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corruption
'Self-Enrichment': JD Vance Stands to Profit From Trump Military Contracts, Crypto Reserve
Financial disclosures analyzed by Accountable.US reveal that the vice president is invested in several defense contractors that have reaped lavish contracts since Trump's return to office.
Jul 11, 2025
The Trump administration has given contracts to four defense contractors that Vice President JD Vance has a financial stake in, according to a report by the government watchdog group Accountable.US.
Financial disclosure forms published by the Office of Government Ethics for June 2025 reveal that through at least the end of 2024—the last date at which he was required to disclose his investments—Vance had anywhere from $100,000 to $250,000 invested in Revolution's Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, a Washington, D.C.-based venture capital group he helped to found before taking office.
Rise of the Rest is invested in at least four military contractors that have since received large contracts from the Trump-Vance administration. Two of them received those contracts—worth millions of dollars—within two weeks of Trump beginning his second term.
Hermeus, the maker of hypersonic aircraft, received a contract worth $9.36 million from the Department of Defense in February. Another company, Slingshot Aerospace, has been awarded $1.7 million in contracts from the Air Force. The report notes that Slingshot's tools, which include GPS monitoring technology, have been used in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The most lucrative company in Vance's portfolio is Anduril, which has received an eye-popping $220 million in government contracts since Trump and Vance took office and seen a 125% increase in its valuation.
It is expected to reap massive new contracts from the so-called "Big Beautiful Bill" that Trump signed into law earlier this month through its creation of expansive new border surveillance technology.
As Sam Biddle reported for The Intercept on Wednesday, the bill includes language that effectively grants Anduril "a monopoly on new surveillance towers for U.S. Customs and Border Protection":
A provision buried in the new mega-legislation stipulates that none of the $6 billion border tech payday can be spent on border towers unless they've been "tested and accepted by [CBP] to deliver autonomous capabilities."…
That reads like a description of Anduril's product—because it might as well be. A CBP spokesperson confirmed to The Intercept that under the new law, Anduril is now the country's only approved border tower vendor.
Anduril is also reportedly one of the main firms in contention for contracts to help build Trump's $175 billion "Golden Dome" security system.
Vance left Revolution in 2020 to start his own venture capital firm, Narya Capital, and two of the companies received investments from his previous firm after his departure. However, Vance directly acknowledged that he had a financial stake in all four of them on a Senate financial disclosure form in 2023, "indicating awareness of the investments," according to Accountable.US.
The Rise of the Rest Seed Fund presents other potential conflicts of interest as well. In addition to its investments in the defense industry, it has also been a major backer of The Bitcoin Company, providing it with more than $2.1 million in seed money in 2022.
Vance himself is a major Bitcoin enthusiast. His disclosures reveal that he personally holds anywhere from $250,000 to $500,000 worth of the cryptocurrency.
During his time in the White House, President Donald Trump has launched initiatives meant to supercharge the cryptocurrency industry, including a "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve," which sent the digital currency's price soaring in March.
Accountability.US executive director Tony Carrk describes Vance's financial entanglements as part of a broader pattern within the Trump administration.
"Vance's background and investments in companies benefiting from Trump government contracts come as no surprise given this administration’s record of benefiting themselves while raising costs and gutting health care for hardworking Americans," he said.
Past reports by the group have highlighted the president's own profiteering from cryptocurrency and other financial ventures. And last month, an investigation revealed that Donald Trump, Jr. also stood to profit tremendously from the "Golden Dome" project via his own investments in Anduril and Elon Musk's company SpaceX.
"As much as the Trump administration claims to be draining the swamp, their conflicts of interest, self-enrichment, and ties to special interests show they are creatures of it," said Caark. "Vice President JD Vance is no exception."
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Warren Unveils Framework for Regulating Crypto Industry and Shutting Down Trump's Corruption
"Nobody wants weak crypto rules more than the president of the United States," said the senator.
Jul 09, 2025
As the U.S. House prepares to vote on the latest proposal claiming to regulate the cryptocurrency industry—one that critics say is actually a "cash grab" that will harm consumers—Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday took the opportunity of a hearing on digital assets to outline her five main priorities for any legislation aimed at regulating crypto.
