A key government agency is dismantling efforts to regulate online betting markets and crypto as President Donald Trump and his family deepen their ties to the booming industries.
The Trump family’s growing footprint in crypto and prediction markets has translated into billions in new wealth, fueled by digital coin offerings and deals with prediction market firms.
Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr., is both an investor in Polymarket, through his investment firm 1789 Capital, and an adviser to Kalshi and Polymarket. The president’s publicly traded media company partnered with Crypto.com last October on what the firms called an exclusive prediction market venture.
At the same time, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a small agency that regulates those industries, has undergone a dramatic retreat from enforcement, and staffers say a series of firings sent a clear warning not to make life difficult for the companies they are supposed to oversee, The New York Times reports.
The CFTC is being led by a single commissioner, Michael S. Selig, a 36-year-old former corporate lawyer with ties to crypto firms and prediction markets, whom Trump appointed as chair in December.
Trump, 79, has left all four other board seats vacant, effectively stripping away the CFTC’s internal checks and balances and consolidating broad authority in the hands of its new chair.
Even before Selig’s appointment, his predecessor, Caroline Pham, undermined the CFTC’s oversight role to benefit powerful industry players connected to the Trump family, the Times reports, citing people familiar with the situation.
The agency’s transformation underscores how Trump, 79, has bent it toward the priorities of his own family and his billionaire friends.
“I’ve been through an almost equal number of Republican and Democratic administrations, and there was always a belief you had to have strong enforcement,” Gretchen Lowe, who spent 30 years at the CFTC and retired last year from a top enforcement job, told the Times. “This is really the first time that politics have affected the C.F.T.C. in such a dramatic way.”
In the 16 months since Trump returned to the White House, the CFTC has brought just two cases involving digital currencies and one involving prediction markets, with all three aimed at individual operators rather than major tech companies.
Meanwhile, the agency has abandoned at least five investigations into crypto firms and pushed out senior career officials who had handled crypto enforcement, the Times reports, citing government documents and former staff members.
“There was a sustained effort to oust enforcement staff who worked on some of the agency’s more significant cryptocurrency matters,” Andrew Rodgers, a CFTC former trial attorney who resigned last year, told the Times.
The seemingly deliberate hollowing out of the CFTC’s enforcement authority has created a direct upside for companies engaged in deals with the Trump family.
When CFTC staff raised concerns that Crypto.com—a close business partner of Trump Media & Technology Group—was giving large trading firms an edge over ordinary sports bettors without full disclosure, Pham urged them to drop the issue and later excluded them from meetings with the company, people familiar with the matter told the Times.
In another episode, Polymarket, which paid a $1.4 million fine to the CFTC under the Biden administration in 2022 for taking bets from Americans without its permission, requested permission to use intermediaries for bets, a move that could make it easier to hide insider trading.
Less than two weeks later, Polymarket announced a “strategic investment” from 1789, an investment firm owned partly by Don Jr., and named him an unpaid adviser.
While reviewing Polymarket’s request, Rahul Varma, the CFTC’s acting director of the market oversight division, and Rachel Berdansky, the deputy compliance director, questioned the strength of Polymarket’s anti-fraud safeguards at a meeting with the company last November, according to the Times.
The agency subsequently put Berdansky on administrative leave and under investigation. She has now retired, while Varma has also been ousted.
Pham left the agency in January to take a job at a crypto company that works with Polymarket.
The CFTC, the White House, the Trump Organization, Polymarket, and Crypto.com did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
US President Trump, family granted immunity from pending tax audits
Democratic lawmakers blast move, which follows the establishment of a controversial ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’.
United States President Donald Trump, his family and his businesses have been granted immunity from any ongoing audits into their tax affairs, according to a directive by the Department of Justice.
The move on Tuesday came as an addendum to Trump’s agreement a day earlier to settle a $10bn lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) over the leak of his tax information to media outlets between 2018 and 2020.
In a one-page document, signed by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the Justice Department said authorities would be “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED” from “prosecuting or pursuing” tax claims against Trump, members of his family and his businesses.
The document, which was posted on the Justice Department’s website without any official announcement or press release, stipulates that the waiver applies to inquiries that are “currently pending or that could be pending”, including any related to tax returns filed by Trump before Monday’s settlement.
Democratic lawmakers immediately blasted the move.
Senator Adam Schiff of California accused the Trump administration of engaging in corruption and “self-dealing”.
“The tax-dodging President gets himself and his whole family a tax break, thanks to Todd Blanche,” Schiff said in a statement on social media.
Nathan Goldman, a professor of accounting and tax expert at North Carolina State University, called the move “unprecedented”.
“The clause within the settlement that Trump and his family will no longer be subject to the audit process breaks from the current tax policies and puts Trump in a situation where he can pay what he believes is the correct amount without any fear of prosecution,” Goldman told Al Jazeera.
“This makes him and his family different from other US taxpayers who, should they underpay their taxes, could be subject to audit, penalty, and potential jail time,” he added.
Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer under former President George W Bush, said exempting Trump from any tax obligations would be unconstitutional.
“If the president or his family owe the IRS money, this is a violation of the domestic emoluments clause of the US Constitution, which specifically says that the president cannot receive any profits or advantages from the US government other than his salary appropriated by Congress,” Painter told Al Jazeera.
Like other citizens, US presidents are legally required to file tax returns and can be audited. They are also entitled to the same privacy protections as other taxpayers.
While the IRS does not disclose taxpayers’ information, every major-party presidential nominee dating back to 1980 voluntarily released their tax returns until Trump broke with the tradition during his 2016 campaign.
The Justice Department and the Trump Organization did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Justice Department’s directive marks a dramatic expansion in Trump’s settlement agreement, which established a so-called “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate people who claim to have been victims of politically-motivated “lawfare”.
Critics have likened the initiative to a “slush fund”, warning that it is likely to be used to reward Trump’s allies.
Decisions on distributing money from the $1.776bn fund will be made by a five-member commission, four of whom will be directly appointed by Blanche, a Trump appointee who formerly acted as his personal lawyer.
In heated exchanges with Democratic senators on Tuesday, Blanche denied that Trump had directed him to establish the fund or that it would be used in a partisan manner.
“Whether you’re Hunter Biden, or whether you’re another individual who believes they were the victim of weaponisation, they can all apply to this fund,” Blanche said, referring to former US President Joe Biden’s second son.
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