worth of stock and by last year that ballooned to $707 million. The top ten stocks traded by members of Congress from January 2023 to July 2025 were: Microsoft, Alphabet Inc., NVIDIA Corporation, Apple Inc, Amazon.com Inc, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Meta Platforms Inc., Berkshire Hathaway Inc, UnitedHealth Group Inc, and Johnson & Johnson. So, our elected officials are trading the stocks of behemoth tech, financial, and healthcare corporations while also making decisions that affect government contracts and laws, not to mention potential anti-trust regulation that could break up corporate monopolies. As AOC said at the legislation’s unveiling, “If anyone says, ‘This isn’t fair, I'm gonna have to divest all my stocks if I run for Congress,’ maybe you should stay home.”

Susan Collins makes the case for Congressional ethics reforms – but not in a helpful way. A super PAC supporting Senator Susan Collins of Maine accepted $2 million from a billionaire private equity donor, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, the day before Republicans voted to advance Trump’s megabill, reports Rolling Stone. In addition to dramatically increasing funding for ICE to execute mass arrests and deportations, the megabill cut funding for Medicaid, gave tax breaks to billionaires, and in several other ways is considered the single greatest transfer of wealth to the already rich in American history. But Collins, forever carefully considering something that seems pretty awful on its face, got her money.

A sign of hope that the Democratic presidential candidate will appeal to more voters in 2028. Last week, the Democratic National Committee took another step toward limiting dark money from the 2028 Democratic presidential primary campaign, reports Common Dreams. (The change will not apply to the general election campaign, when rules would still allow the Democratic nominee to use those types of funds to unseat the GOP). End Citizens United polling shows that voters perceive Democrats as more corrupt than Republicans, so they need to remake their public image in a big way ASAP. Restricting big dark money could be gamechanging, because the Democratic candidate who prevails in the primary would be chosen first by a wide range of Americans, not megadonors who are by definition out of step with the ordinary (and often understandably cynical and angry) voters that Democrats need to win back nationwide.