By Erica Orden
10/22/2026
A shareholder of a crypto company on Thursday sued President Donald Trump and the crypto venture co-founded by his family in federal court, alleging Trump violated the Constitution by profiting off his office through a pair of deals linked to the United Arab Emirates.
“No president in American history has profited from his office so brazenly,” the lawsuit says. “The President himself has openly admitted that the lack of consequences emboldens him, not only to continue using his high office to enrich himself, but to expand the fortune he is extracting from the trust the American people placed in him.”
The complaint from a shareholder of Circle Internet Group accuses Trump of violating the foreign emoluments clause of the Constitution, which bars the president from accepting money or benefits from a foreign government without congressional approval. The complaint focuses on two deals involving World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm Trump co-founded with his sons.
David Wachsman, a spokesperson for World Liberty Financial, said the company is “compliant with all U.S. laws and regulations.”
“No one at World Liberty Financial works for the U.S. Government. These claims are without merit and we look forward to resolving them in court,” Wachsman said.
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said “there are no conflicts of interest,” calling the lawsuit “frivolous.”
“This is yet another frivolous lawsuit that echoes the same, tired narrative that Democrats have pushed against President Trump, his family, and his administration for a decade,” Kelly said. “President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public – which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media.”
In the first deal, Trump, prior to the start of his second term, sold a 49% stake of World Liberty Financial for $500 million “routed from” the UAE, according to the complaint. Trump has received millions in payouts from that deal since taking office, the complaint alleges.
Wachsman has previously said Trump was not involved in the transaction and currently has no role with the company.
The second deal concerns the purchase of $2 billion of the Trump family’s digital currency, a deal the lawsuit alleges was undertaken by an investment fund created by the UAE government that “orchestrated a scheme to inflate the value of President Trump’s crypto holdings.”
“The corrupt purchase handed President Trump millions of dollars in interest and dramatically expanded the circulation of his stablecoin overnight,” the lawsuit says.
Also named as a defendant in the lawsuit is Steve Witkoff in his capacity as Trump’s Middle East special envoy.
J. Benjamin Greenberg, a software engineer who once worked for Circle Internet Group, filed the suit in Washington federal court. Greenberg owns about 10,000 shares of its stock and is bringing the lawsuit in Circle’s name in what’s known as a shareholder derivative suit.
“Circle did not initiate, direct, authorize, or participate in the filing,” a company spokesperson said. “We do not comment on pending litigation.”
Greenberg is seeking to have the court strip Trump of the payments he received from the deals in question, order Trump to disclose any other foreign crypto payments he has received and for unspecified damages.
“Although the President has dressed his corrupt arrangements in the language of new technology — tokens and stablecoins, holding companies and reserve yields,” the lawsuit says, “that vocabulary must not obscure what this is: the oldest form of public corruption, a public official taking money from a foreign power.”
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