Corruption Concerns: A recap of official White House actions raising red flags in 2025

President Trump and the executive branch took official actions, including pardons and dropping investigations, to benefit Trump donors and business partners, both foreign and domestic. A 2025 recap.

White House East Wing Ballroom Donations

The White House released a list of 37 donors for the construction of the reconstructed White House East Wing ballroom. The list includes individuals and corporations. Many companies such as Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen Hamilton hold government contracts including with the Defense Department. Google agreed to pay $22 million towards the ballroom as part of a legal settlement. Palantir has been awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts this year, as have Amazon and Microsoft. Coinbase, another donor, is seeking government approval to offer blockchain-based stocks. These companies appear to be engaging in a pay-to-play by investing in the East Wing replacement.

Pardons for Sale

Justice Sotomayor wrote in her dissent to the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Trump v. United States: “Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune, immune, immune.” The decision states that a president can’t be held criminally liable for official actions as president. So as Trump pardons his donors, he’s not obligated to keep it a secret.

Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, known as CZ, received a pardon from Trump in October after Binance received a $2 billion investment from the Trump Family’s cryptocurrency venture World Liberty Financial (WLF) in May. When asked about the pardon, Trump said he didn’t know anything about CZ and that he pardoned him because Trump was told that CZ was the victim of government weaponization. CZ pleaded guilty for failing to combat money laundering on his crypto exchange in 2023. He was sentenced to four months in jail and released in September 2024, meaning he had served his full sentence more than a year before receiving the pardon.

Trevor Milton was pardoned after donating nearly $2 million to Trump’s re-election campaign. Trump said that he pardoned Minton because it was “highly recommended by many people” and asserted that Minton was only prosecuted because he had supported Trump in the past. He had been convicted of fraud for lying to investors about his electric vehicle start-up Nikola.

Paul Walczak was pardoned after his mother attended a MAGA Inc. fundraiser in May last year. He had pleaded guilty in 2024 for tax crimes related to his nursing home. Rather than paying federal income taxes collected from his employees, he kept more than $10 million and used it for his own expenses including the purchase of a yacht.

Dropped Investigations

The Trump Administration has dropped or paused enforcement actions against 165 corporations last year, including a third of all targeted investigations against technology corporations, an industry which has provided vast financial support for the President. Here are just a few examples:

Elon Musk spent hundreds of millions in the 2024 election and became head of the Trump Administration’s DOGE team. The Administration then dropped or paused more than 40 agency investigations into Musk’s businesses, including SpaceX, Tesla, and Neuralink.

In May, after Trump-aligned WLF invested billions into CZ’s Binance, the SEC almost immediately dropped its case against the company, months before the founder was pardoned.

Cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun was charged in 2023 with selling unregistered crypto securities. After Trump won the 2024 election, Sun bought $30 million of WLF tokens, and when Trump took office the SEC paused its enforcement action against him.

Coinbase gave $1 million to the Trump inauguration fund and the SEC dropped an enforcement action against them as well after Trump took office.

Foreign Influence

In May last year, a United Arab Emirates (U.A.E) senior government official announced a $2 billion investment into WLF. Soon after, the U.S. signed an agreement with the U.A.E. to provide American-made A.I. chips.

That same month, the White House accepted a luxury plane from the Qatari government with the intention of retrofitting it to serve as Air Force One while Trump is still in office. Then, the President signed an agreement to generate an economic exchange worth at least $1.2 trillion.

Trump traveled to the capital of Saudi Arabia in April and May, and in September a new Trump-branded building was announced in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s second largest city.

A break on tariffs against Switzerland from 39% to 15% came one week after Trump met with Swiss business leaders, accepting gifts (that is, in his official capacity) such as a gold-plated desk clock and an engraved gold bar. Negotiations with Swiss President Karin Keller fell flat, but after meeting with Swiss business executives Trump announced a deal in the works to lower tariffs. It still has to be approved by the Swiss parliament and put up for a referendum.