New York Times reporter Eric Lipton says the Trump family businesses, including their crypto company, are capitalizing on the President's position, and creating unprecedented conflicts of interest.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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Your support means so much to us, now more than ever. You help make NPR shows freely available to everyone. We're proud to do this work for you and with you. Okay, let's start the show. This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. Since President Trump has returned to office, his conflicts of interest have surpassed those of his first term.
He's no longer hesitant about pursuing profits without restraint, according to my guest Eric Lipton, an investigative reporter for The New York Times. Lipton has written a series of articles about the president's conflicts of interest relating to his family's real estate and development companies and cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial.
Lipton writes that World Liberty Financial has eviscerated the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in ways without precedent in modern history. Trump has urged Congress to pass a bill known as the Genius Act, which would make it easier for U.S. companies to deal in a type of cryptocurrency known as stablecoin.
After advocating for passage of the bill, the Trump family crypto company started issuing its own stablecoin and became one of the biggest issuers in the world. Partly as a result of Lipton and his co-authors reporting, Democrats are now trying to amend the Genius Act. I spoke with Eric Lipton yesterday morning about his reporting on Trump's conflicts of interest.
While we were recording, a Senate subcommittee opened an inquiry into, quote, Trump crypto corruption. Hours later, Senate Democrats introduced the End Crypto Corruption Act, which would ban the president, vice president, senior executive branch officials, members of Congress, and their immediate families from
from financially benefiting from issuing, endorsing, or sponsoring crypto assets such as meme coins and stable coins, both of which we discuss in this interview. Eric Lipton, welcome back to Fresh Air.
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