A published report detailing how President Donald Trump’s eldest sons stand to profit from a tungsten mining deal negotiated by their billionaire father has sparked outraged calls for accountability, with Democratic lawmakers characterizing the taxpayer-funded project as yet another example of the administration’s unchecked and unprecedented corruption.
According to the New York Times report, Trump and his team – including billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick – “won an agreement from the Kazakh leader to give a little-known American company access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten, a metal that the United States desperately needs for the production of missile warheads, fighter jets, computer chips and other critical goods.”
Ahead of the deal’s completion last September, according to the Times, the Trump administration “approved preliminary applications for as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing for the American company, now called Kaz Resources, which plans to break ground on the project in rural Kazakhstan.”
Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., along with Lutnick’s sons Brandon and Kyle, are poised to benefit from the project. “Within weeks of the St. Regis negotiations, investors with a firm called Dominari Securities, which is housed at Trump Tower in New York and partly owned by the president’s two eldest sons … joined with other partners to take a 20% stake in a corporate entity related to the Kazakhstan project,” the Times reported.
Lutnick’s sons, meanwhile, “helped one of the lead investors … on the Kazakh deal raise $210 million in new capital for a related entity,” potentially resulting in a multimillion-dollar boon for Cantor Fitzgerald, the investment firm overseen by Brandon and Kyle Lutnick.
The Times found that at least “14 companies working on critical mining deals with the US government that have ties to Cantor Fitzgerald or the Trump family,” including Kaz Resources, Perpetua Resources and USA Rare Earth.
Trump’s family has profited massively from his return to the White House, thanks in a large part to a crypto scheme spearheaded by the president’s older sons. A “Trump Family Digital Grift Wealth Tracker” maintained by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee estimates that crypto projects have netted the president and his family over $2.4 billion in profits so far.
