EXCLUSIVE — The nation’s top banking regulator is rejecting Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) request to halt a bank charter application for World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency group founded by President Donald Trump and his allies in 2024.
WLF, which describes itself as a “decentralized finance” cryptocurrency firm, filed an application on Jan. 5 with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to be a national trust bank. The comptroller approving a charter for WLF would allow the firm to issue USD1, a stablecoin backed by the dollar that hit a market cap exceeding $3 billion last year. WLF has served as a primary wealth asset for the Trump family since its founding during Trump’s campaign.
Warren, the ranking member on the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, sent a letter to Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould on Jan. 13, urging his office to halt the review of WLF’s application until Trump fully divests from the company and eliminates all possible conflicts of interest. She argued that failing to do so would allow, “for the first time in history,” the president of the United States to be in charge of oversight for “his own financial company.”
However, Gould will send a letter back to Warren on Friday, a copy of which was obtained Friday morning by the Washington Examiner, stating that the independent agency “is committed to following all applicable laws and regulations, including those governing the chartering application and review process, for all applications submitted for the OCC’s consideration.”
“There are statutory requirements providing that the OCC must act within a prescribed period of time, and the Administrative Procedure Act instructs courts to ‘compel agency action unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed,'” the letter reads. “Congress has made clear that the OCC has a duty to act on the applications it receives in a timely manner. The OCC intends to act consistent with this duty rather than your demand.”
Gould vowed to conduct the OCC’s charter reviews, for WLF and all other applications, in “an apolitical and nonpartisan process.”
“After decades of decline in the number of de novo charters, it is vital the OCC return to normal order,” the letter concludes. “This means adhering to the law and reviewing all applications, including applications to establish national banks, in an apolitical, nonpartisan and objective manner, supporting both innovative and traditional approaches to the very old business of banking.”
Asked for comment on OCC’s decision, Warren told the Washington Examiner in a statement that “President Trump’s unprecedented crypto corruption has metastasized to the banking system.”
“Comptroller Jonathan Gould – who serves at the pleasure of President Trump – is refusing to delay the review of World Liberty Financial’s bank charter application until Trump and his family divest from the company,” she wrote. “The OCC’s review is a sham. We have never seen financial conflicts of this magnitude and no crypto market structure legislation should pass Congress without guardrails to stop this kind of corruption.”
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Since its founding, WLF has boosted the Trump family‘s wealth by more than $1 billion and has consistently been pointed to by the president’s critics as a significant conflict of interest given his administration’s championing of cryptocurrencies.
Reuters reported one day after Warren originally petitioned Gould to halt the WLF review that the firm had partnered with Pakistan to “explore using World Liberty’s USD1 stablecoin for cross-border payments.”
