Fox News Ignores Bombshell Reports Of $500M Emirati Payoff To Trump Family
President Donald Trump and Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan at the White House on March 19, 2025
Fox News has not covered bombshell reports revealing that an Emirati royal known as the “spy sheikh” secretly purchased a major stake in a company controlled by President Donald Trump’s family for $500 million just four days before Trump’s inauguration, according to a Media Matters review through Monday night.
The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times both reported over the weekend on what the Journal described as a deal “unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.” Such deals are unprecedented because they open up obvious channels for presidential corruption, and that seems to be what happened here.
The foreign government official, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, reportedly sought “access to tightly guarded artificial intelligence chips,” though the previous administration had blocked such access due to “fears that the sensitive technology could be diverted to China.” But after Tahnoon lined the Trump family pockets by purchasing 49 percent of their nascent cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial — which “had no products” at the time of the investment — the Trump administration “committed to give the tiny Gulf monarchy access to around 500,000 of the most advanced AI chips a year.”
But the president’s apparent participation in a quid pro scheme scheme in which U.S. national security interests were sold out in return for a sizable payment to his family has not been mentioned a single time on Fox News, the Journal’s corporate cousin. The pro-Trump network’s propagandists were instead fixated Monday night on criticism of Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdown by attendees at Sunday’s Grammy Awards.
You may recall that Fox's stars spent years claiming to be very disturbed by the foreign business dealings of members of former President Joe Biden’s family. Those dealings, which involved comically tiny amounts of money compared to the Tahnoon payoff and no compelling nexus to any policy decision by Biden or his administration, were the subject of endless coverage and commentary dating back to before Biden launched his 2020 presidential campaign, and deemed so serious as to require Biden’s impeachment.
Fox host Sean Hannity alone devoted hundreds of segments to the president’s son Hunter in 2023 as he argued that the president had been “very credibly accused of public corruption on a scale this country has never seen before.”
But after the right-wing propaganda machine helped Trump back into office, he promptly began cashing in. And in turn, we've seen Fox stars seem to have developed a strange new respect for obvious malfeasance.
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