On this day last year, the Trump administration carried out its second illegal boat strike in international waters, killing three on a Venezuelan vessel allegedly smuggling drugs. At least 230 people have now died in such strikes.
Good morning. Andrew here. Congress is back in town after a weeks-long recess, and senators are focused on a matter of extreme importance to Americans getting squeezed by Donald Trump’s wartime economy: cryptocurrency regulations – or more precisely, getting the crypto industry the lax regulatory treatment it has been trying to pay for with all those TV ads. What else? The bill tries and fails to solve Trump’s crypto grift.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ senators prepare a crypto gift for America’s impossibly corrupt president, Trump pal and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft cracks down on a rapper for saying “Free Palestine,” and there’s yet more terrible news in the new forever war with Iran.
Let Them Eat Crypto
Senators have finally returned to Washington after a long summer vacation, at a perilous moment: Americans are struggling with rising inflation and higher borrowing costs. Gas prices have spiked, and the world is on the brink of a long-feared fuel crisis, thanks to Donald Trump’s failed, unending war with Iran.
What kind of important work are senators attending to in the three weeks they’re in D.C. before they break for over a month before the midterm elections? Well, first, Trump needed another far-right judge. Later today, they’ll decide whether to advance a bill that would give the crypto industry the exact type of favorable, light-touch regulatory environment its executives paid for by spending $245 million on the 2024 elections, and another $206 million (so far) this cycle. If that doesn’t sound vital, experts say the legislation would also turbocharge the Trump family’s unprecedented, bottomless crypto corruption – not limit it, despite what the bill’s advocates claim.
Trump made $1.4 billion last year off family cryptocurrency schemes which include selling a functionally worthless $TRUMP memecoin and operating a crypto exchange, World Liberty Financial, funded by the UAE’s national security adviser, aka the “spy sheikh.” Trump appointees recently took a key step toward allowing World Liberty Financial to launch its own bank, as a treat for the first family.
The crypto bill must have seven Democratic votes to advance, which is not an unreasonable possibility. The industry has thrown its money around, and has powerful allies on the Democratic side. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who heads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and whose son recently received startup backing from a crypto billionaire, has reportedly urged colleagues to support it.
To secure their votes, some crypto-friendly Democrats have insisted the Clarity Act include ethics provisions to prevent Trump from continuing his crypto grift. New reforms added to the legislation purport to do so – but experts and Democrats say the changes would accomplish virtually nothing.
As written, the bill “would fail to rein in the most obvious examples of Trump’s self-enrichment from crypto ventures, and, with passage, could supercharge it,” says Mark Hays, who leads crypto policy at Americans for Financial Reform and Demand Progress Action.