Company Boasts Spending Up To $20 Million On Trump Crypto Coin To Buy Influence
WASHINGTON — An international trucking logistics firm is buying as much as $20 million worth of President Donald Trump's crypto coins to influence the administration's trade policy — the precise sort of quid-pro-quo arrangement that corruption experts warned Trump was encouraging when he unveiled his venture.
Freight Technologies Inc. CEO Javier Selgas said in a Wednesday news release that buying Trump coin would be 'an effective way to advocate for fair, balanced and free trade between Mexico and the U.S.'
The release was attached to a filing that same day with the Securities and Exchange Commission explaining why Freight Technologies was issuing bonds. 'The company will use the net proceeds from the offering to purchase TRUMP coins,' the company told the SEC.
'It's just another day for Donald Trump that an international freight company is paying a $20 million tribute towards the Trump family fortune after openly wishing it will lead to administration tariff relief,' said Tony Carrk, executive director of Accountable.us. The watchdog group discovered Freight Technologies' plan through a social media post bragging about it by GetTrumpMemes.com, the company that sells the Trump coins.
Neither Freight Technologies, which is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands but has a U.S. headquarters in Houston, nor Selgas responded to HuffPost queries. Trump White House officials also did not respond to HuffPost for this story, nor did GetTrumpMemes.com.
On April 23, GetTrumpMemes.com announced that it was holding a contest to reward the top 220 holders of Trump coins with a dinner with the president at his golf course in Sterling, Virginia, on May 22. The top 25 coinholders would get an 'exclusive' reception with him as well.
'Any company can seek to curry favor with Trump and flavor that curry with cash,' said Norm Eisen, the top ethics lawyer in the Obama White House. 'He's opened up an additional channel of illicit influence by hosting this dinner.'
Going back to his first term, Trump used his office to enrich himself — a textbook definition of corruption — more than any previous president going back at least a century. He operated a hotel blocks from the White House where both domestic and foreign lobbyists met with administration officials while spending at the bar and restaurant. Foreign delegations frequently took rooms there, sometimes blocks of rooms, for days and weeks at a time.
Republican Party groups and candidates held events at his properties, particularly the Washington, D.C., hotel and Mar-a-Lago, Trump's private club in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump even tried to host a G7 summit of the world's largest democratic economies at his cash-strapped golf resort in Doral, Florida, until critical press coverage made him back down.
All of those efforts, though, pale in comparison to Trump's eager promotion of his crypto schemes in his second term. Three days before his inauguration, he announced his Trump coin, which immediately soared to nearly $75 per coin before crashing back down. It had fallen as low as $7.57 last month before GetTrumpMemes.com announced the dinner and reception contest. The price on Friday stood at $12.97.
Crypto coins have zero intrinsic value and do not physically exist anywhere. Even the GetTrumpMemes.com site states: 'Trump Memes are intended to function as an expression of support for, and engagement with, the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol '$TRUMP,'' and they are 'not intended to be, or to be the subject of, an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any type.'
Ethics experts warned that Trump's coins would enable foreign and domestic interests seeking the president's favor to funnel him cash without leaving a public trace. Indeed, thus far, Freight Technologies appears to be the only company or individual making a large dollar purchase of Trump coins to announce it publicly. Crypto transactions are difficult to trace, which has made them a favorite for money launderers and other criminals since their invention.
GetTrumpMemes.com posts a 'leader board' of the top Trump coin owners, but only provides their user names and crypto 'wallets.' If Freight Technologies goes through with its plan to buy $20 million of Trump coins at Friday's $12.97 price, it would have 1,542,020 Trump coins, putting the company in the top spot on the rankings and likely giving its representative face time with Trump at the 'VIP' reception prior to the May 22 dinner.
Freight Technologies facilitates movements of goods back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border by long-haul trucking — a business facing considerable financial threat from Trump's trade war. 'At the heart of Fr8Tech's mission is the promotion of productive and active commerce between the United States and Mexico. Mexico is the United States' top goods trading partner, with Mexico being the leading destination for US exports and the top source for US imports,' Selgas wrote in the April 30 release.
'There's little doubt this company is expecting some administration policy relief in return for their generous investment in the growing Trump crypto empire,' Carrk said. 'It's an indictment in and of itself that the president has paved the way for so much potential corruption for his own personal gain and at the public expense that few can keep up.'
Ty Cobb, a former federal prosecutor who served in Trump's first-term White House, said that while federal law makes either offering or accepting a bribe a crime, Trump has made it plain that won't be enforced so long as he is in the White House.
'They've made it clear that there are no ethics and they're not beholden to any standards, and it doesn't matter if it's illegal or not because they're not going to prosecute Republicans, so get over it,' Cobb said. 'What passes for routine at this White House is purely corrupt.'
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