Fox News legal analyst on Trump's cryptocurrency scheme: “This is very disturbing. There's a lot of foreign money coming into these, into the family coffers.”
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Andy McCarthy and Rich Lowry discuss Trump's cryptocurrency scheme
Citation
From the May 14, 2025, edition of National Review's The McCarthy Report
RICH LOWRY: Crypto. What's the news?
ANDY MCCARTHY: So, well, the news last night, is that an obscure company, that has a Chinese subsidiary. It's a company that, trades on, NASDAQ, and it, it has a Chinese subsidiary. It last year did such booming business that it has had zero revenue.
It only has eight employees. Again, we know this because the company trades on NASDAQ. It turned out that they raised $300,000,000 from an unidentified entity that's set up in The Virgin Islands, which is notorious for, people, because its laws allow for shell companies to be easily set up. The Virgin Islands is notorious for people who want to be anonymous in conducting financial transactions. So we have somebody who we don't know who is giving $300,000,000, bought $300,000,000 of the stock of this nondescript company with the Chinese subsidiary that doesn't apparently have any business, but somehow trades on NASDAQ.
They have gotten $300,000,000 from whoever the source is, and they've announced that they're gonna buy $300,000,000 worth of Trump's meme coin that we talked about last week, the Trump coin. This is the coin that Trump announced, three days before he was being inaugurated that his company or company that he controls, was basically going to market. And the Trump entities are enriched the more that the coin is worth, and they also make money because whether people who buy the meme coin meme coin scheme is basically a pump and dump scheme. You know, people buy a meme coin is not like as I described last week, a meme coin is not like stable coin or other cryptocurrency. It doesn't even pretend to be currency.
It's basically people are buying a memento that's associated with, you know, a person, a joke, an internet influence operation, what have you. But it's a memento of something. Trump's meme coin, the image that they put out when they began to market it three days before he was inaugurated was Trump with his fist in the air going fight, fight, fight, kind of, invoking the memory of the assassination attempt, in Butler. They began selling it. It was, I think that it was selling for 18 cents a token when they first put it out.
At one point, it went up to $75 a token. And there were they marketed, like, a thousand of these tokens. So on paper, Trump was a very rich person and may actually have, have already made over a billion dollars on this based on sales of the coin and also the way they structured it every time a buyer has a transaction in in, this meme coin, the Trump people make money. They make a transaction fee on every transfer of the meme coin. So they've made about $350,000,000 on the, on the transaction fees and their holding of the coins that they have is inflated.
If the, if the price of the coins goes up and every time there's a big purchase of the coins, obviously the value goes up. So now we have this transaction where somebody is basically giving Trump three hundred million dollars. And I think the most alarming thing about the meme coin is, again, we have all these laws against government officials taking foreign money. We have the bribery law in the constitution. We have the Emoluments Clause, but we also have, you know, campaign finance laws that make it illegal for foreigners to give American campaigns or related activities like, inauguration funds, foreigners can't contribute to them.
So something like the meme coin, which Trump sets up as a private business of his and is obviously using the presidency as leverage to increase the value of it. And because crypto, a lot of the transactions can be fairly anonymous transactions, what the people who are investigating this are finding is that the money and it's now it's been billions of dollars, but the money that's pouring into these ventures is from overseas. A lot of it comes from China. A lot of it comes from Singapore.
A lot of it comes from places in the Middle East. A lot of it comes from other places in Asia. So it's a way for foreigners to pay Trump a lot of money. And some of them have been pretty open about the fact that they're not only big buyers of this meme coin. Trump is now, the other the other meme coin thing that's gone on for the last couple of weeks is they were worried that the price of meme coin, the market in meme coin, the Trump meme coin was going to collapse because after it surged at the beginning, it's gone down.
And even though a lot of people made a lot of money, most investors have lost money. The last thing I saw this week said that the losses were probably over $3,000,000,000, but a lot of people who got in early, as is typical of a pump and dump scheme, a lot of people who got in early and then sold when the, when the value surged made a lot of money. And again, the Trump's make a lot of money because whether investors win or lose, they make the transaction fee, but they don't want they don't want the thing to collapse because they're still holding about 800,000 of these coins. They only marketed 200,000, and the value of what they're holding depends on what the market is. So what they did to try to prop up the market was have a contest where the top I think it was 220 purchasers of the Trump meme coin would be invited to a big gala dinner at Trump's Virginia golf club.