Along with protecting consumers within the crypto market, she said, Congress must pass legislation that safeguards the country from public officials—including President Donald Trump—who want to personally profit from the burgeoning industry.
Those priorities haven't been addressed, she suggested, in proposals like the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act and the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act, which lawmakers are expected to vote on in the coming days.
"I'm concerned that what my Republican colleagues are aiming for is another industry handout that gives the crypto lobby exactly its wish list: the blessing of the government's approval, combined with crypto rules that are weaker than the rules every other financial actor must follow," said Warren (D-Mass.).
Any regulatory framework for the crypto industry, in which investors can use real money to purchase virtual or digital assets and trade them on decentralized, unregulated blockchain technology, must include the framework set up by "the securities laws that have served as the bedrock of our capital markets for nearly 100 years," said Warren—but the CLARITY Act includes language that would allow "non-crypto companies to tokenize their assets to evade the SEC's [Security and Exchange Commission] regulations."
"If we're going to provide rules of the road for crypto, we need to shut down this superhighway for presidential corruption at the same time."
"Under the House bill, a publicly traded company like Meta or Tesla could simply decide to put its stock on the blockchain and POOF! it would escape all SEC regulation," said Warren.
Americans for Financial Reform (AFR) also spoke out against the CLARITY Act's provision on Tuesday, saying the bill would "create a race to the bottom and fuel fraud and financial instability."
With the crypto market growing 15-fold over the last five years, with a $3 trillion market capitalization in 2024, risks to "investors, our financial system, and our national security have also sharply increased," Warren warned in the hearing.
She pointed to FBI findings that Americans lost more than $9 billion to fraud in the unregulated crypto market last year—a 66% increase from 2023‚ and a Chainalysis report that hackers from North Korea were able to steal $1.3 billion from crypto platforms in 2024 as well as $1.5 billion earlier this year.
"Crypto investors should have the same protections from getting scammed or cheated as investors in any other asset," said Warren. "For example, there is no reason that the rules prohibiting stock exchanges from simultaneously serving as brokers and giving preferential treatment to their own trades over their customers' can't be applied to the crypto market too."
Warren also called for legislation that ensures instability in the crypto market won't "infect" the larger financial system by guaranteeing that taxpayers are not on the hook for "risky crypto bets," and that includes commonsense rules to protect national security and fight crime within the industry.
The GENIUS Act, which 18 Democrats joined the vast majority of Senate Republicans in passing last month, did not include anti-money laundering rules or sufficiently close sanctions loopholes, said Warren, with Republicans saying the issues could be addressed in a future bill regarding crypto market structure.
"So this is it. No more kicking the can down the road. Now is the time to solve that problem," said Warren.
Finally, Warren said any bill addressing regulations in the crypto market must "shut down the president's crypto corruption" by prohibiting all public officials from issuing, sponsoring, or profiting from crypto tokens.
Warren's comments came weeks after Trump held a dinner with the top 220 investors in his own $TRUMP meme coin and offered a VIP White House tour to the top 25 mostly anonymous investors—an event that progressive organizers said was "corruption embodied."
"Nobody wants weak crypto rules more than the president of the United States," said Warren, noting that $7 billion of Trump's wealth now comes from his own stablecoin and meme coin, a bitcoin mining company, a "huge portfolio of crypto investments," and includes more than $320 million in fees from the $TRUMP coin—even as the majority of investors in the token lost money.
"If we're going to provide rules of the road for crypto, we need to shut down this superhighway for presidential corruption at the same time," said Warren.
Urging Congress to vote against the CLARITY Act this week, AFR also warned that the "massive deregulatory bill" is backed by "a gusher of campaign cash and lobbying muscle from ultrawealthy venture capital firms and crypto billionaires," with Trump set to "gain the most from this giveaway" after making $1.2 billion in crypto just in the past few months."
"CLARITY (along with related crypto bills being considered) is a custom-built framework that gives him and his billionaire allies a green light to manipulate financial markets," said the group, "while working families are left holding the bag."
