Howard Lutnick under fire as his billion-dollar firm quietly cashed in on shady cryptocurrency before Trump named him commerce secretary

Daily Mail​

4 days ago

Howard Lutnick, the billionaire Commerce Secretary under President Trump who has been accused by MAGA insiders of being his 'handler', has drawn scrutiny not just for his powerful role in government, but for his history of appearing at the center of some of America's most controversial chapters.
Some have even likened him to a real-life Zelig, after the Woody Allen film, inexplicably present at moments ranging from 9/11 to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
Now, critics say he's profiting once again, this time through a murky cryptocurrency deal with his company, Cantor Fitzgerald, that lost 658 employees in the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks.
His firm quietly acquired a major stake in Tether, a controversial digital currency, in the months before Lutnick joined the Trump administration.
Tether, which is based in El Salvador, is allegedly - according to federal prosecutors -tied to an array of illicit activity - reportedly helping fund everything from North Korea 's nuclear weapons program to Mexican drug cartels, Russian arms dealers, Middle Eastern terror networks and Chinese fentanyl traffickers.
Tether's current CEO, Paolo Ardoino has consistently denied that Tether is involved in illicit activities, calling such reports 'wholly inaccurate' and 'wildly misleading.'
Last January, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass,) sent a letter to Lutnick prior to his confirmation hearing citing her 'serious concern' over his 'deep involvement with and support for Tether, a known facilitator of criminal activity.'
Warren called Tether 'the outlaws' favorite currency' and said that even though Lutnick had promised to divest himself of all interests in Cantor Fitzgerald that his personal and family ties still raise the potential for a conflict of interest.
Between November 2023 and November 2024, Cantor Fitzgerald invested $600 million in Tether, approximately 5 percent, in exchange for a contract to manage its US Treasury reserves, earning substantial fees.
Lutnick has already been referred to as the 'handler' of Trump by peeved MAGA devotees who were outraged by his backing of Trump's response to the messy rollout of the Epstein files
Before and after his appointment as Commerce Secretary, Lutnick advocated for the Genius Act, which passed into law July 18 and regulates and legitimizes stablecoins, of which Tether is the largest and most powerful.
Unlike other cryptocurrencies, a stablecoin is a digital version of the dollar that maintains a stable price where one coin equals one US dollar.
This means Cantor Fitzgerald will make even more billions, through fees, as a result of the prescient deal, they made to manage those treasuries.
'Cantor Fitzgerald is the biggest beneficiary of the Genius Act,' Aaron Day, an author and fellow at the Brownstone Institute, told the Daily Mail.
'Does Pelosi's insider trading or Hunter Biden's Ukraine oil role seem corrupt? How about steering $27 trillion in yearly stablecoin transactions to benefit the Commerce Secretary's firm?
'Lutnick came out of nowhere with no political experience to run Trump's transition team, and while he was angling for Treasury Secretary, he got Commerce. Then he talked up Tether and pushed for the Genius Act.'
'This guy's firm is now managing all the actual US dollars and treasuries that back the most popular digital dollar.
'He has significant control over our money supply. A lot of people don't understand this stuff, which is part of the game - but it's dangerous and Lutnick is a dangerous guy.'
Though Lutnick nominally divested himself of his holdings in Cantor Fitzgerald earlier this year after joining the Trump Administration, the firm is now run by his sons, Brandon, 27, the chairman, and Kyle, 28, the executive vice chairman.
Both young men went to the elite Horace Mann school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and Stanford University.
Kyle has been a DJ and rapped under the name Kxtz. The brothers have already been criticized for allowing Cantor Fitzgerald investors to bet that Trump's much-ballyhooed tariffs - talked up by Lutnick as much as Trump - will eventually be shot down in court.
When Daily Mail reached out for comment, a spokesman for Lutnick at the Commerce Dept. emailed a statement saying that 'Secretary Lutnick has fully complied with the terms of his ethics agreement with respect to divestiture and recusals and will continue to do so.'
Lutnick's team declined further comment, pointing only to a recent Wall Street Journal story claiming that Tether was 'the big loser' in the passage of the Genius Act because it now has to clean up its act and be more transparent.
Aaron Day and others say that the article does not outline how Cantor Fitzgerald will ultimately benefit from the new government oversight.
'Lutnick had the foresight to invest in Tether in exchange for being able to manage the treasuries on behalf of Tether even before the government by the Genius Act required that stablecoins be backed only by treasuries,' Day said.
'All the hoops that Tether now has to go through will only benefit Lutnick.'
A former Wall Street executive familiar with Cantor Fitzgerald agreed, saying: 'Lutnick's the kind of operator who plays the long game with a smile and a dagger,' she told the Daily Mail.
'He's been dining out on Cantor Fitzgerald's 9/11 tragedy for years, using that goodwill to slip deeper into Washington while quietly building an empire.
'Now he's managed to turn a private crypto play into a government-sanctioned money machine for his own firm - handing the keys to his sons while pretending he's out of the game. It's not innovation - it's infiltration.'
'The Genius Act may have clipped Tether's wings, but it boosted the entire regulated stablecoin market - which Cantor Fitzgerald now controls from the inside.'
Tether co-founder Brock Pierce told Daily Mail that Lutnick's buy-in showed 'good timing,' but denied he was behind the Genius Act's passage - despite the law paving the way for billions in fees for Cantor Fitzgerald through its role managing Tether's Treasury assets
