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.