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Supreme Court Agrees to Hear GOP Effort to Further Gut Campaign Finance Law
Watchdogs say the spending coordination limits that Republicans are challenging were put in place to "guard against the corrupting effect of large campaign contributions."
Jun 30, 2025
The Supreme Court is taking up another Republican legal case seeking to erode campaign finance law and give more power to the wealthy donors seeking to influence elections.
On Monday, the court agreed to hear a challenge to campaign finance restrictions which limit the ability of party committees to directly coordinate spending with individual candidates. The anti-corruption group Public Citizen argues that this provision was put in place to "guard against the corrupting effect of large campaign contributions."
The challenge was brought by the National Republican Senatorial and Congressional Committees, as well as the 2022 campaigns of two Ohio Republican congressmen: former Sen. JD Vance, who has since become vice president, and former Rep. Steve Chabot, who lost his re-election bid in 2022.
The case seeks to overturn rules implemented in the Federal Election Campaign Act in 1971, which put strict limits on the ability of party committees to spend money in coordination with specific candidates. The Democratic National Committee will defend the rule before the court after filing a motion to intervene.
The rules were put in place, in part, to stop wealthy donors from using parties to get around rules about coordinating individual spending with candidates.
Under current law, how much coordinated spending parties can undertake is limited by the population of the state or district in question. At most, parties can coordinate nearly $4 million worth of spending for a single Senate candidate and $127,200 for a single House candidate.
The Republicans bringing the challenge have argued that the limits on coordinated spending violate the First Amendment.
The Campaign Legal Center, which has argued before the court against weakening these rules, has described them as a powerful bulwark against corruption.
"Since the party coordinated spending limits were enacted in the 1970s, these limits have checked the corruptive effect of large contributions flowing through party committees to candidates and prevented the quid pro quo exchanges that such contributions would otherwise facilitate," they wrote last year in a policy page arguing against the GOP challenge.
"Because the limits allow political parties to spend only a prescribed amount of their money in direct coordination with a candidate," the Campaign Legal Center continued, "they moderate the risk that a party committee could effectively pass on every big donation—or six-figure check collected via joint fundraising—to the donor’s chosen candidate in the form of coordinated expenditures."
"This case has nothing to do with the First Amendment and everything to do with Republicans' obsession with creating a government by and for billionaires," said Brett Edkins, a spokesperson for the progressive advocacy group Stand Up America.
In 2001, the Supreme Court upheld coordination limits in another case brought by Republicans: FEC v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee.
In that case, often described as the Colorado II decision, the majority ruled 5-4 that "a party's coordinated expenditures, unlike expenditures truly independent, may be restricted to minimize circumvention of contribution limits."
Since then, however, the Supreme Court has helped the Republican Party chip away at laws that kept powerful donors in check.
Most notably, in the 2010 Citizens United v. FEC case, they ruled that political spending is a form of protected speech and that individuals could spend unlimited amounts of money influencing the election process, so long as it was not directly coordinated with candidates and instead done through "independent expenditure only" committees, more commonly known as super PACs.
"In the 15 years since the Supreme Court's abysmal Citizens United decision opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate and billionaire campaign spending, the corruption of American politics has gone from bad to worse," said Jon Golinger, a spokesman for Public Citizen.
Despite the supposed wall of separation, most candidates now rely on super PACs for large amounts of their political communication and organizing. In 2015, a report by Public Citizen titled "Super Connected" found that 45% of super PACs spending over $100,000 directed that spending toward a single candidate.
The amount of election-related corporate spending directed to these largely unaccountable entities has exploded in recent years. According to OpenSecrets, outside spending reached an unprecedented $4.5 billion in the 2024 election, compared with just $555 million in 2008, the last presidential election year before Citizens United.
The top three individual spenders—the Mellon family, Elon Musk, and the Adelson family—spent a combined $369 million to help Donald Trump win the presidency.
"The right-wing supermajority on the Court already dismantled decades of campaign finance protections in Citizens United, and now they’re poised to gut what few remain, inviting billionaires to bankroll candidates through political parties with no limits," Edkins said.
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