**Critics expressed alarm on Tuesday amid a new report suggesting that President Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency firm is about to get federal banking privileges.**

  
In Brief:

* As reported by NOTUS, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) in the coming weeks is expected to approve a national trust bank charter for World Liberty Financial, the crypto startup founded by members of the Trump family and the family of Trump Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.
* Were it to receive the charter, NOTUS explained, World Liberty Financial would receive “significant legal and financial benefits,” including being able “to settle financial transactions akin to Venmo or PayPal on the World Liberty Financial platform, through which the Trump family could receive a cut.”
* Corey Frayer, director of investor protection for Consumer Federation of America, told NOTUS that here was simply no precedent for a sitting president being granted such privileges for a company he founded by a comptroller whom he personally appointed.
* “For the first time in history, a president is leaning on a bank regulator to give his private enterprise the implicit backing of the federal government,” Frayer explained. “It’s outrageous.”
* “The guardrails continue to fall,” wrote Diana Henriques, a veteran financial journalist best known for her extensive coverage of the Ponzi scheme run by disgraced financier Bernie Madoff. “It is functionally impossible to regulate a bank owned by the president. Yet it can imperil the entire banking system if it runs off the rails. For heaven’s sake, this has to be stopped.”
* Derek Martin, vice president at Focal Point Strategy Group, wrote that there is “no other way to interpret” the NOTUS report “than Trump using the government to advance his own firm’s interests.”

'This Has to Be Stopped': Alarm As Trump's Crypto Firm Set to Get Federal Banking Privileges | Common Dreams