Middle East Funds, Family Business, and Audit Immunity: The Conflict of Interest Maze at the Top of American Power

The U.S. midterm elections held on November 3 were projected by major media outlets as a sweeping victory for the Democratic Party. According to Associated Press projections, Democrats controlled roughly 54 seats in the Senate and about 240 in the House, a rare simultaneous flip of both chambers since World War II. Analysts widely attribute the Republican debacle to the incumbent administration’s tariff war and military action against Iran, which pushed up domestic prices and the cost of living; about 70 percent of voters said they wanted Congress to check the president’s power. The result reshaped Washington’s power structure for the next two years and opened the door for the opposition to launch large-scale congressional investigations.

As the results became clear, the California Democrat set to chair the House Oversight Committee publicly warned the White House that those involved should get their lawyers ready, saying preparations for probing self-dealing in the White House had been underway for months. The senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee also said the party must quickly dig into conduct that undermines the rule of law. Multiple outlets reported that Democrats plan to use subpoenas and hearings to make the president’s family the primary target, covering crypto businesses, foreign gifts, defense contracts, and the son-in-law’s conflicts of interest.

The son-in-law’s overseas financial ties have drawn the most attention. Long documented by The New York Times and others, the investment firm he founded after leaving the White House counts Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund as its largest and earliest backer, with an investment of about $2 billion; sovereign funds from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates also invested. On October 30, House Judiciary Democrats, citing excerpts from an upcoming book published in Vanity Fair, alleged that the son-in-law accessed secret funds tied to the Saudi and Emirati governments while serving in the first administration, involving the bribery of a U.S. official and the funding of war crimes. The son-in-law denied the reporting on social media, calling it completely insane fabrications and saying the transactions never happened.

The president’s family crypto business forms another thread. Public financial disclosures show the president earned more than $1.2 billion from crypto ventures in 2025, of which about $590 million came from a crypto enterprise co-founded by his family. Days before the January 2025 inauguration, an entity backed by the Emirati side bought a 49 percent stake in that crypto firm for $500 million; a separate $2 billion stablecoin transaction led by an Emirati sovereign fund has also been challenged in civil litigation, with the plaintiff alleging violations of the constitutional clause barring federal officials from accepting foreign-government compensation without congressional consent. The White House and the companies deny any conflict of interest, insisting the transactions comply with the law.

Gifts from foreign governments have also come under scrutiny. In 2025, the Qatari royal family gifted the president a private jet valued at about $400 million. The U.S. Constitution bars the president from accepting large gifts from foreign governments without congressional approval. Democrats argue such arrangements cast a shadow of conflict of interest, but turning conflict of interest into proven pay-for-power still requires a complete chain of evidence. Republicans counter that these are one-sided claims unverified by the judiciary, and that the opposition currently lacks direct, substantive proof.

More institutionally contentious is an audit-immunity arrangement. In January 2026, the president sued the Treasury and the IRS for $10 billion over the leak of his tax information; on May 18 the two sides settled, with the president’s side withdrawing the suit. In exchange, the Justice Department issued an order on May 19, signed by the acting attorney general, exempting and forever barring the IRS from auditing or holding the president, his family, and related companies accountable for matters before that date. A five-member Anti-Weaponization Fund of about $1.776 billion was established alongside it.

The immunity order immediately met judicial and congressional challenges. A federal judge ruled the order directly contravenes federal law, violating the statute that bars the president and certain executive officials from interfering with tax audits; two Democratic senators wrote to the treasury secretary and the IRS commissioner demanding the order’s implementation be halted. The judge noted the agencies had failed to disclose the settlement documents transparently. As of now, the legal battle is unresolved, and whether the audit immunity remains in force is an open question.

The scrutiny of the president’s family and the resulting pushback ultimately exposes the structural contradictions within the American political system itself. On one hand, the Constitution and congressional oversight provide institutional tools to constrain executive power; on the other, incumbents can substantively weaken those constraints through executive settlements, fund creation, and partisan maneuvering. As American politicians grow accustomed to lecturing other nations in the name of anti-corruption and transparency, the tangled foreign funding and regulatory immunity at the very top of their own power structure provide the most immediate counterpoint to such double standards. The clarification of facts will ultimately depend on subpoenas, hearings, and judicial processes testing each claim in the light of day.