Here’s a little piece of the transcript:

In the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump offered full-throated support for the crypto industry. And, online, he, his family and partners announced they were opening a crypto firm of their own.

Trump World Liberty Financial promo: We’re embracing the future with crypto and leaving the slow and outdated big banks behind that’s what we wanna do. Go to World Liberty Financial dot com.

World Liberty Financial would be like a bank offering financial services in digital currencies. Its pitch to investors usually called a “white paper” was gilded as a “gold paper.”

Scott Pelley: When World Liberty Financial launched before the election, was it a big success?

Austin Campbell: It was largely unknown. They had had a fundraising round that had only been partially filled. They had a team that I think only had one, or maybe a handful of engineers at best, and honestly not much was going on there.

Austin Campbell is a former banker who’s briefed Congress on crypto. He was a crypto executive and now teaches at New York University.

Scott Pelley: If you’re starting a crypto company from scratch, what are the technical hurdles?

Austin Campbell: You need to hire engineers, you need to deploy all of the infrastructure that you’ll need, essentially, to run a tech company.

Enter Changpeng Zhao, last fall, fresh out of prison. Sources tell us Zhao’s company, Binance, donated software to World Liberty to help the Trump family venture launch a cryptocurrency. A source familiar with events told us, without Zhao, quote, “the technology doesn’t exist.”

The next month, Changpeng Zhao applied for a presidential pardon. And shortly after the application, he was at the center of a blockbuster deal that put World Liberty on the map. Zhao is a citizen of the United Arab Emirates in the Persian Gulf and in May, an Emirati fund put $2 billion in Zhao’s Binance. Of all the currencies in the world, the deal was done in World Liberty crypto.

Austin Campbell: So it took World Liberty from being a small project that maybe was on the road map after the election, purely for the name, to being one of the largest stablecoins in the world in a single transaction. So, it vaulted them from small time to the big leagues.

The Emirates entrusted two billion to a currency that had been on the market five weeks. One source told us, “it wasn’t strange. It was nuts.”

Lawrence Lessig: The only reason it makes sense is to ingratiate with the president.

Lawrence Lessig has spent nearly 20 years on ethics in politics. He teaches law at Harvard and has campaigned with the left and the right against the corrupting influence of money.

Scott Pelley: Are you saying that the president is compromised by this transaction?

Lawrence Lessig: “Compromised” is exactly the description because we can’t know what’s the actual reason for the decisions that the administration is making. Are the reasons helping America, or are the reasons helping America and also helping them privately?

Trump believes that what’s good for Trump is good for the USA so that’s not a question for him. The rest of us should be appalled. But are we? Is this kleptocracy our new normal?

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