Brock Pierce, the co-founder of Tether, admitted to the Daily Mail that Lutnick 'exhibited good timing' with Cantor Fitzgerald's decision to buy a stake in the stablecoin but said he disagreed with reports that Lutnick was a big reason why the Genius Act passed.
'Cantor Fitzgerald got a good deal and it was well-timed,' Pierce said. 'It's a sign that Howard was shrewd, but it was Congress who passed the Genius Act, not him.'
Lutnick, 64, has come under attack by both liberals and conservatives in recent months.
The brash, high-energy Long Island native and one-time donor to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign was standing prominently by Trump's side on July 15 when the president was hammered with questions about releasing the Epstein files.
Trump called the Epstein files 'fake news' and dissed his MAGA supporters as 'weaklings' for pressing him on it. They, in turn, angrily called Lutnick his 'handler.'
Critics have slammed him for what's been called his aggressive and chaotic tariff policies, conflicts of interest, media blunders and for suggesting that some Social Security recipients are 'fraudsters.'
Lutnick has said that Trump's tariffs wouldn't bring on a recession but added that if they did cause a recession, it would be 'worth it.'
He also claimed that only 'fraudsters' would be concerned about the possibility of missing their Social Security checks - citing his 94-year-old mother-in-law, who he said would never 'call and complain' if her check didn't arrive.
MAGA operative Steve Bannon has called Lutnick an 'unmitigated disaster' who should be yanked from making public appearances because his 'messaging' - especially about tariffs - is so off.
'I don't know why Lutnick's still doing media. Let me be blunt,' Bannon said in April. 'I think he's close to being an unmitigated disaster. We should see a lot less of Lutnick on TV. We have to have a clear message, so people understand what the process is.'
Billionaire Mark Cuban asked if Lutnick 'has done anything of value as Commerce Secretary?' while New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said he 'crawled out of a special kind of sewer' and Martin O'Malley, the former governor of Maryland and former Social Security Administration Commissioner said Lutnick was 'appalling.'
None of the bad press seems to bother Lutnick, but that may be because he's used to being in the eye of the storm.
Lutnick was one of the fortunate few, along with his older sister Edie Lutnick and Larry Silverstein, owner of the World Trade Center complex, who hadn't arrived at work at the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.
At the time, Lutnick was the chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald, whose offices were on the 101st to 105th floors of the North Tower.
Lutnick, who had joined the firm as a lowly broker in 1983, rose to take over from co-founder Bernie Cantor in 1996 after a contentious succession fight.
He was not yet work on September 11 because he had to take his young son, Kyle, to his first day of kindergarten at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx.
Edie (left) and Lutnick had not been at work during the 9/11 attacks - he had taken Kyle to his first day of kindergarten at Horace Mann in the Bronx
Cantor Fitzgerald lost 658 employees that day, including Lutnick's trader brother, Gary.
Howard rebuilt the company - but not without controversy. Four days after the jets hit the towers, Lutnick stopped paychecks to nearly 700 employees - many of whom at that time were still missing.
'I was disgusted, you know?' Anne Wodenshek, a mother of five children who lost her husband on September 11, said at the time.
'Because I didn't accept that he was dead at that point, you know? He was missing. You know, you don't have to be so brutal. They can give us at least two weeks to grieve without having to think that our husbands were gone.'
When Trump announced Lutnick's hiring as Commerce Secretary on November 24, 2024, he described Lutnick as a 'beacon of hope to those who remained' after the World Trade Center catastrophe and said he was 'an inspiration to the world - the embodiment of resilience in the face of unspeakable tragedy.'
Iris Cantor, Bernie Cantor's widow, held a very different opinion of the man she sued at least 10 times.
She first filed suit against him in 1996, alleging that he had 'usurped control' of Cantor Fitzgerald when her husband was ill and followed up with various claims accusing him of shady business practices at the company she still held an interest in.
Cantor, who now lives in Westchester County, said she couldn't comment and hung up when reached by the Daily Mail this week.
Lutnick also faced public backlash after he halted paychecks to 700 employees in the days after the 9/11 attacks, even as many remained missing in the World Trade Center wreckage
But an old friend of hers from the Upper East Side of Manhattan recalled a dinner the two had at the Doubles Club at the Sherry Netherland Hotel in 2014.
'Iris went off on what a horrible con artist Lutnick was,' the friend recalled. 'She called him a swindler and said he didn't honor any of his agreements.
'She said her husband had brought him into the company and then he just took it over. I was really struck by the fury in the voice of this exquisite woman when she talked about him.'
So far, however, Lutnick has escaped being dragged into the Jeffrey Epstein mess - despite sharing a townhouse wall with Epstein for two decades until Epstein's death in July 2019.
Lutnick bought the townhouse next to Epstein at 11 East 71st Street in 1998 from the Comet Trust, which had acquired it in 1996 from a trust where Epstein was the trustee.
The property was originally owned by an entity called the SAM Conversion Corporation, which was associated with Epstein and billionaire Les Wexner.
Wexner, who owns Victoria's Secret, hired Epstein as his financial manager in the late 1980s and gave him power of attorney over a number of his assets, including the Straus House at 9 East 71st Street, which became Epstein's Manhattan headquarters.
The Department of Commerce, when asked last month about Lutnick's relationship with Epstein, said the two 'had no personal relationship, contact or direct dealings.'