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President Donald Trump’s potential conflict of interest regarding his ownership and oversight of crypto-related agencies prompted Rep. Maxine Waters, D-CA, and other Democratic lawmakers to walk out of a joint hearing on digital asset legislation on Tuesday.
Waters, the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, objected to the joint hearing of the committee and the House Agriculture Committee stalling the discussion on a new regulatory framework for cryptocurrencies, since joint committee hearings require unanimous consent.
“I object to this joint hearing because of the corruption of the President of the United States and his ownership of crypto and his oversight of all the agencies; I object,” Waters said at the hearing.
After walking out, Waters held a separate Democratic session with other committee lawmakers while the House Financial Services Committee and House Agriculture panel held a roundtable.
The ranking member raised concerns about the “unprecedented” conflict of interest presented by Trump and his family, citing reports that insiders made nearly $100 million on Melania Trump’s meme coin.
In January, three days after he took office, $TRUMP, a meme coin, was launched. Soon after, his wife Melania launched her own meme coin, $Melania. Recently, according to an announcement, the top 220 of the $TRUMP meme coin holders would be invited to have dinner with the president and hear him speak about the future of crypto.
“I’m deeply concerned that Republicans aren’t just ignoring Trump’s corruption. They are legitimatizing Trump’s and his family’s efforts to enrich themselves on the backs of average Americans,” Waters said in a statement.
“Through his crypto business, Trump has turned the office of the presidency into a personal money-making machine,” she said. “He is flouting our country’s national security and anti-corruption laws, allowing the adversaries like China and Russia to curry favor, either blatantly or anonymously, through transfers of money to him and his inner circle.”
“Trump believes he is above the law. Well, he is not, and Democrats will do what we can to hold him accountable,” she added.
House Financial Services Committee Chair French Hill, R-AR, pointed out that Waters’ objection came after the ranking member received more than six weeks of notice and negotiated an additional witness for the minority.
Waters’ disruption of the joint hearing “has thrown partisanship into what has historically been a strong, good, working bipartisan relationship,” Hill said during the hearing.
In the Senate, Democrats are calling for changes to pending crypto legislation as concerns mount over the Trump family’s ties to the space and the president’s ability to benefit from crypto trading.
The resistance gained momentum last week when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, asked his colleagues not to vote for the GENIUS Act, which the Senate Banking Committee advanced last month, The New York Times reported. The GENIUS Act is a consumer protection bill that aims to establish federal safeguards to protect stablecoin holders and enhance consumer confidence in the payment stablecoin market.
The Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act of 2025, led by Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-TN, and backed by the crypto industry, received support from all committee Republicans and five Democrats.
Anna Kelly, the White House’s deputy press secretary, asserted that the president has no conflict of interest since his assets are in a trust managed by his children.
“President Trump is dedicated to making America the crypto capital of the world and revolutionizing our digital financial technology,” Kelly said in a statement to Reuters.
Waters’ action follows questions raised by Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, and Jeff Merkley, D-OR, about the Trump administration’s involvement in a billion-dollar business deal that also has support from state-backed Emirati investment firm MGX, crypto exchange Binance, and Trump-affiliated World Liberty Financial.
In a letter sent Monday to Jamieson Greer, acting director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, Warren and Merkley highlighted reports that MGX plans to invest roughly $2 billion in Binance using WLF’s recently announced stablecoin USD1 and called out the potential conflicts of interest with the deal.
“The deal, if completed, would represent a staggering conflict of interest, one that may violate the Constitution and open our government to a startling degree of foreign influence and the potential for a quid pro quo that could endanger national security,” the lawmakers wrote.
Binance settled criminal charges with the Department of Justice in 2023 and agreed to pay $4 billion; its founder went to prison and is now reportedly seeking a pardon from the president.
MGX is a “foreign government spymaker coveting sensitive U.S. technology plan to pay the Trump and [Steve] Witkoff families hundreds of millions of dollars.” This might be just the beginning of the Trump and Witkoff families expanding their stablecoin use “as an avenue to profit from foreign corruption,” the senators noted.
Warren and Merkley requested answers to questions by May 9, related to the mechanisms employed by OGE on safeguards and protocols to prevent conflicts of interest and to determine whether the president and major government officials are “involved in quid pro quo in violation of federal bribery statutes.”