The single best thing we can do to shut down criminals, terrorists, cartels, rogue states and government corruption would be to criminalize cryptocurrency.
One truly historic and unique part about this new phase of Trump’s presidency is that it’s no longer a question of whether he is lying or not: it is that the real question is whether he is even capable of telling the truth. On Donald Trump’s orders, the U.S. started bombing Iran in a joint mission with Israel, with boots on the ground and an apparent commitment to “regime change.” Some civilians in Iran are dead, as are some US soldiers. Iran has retaliated against Israel, Dubai and U.S. airbases.
The reasons to be cynical about this attack are being shouted from every corner of the Internet. Trump promised to be the Peace President; we are supposed to believe that Iran has revived the nuclear programme that last summer’s bombing was supposed to have “obliterated”; he’s wildly unpopular and wants to bury more Epstein news, especially since it emerged this week that the DOJ was deleting files with complaints from a victim who was 13–15 at the time.
There’s a meme circulating with Putin, Trump and Netanyahu — three men in their 70s who are willing to destroy the world and their countries, all just to keep themselves out of jail. All have been credibly accused of (and some charged with) serious crimes, including war crimes. Trump and Netanyahu have arguably done more to destroy the international reputations of their countries than anyone in either country’s history, and both are willing to have people die to keep them in office and out of jail.
People who hate or oppose Trump or Netanyahu should not fall into thinking that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.”
Iran genuinely does have a terrible, lawless, fascist theocracy that horrifically oppresses its own people and funds murder and extremism. They shot down a civilian airliner, they fund Hezbollah and Hamas, who are also fascist theocratic ultranationalists charged with war crimes.
Which brings me back to one more reason to be cynical: Iran was laundering hundreds of millions of dollars through Tether, a cryptocurrency company whose banker is none other than Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick.
That was the story just a few weeks ago in the Guardian UK — the same cryptocurrency championed by Nigel Farage, one of a number of far-right political figures worldwide who are supported by crypto.
“Iran’s central bank appears to have been using vast quantities of a cryptocurrency championed by Nigel Farage, according to a new report.
Elliptic, a crypto analytics company, said it had traced at least $507m (£377m) of cryptocurrency issued by Tether — a company touted by the Reform UK leader — passing through accounts that appear to be controlled by Iran’s central bank.
Elliptic’s report tracked what it says is the Iranian central bank’s “systematic accumulation” of Tether stablecoins, a type of crypto that is pegged to the dollar so it can easily be exchanged for hard currency.
This pointed to “a sophisticated strategy to bypass the global banking system,” perhaps to trade or to prop up the rial, Iran’s currency.
With thousands confirmed dead in the brutal suppression of protests, the Iranian regime’s apparent use of Tether’s stablecoins raises questions for Farage about his support for the cryptocurrency.
In September, Farage revealed he was planning to raise Tether during a meeting with the governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey.
Farage added: “You know, stablecoins, crypto — this world is enormous, and I’ve been urging for years that London should embrace it. We should become a global trading centre for this stuff, under proper regulation.”
One of Tether’s major shareholders, the tech investor Christopher Harborne, is Reform’s biggest donor.”
Howard Lutnick — Trump’s Commerce Secretary, and who was head of Trump’s transition team — was also the head of Cantor Fitzgerald, Tether’s banker.
Even as the Trump administration threatens Mexico and Canada with tariffs because of concerns about illicit drugs flowing over the border, Tether has been used to launder money for Mexican drug cartels.
This is a chart from the Financial Times. The green diamond-shaped logo with a T is Tether.
Unsealed court documents highlight how drug cartels from Mexico and Colombia are leveraging cryptocurrency, particularly Tether (USDT/USD) and Bitcoin (BTC/USD), to launder tens of millions of dollars.
In January 2024, the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) warned that Tether has fast become the platform of choice for money laundering and fraud operations across East and Southeast Asia. Its popularity is illustrated by the “surging volume” of cyber fraud, money laundering and underground banking cases, the UN said, including schemes like “sextortion” — a form of blackmail threatening to post sexual content or information about a person — and “pig butchering,” a socially engineered romance designed to “fatten up” targets before extracting money.
The UN said financial authorities and law enforcement have reported a rapid uptick in the use of “sophisticated, high-speed money laundering” teams specializing in Tether in recent years, with criminals advertising their services on social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok and Telegram.
Online gambling platforms in particular have “emerged as among the most popular vehicles for cryptocurrency-based money launderers” — especially those using Tether — the report said, warning they are “fueling the intensification” of the region’s “rapidly growing illicit digital economy.”
