Trump Defends WLFI Stake on 60 Minutes as Senate Probe Looms

Donald Trump sat down with 60 Minutes at the White House over the weekend and spent part of the interview swatting away conflict-of-interest questions about World Liberty Financial, the crypto company he co-owns and his sons manage. Asked by interviewer Ross Douthat about foreign backers tied to the UAE, Trump leaned on a simple defense: he doesn't run the thing. His money mostly sits in index funds at big Wall Street firms, he said, while his children handle the family business and he has little idea what gets traded. "My sons run the company. It's hard to say to them, 'Don't do anything anymore for four years because I'm president,'" he said. Douthat pressed the reverse scenario — a Biden family business bankrolled by Middle Eastern investors — and asked whether that would sound corrupt. Trump's answer: the difference is he doesn't know how WLFI operates.

It's the second time in months he's had to make that case. Back in July on CNBC, Trump said he "could know about it," adding there was "nothing illegal" or wrong about it. The numbers behind the scrutiny aren't small: he pulled in more than $1.2 billion from crypto ventures last year, including nearly $600 million from WLFI and $636 million from sales of meme coins carrying his name. When Douthat noted that no previous president owned a crypto company, Trump brushed it off, saying his predecessors owned "whatever crypto was at the time," oil included. "Every president has had this problem," he said.

The pushback is now formal. Senator Richard Blumenthal has sent letters to World Liberty, Fight Fight Fight LLC — a key entity behind the Trump meme coin — Binance and USDT issuer Tether, demanding records for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations by January 4, 2027. According to CryptoPotato, that inquiry centers on possible conflicts of interest in the Trump family's digital asset operations, and no final conclusion has been reached. So Trump gets to keep making his argument — with a Senate deadline now on the calendar.