EXCLUSIVE — The nation’s top banking regulator has rejected a request by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to halt the banking charter application of World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency group founded in 2024 by President Donald Trump and his allies.
WLF, which describes itself as a “decentralized finance” cryptocurrency company, filed an application to become a national trust bank with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency on January 5th. If the auditor approves WLF’s charter, the company will be allowed to issue USD1, a dollar-backed stablecoin that had a market capitalization of more than $3 billion last year. WLF has served as a major asset for the Trump family since it was founded during Trump’s presidential campaign.
On January 13, Warren, the ranking member of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, sent a letter to Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould asking the office to halt its review of WLF applications until President Trump has completely withdrawn from WLF and all potential conflicts of interest have been eliminated. Failing to do so would mean “for the first time in history” a U.S. president would be in charge of overseeing “his own financial company,” she argued.
But Gould plans to send a letter back to Warren on Friday, a copy of which was obtained by the Washington Examiner Friday morning, saying the independent agency is “committed to complying with all applicable laws and regulations, including those governing the charterparty application and review process, for all applications submitted for OCC consideration.”
“There is a legal requirement that the OCC act within a prescribed period, and the Administrative Procedure Act directs courts to ‘unlawfully withhold or unreasonably delay agency action,'” the letter said. “Congress has made clear that the OCC has an obligation to act in a timely manner on the applications it receives, and the OCC intends to act on this obligation, not your requests.”
Gould vowed to conduct the OCC’s charter review of WLF and all other applications in a “nonpolitical and bipartisan process.”
“After decades of declining numbers of new charters, it is critical that the OCC return to normal order,” the letter concludes. “This means adhering to the law, reviewing all applications, including those to form a national bank, in a nonpolitical, bipartisan and objective manner, and supporting both innovative and traditional approaches to very old banking.”
Asked to comment on the OCC’s decision, Warren told the Washington Examiner in a statement that “President Trump’s unprecedented crypto corruption has metastasized into the banking system.”
“Comptroller Jonathan Gould, acting as comptroller at the behest of President Trump, is refusing to delay his review of World Liberty Financial’s bank charter application until President Trump and his family exit World Liberty Financial,” she wrote. “The OCC review is a sham. We have never seen a financial dispute on this scale. No virtual currency market structure bill should pass Congress without guardrails to prevent this type of corruption.”
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Since its founding, WLF has added more than $1 billion to the Trump family’s wealth, but has consistently been cited by the president’s critics as a significant conflict of interest, given the Trump administration’s support for cryptocurrencies.
Reuters reported a day after Warren first petitioned Gould to halt the WLF review that the company is “considering using World Liberty’s USD 1 stablecoin for cross-border payments” in partnership with Pakistan.