LOWRY: Yeah.
MCCARTHY: And one of the big prizes, if you were at the, like, the really high rung of people who were purchases, was you're gonna get a tour of the White House. So, I mean, it couldn't be more blatant that, that they're using.
LOWRY: [INAUDIBLE]
MCCARTHY: Yeah. Right. So, they're trying to prop up the price. And in the meantime, a lot of these people have gone public because now they've had this contest and they were trying to win the contest. Right?
So, you know, the Times has a bunch of these people who they've interviewed. And they said, yeah, I bought, like, you know, a million dollars worth of the mean coin to get into the into the contest because I'm hoping to discuss, I'm hoping to meet president Trump at the gala and talk to him about, you know, conditions in Mexico and the tariffs. And I wanna talk to him about crypto policy. Of course, they're trying to buy influence. I mean, it couldn't be more obvious that that's what they're doing.
But the alarming thing here is you have all these foreign I mean, even if the even if they weren't foreign, it would be very disturbing to have somebody who was president leveraging the power of the presidency to get people to buy stuff from him, which is obviously making him much richer. Trump's net worth, according to Forbes, this week is $5,400,000,000 between, you know, what they did to stand up, this Trump media company, the Trump media and technology group that owns, Truth Social. And what they've done with this cryptocurrency stuff, Trump's net worth has doubled in the last year or so. And that's, you know, that's when, Tish James had him on the ropes and it looked for a second like he was gonna lose everything, right?
Which is probably in part why he's so adamant to strike while the iron is hot. But this is very disturbing. There's a lot of foreign money coming into these, into the family coffers.
LOWRY: Is there any precedent for this sort of action? I would they only be Joe Biden and and his his family business? Or have we ever seen anything like this?
MCCARTHY: I don't I don't think so. I mean, I think as I said in the first column I wrote about the cryptocurrency stuff, I think the analogs here would be something like the Biden family business or the Clinton Foundation.
LOWRY: Right.
MCCARTHY: You know, the Clintons set up this foundation in large part so that foreign people could pay them a lot of money and not have to worry about the campaign finance laws.
LOWRY: Pay a lot of money, and you go to the conferences, and you spend time with former president, future presidents, I believe. .
MCCARTHY: Right. Right. And, it all looks like global good. Right? Global do-gooding.
LOWRY: It's we'll just be done in office while in office.
MCCARTHY: Yes. Right. That's the difference is when you were paying into the Clinton Foundation, you were trying to buy influence with very influential buy access to very influential people. And there was always a chance that Hillary could become president again. Right?
But they weren't in office. And with Biden, as scummy as that whole thing was, they actually tried to shut it down and mainly did shut it down in 2019 because he was running for president.
LOWRY: Right.
MCCARTHY: And you could tell, by the way, that Biden, you know, implausibly, how many times did he say, I don't know anything about it. That's Hunter's stuff. I don't ask him about it. I don't know anything about it. I know nothing about it.
So even though they were making what what for them was a lot of money, and they were clearly selling Biden's political influence, they at least had enough sense to say, this has nothing to do with the presidency. I'm not cashing in on my power. You know, they were trying to erase the, to the extent that there was a a a trail of clues that that was what they were doing. They were trying to, to wipe that slate clean. With Trump, he's very much right out in the open, and he's leveraging the actual power of the presidency, which is why the money is so astronomical.
I mean, look, the Biden stuff, the the House Committee trace $27,000,000 into the Biden family coffers, that's a rounding error compared to the money that we're talking about here. Yeah. And it's not surprising that that's true because there's nothing like the power of the presidency. You cannot you can obviously understand why if people think they can turn it to their advantage, that would be something, it would be worth it to them to pay a lot of money for.
LOWRY: Get pardoned. Investigations get dropped. You know? You're you're, It's happening. Some obscure question foreign policy question settled in in your favor or your pay master's favor, etcetera.