Public Citizen Renews Call for Investigations Into Crypto Corruption
In light of potentially illegal and obviously corrupt actions of Trump and the crypto lobby, Congress must pass legislation to fight back.
If you are covering the crypto industry’s increasingly corrupt forays into politics and policy, start by getting in touch with Public Citizen. We’re the leading critic of the crypto industry – tracking crypto’s unprecedented election spending and the influence the industry has purchased with it.
Just this week, Public Citizen again called for an investigation into President Donald Trump’s potentially illegal promotion of his own meme coin. We previously criticized the Trump administration for allowing foreign governments to funnel money to him through this coin, and have called on Congress to bar the president from selling and profiting from his meme coin. And we were one of the first groups to blast Trump’s executive order on crypto, having recognized early on that it was part and parcel of this grift.
In addition, Public Citizen is closely following U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy’s (D-Conn.) “Meme Act,” which would bar the president and Congress from issuing and profiting from meme coins; U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley’s (D-Ore.) “End Crypto Corruption Act;” the back and forth over the Genius Act, which problematically invites major commercial firms such as Amazon, Walmart, Twitter/X, and Facebook/Meta to enter the banking sector; and U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters’s (D-Calif.) walkout and subsequent shadow hearing on Trump’s conflicts of interest with the crypto industry.
“All available signs point to Donald Trump trading deregulation of the crypto industry in exchange for personal and political enrichment,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen. “Crypto helped elect Trump, and now they are helping him add millions to his personal bank account. As is often the case with this administration, the corruption and scandal is happening out in the open, right in front of our eyes. The question now is what are our elected leaders going to do to stop it? Passing legislation to fight this corruption is a great place to start.”