The other cryptocurrency of choice for money laundering, with the involvement of Chinese organized crime and the Chinese government, is TRON. Its CEO, Justin Sun, was charged last year by the SEC for violating marketing rules — paying celebrities to promote his crypto without disclosing they were paid. TRON also just purchased $30 million in crypto tokens from World Liberty Financial, a new crypto venture backed by President-elect Donald Trump.
Howard Lutnick’s latest splash in the news was his extravagant lies about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
His testimony before Congress was ludicrous. After telling an interviewer he and his wife had walked away from Epstein after being “creeped out by him,” Lutnick sailed a ship with his wife, children and nannies to have lunch with him.
In fact, Lutnick’s connections with Epstein are so blatant it would be comical. Lutnick and Epstein were next-door neighbours in New York mansions that shared a wall, and Lutnick is named in a 2025 FBI PowerPoint document under “prominent names”:
According to Mother Jones, “Epstein in 2017 donated $50,000 to a charity dinner honoring Lutnick, and the following year the two communicated about countering an expansion of a neighboring museum.”
In fact, Epstein played a critical role in the development of cryptocurrency, and more specifically Tether.
Epstein partnered with Brock Pierce, yet another crypto advocate with a profoundly disturbing history of sex crimes. Pierce was a child star — an actor in the Disney film The Mighty Ducks — and was also involved in a disturbing sex abuse scandal in Hollywood.
By 2014, Epstein was partnering with Pierce on investments and assisting him with his business affairs. For example, Epstein looked over a Noble Bank/Markets Nasdaq agreement — the Puerto Rico-based international financial entity started by Pierce and John Betts that briefly served as the main “bank” for the stablecoin Tether.
The most important partnership between the two came shortly thereafter: a $3 million investment in Coinbase through a fund started by Bradford and Bart Stephens.
Notably, “Pierce introduced Epstein to political strategist and chaos agent Steve Bannon in 2016/2017.”
Epstein’s death rocked crypto markets, and a few days after there was a transfer of a quarter of a trillion dollars on a single day.
“Epstein was arrested on July 6th, 2019 as he stepped out onto the tarmac at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport at the end of a private jet flight from France. He ended his own life in a New York City jail cell roughly a month later. A few days afterwards — in what I’m sure is Totally Just A Coincidence — more bitcoins moved “on chain” than all but one other day in modern bitcoin history.”
As the author notes, cryptocurrency scams were being used to finance Russian troops in the war against Ukraine.
Everyone assumes that Trump is covering up the Epstein files because those files reveal him to be some kind of pedophile. But what if the files instead reveal that Trump and Epstein were working together to launder Russian money? It’s hardly a secret that Trump’s real estate projects from the 1980s to early 2000s were rife with Russian oligarch money — oligarchs buying apartments in Trump Tower, oligarchs lending the Trump Organization money to build hotels, and so on. Senator Ron Wyden has recently been talking about Epstein’s bank transfers, many of which involved Russian banks. If Epstein and Trump were friends who liked doing real estate deals with Russian money, it seems reasonably likely that they might have done some deals together.
In a separate piece, The Cryptocalypse Chronicles lists some of the other prominent people tied to cryptocurrency who were also connected to Epstein — Lutnick, Brock Pierce, Steve Bannon, and the owner of Palantir, Peter Thiel.
Epstein was an investor in Valar Ventures, one of the firms associated with Thiel’s ventures in late-stage capitalism and one that has done some investing in the cryptocurrency space.
It’s worth mentioning that Thiel is a major backer of Rumble, the video platform created as a right-wing alternative to YouTube. Other Rumble backers include Vivek Ramaswamy, JD Vance, and Howard Lutnick. Rumble hosts Tucker Carlson’s anti-semitic rants, Trump’s Truth Social, and plenty of anti-semitic and Russian propaganda.
I will quote Michel de Cryptadamus, and every single person, policymaker and lawmaker needs to understand this, and act on it. He wrote:
The ideal user base for cryptocurrency is “a cabal of organized crime groups, kleptocratic regimes, and rogue nuclear states.” That’s because criminals, kleptocrats, and rogue nuclear states are all dealing with the one problem crypto can actually solve that traditional finance cannot: they want to move money around the world and they don’t want anyone to be able to stop them.
It is not decentralized: it is designed to exist outside the rule of law. There’s a reason it’s hard to just move that money: it’s to make sure criminals, kleptocrats, and rogue nuclear states don’t pillage and murder those of us who aren’t.
One of the reasons the world is in its current state is because cryptocurrency is fuelling corruption and criminality of the absolute worst kind, at the highest levels.
The single best thing every democratic government could do to take a step toward bringing the world’s criminals to justice is to criminalize crypto — a fake currency designed to let people break the law.
In closing, I will emphasize there was no real urgency for the attack on Iran: active negotiations were underway and progress was being made.
THIS ZEIT NEEDS A NEW GEIST. Criminalizing crypto would be a start.
