Olivia Troye was Vice-President Pence’s national security advisor. She resigned in August 2020 and endorsed challenger Joe Biden. She now writes a blog where she comments on current issues. The blog is called Olivia of Troye.
In this post, she writes about open corruption and its danger to national security. Paying Trump family members to gain access to government policy.
She began:
I read this reporting twice. And then I sat with it.
Because once you strip away the crypto jargon, the shell companies, and the carefully lawyered denials, what’s left is something deeply unsettling—and profoundly dangerous for American governance.
Four days before Donald Trump was sworn back into office, lieutenants to an Abu Dhabi royal secretly signed a deal with the Trump family to purchase 49% of a Trump-linked company for $500 million. Not a hotel. Not a licensing deal. A major ownership stake in a company tied directly to the sitting president’s family.
The buyer wasn’t just a foreign investor. It was Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan—the United Arab Emirates’ national security adviser, brother of the country’s president, and overseer of a vast intelligence, surveillance, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) empire that U.S. officials had already flagged as a national security risk.
Months later, the Trump administration approved unprecedented access for the UAE to hundreds of thousands of the most advanced American AI chips, technology that had previously been restricted over fears it could be diverted to China. This has been a concern inside national security circles for years. Now here we are.
Under the Biden administration, Tahnoon’s efforts to secure advanced U.S. AI chips were largely blocked. Intelligence officials and lawmakers, Republicans included, raised repeated concerns about his companies’ ties to Chinese firms, including Huawei.
After Trump’s election, the door reopened. Tahnoon met repeatedly with Trump, his Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, and senior U.S. officials. He pledged massive investment in the United States. He was welcomed into the Oval Office and seated at White House dinners alongside cabinet members.
Two months later, the administration committed to giving the UAE access to roughly 500,000 advanced AI chips per year, enough to build one of the world’s largest AI data-center clusters. At this point, we have to stop pretending this is ambiguous. This is what corruption looks like in real time.
Not a bag of cash. Not a secret memo. But a foreign intelligence-linked official quietly purchasing leverage over the family of a sitting U.S. president, and then watching U.S. policy move in his favor.
That isn’t coincidence. It’s influence.
And when influence can be bought this way, American decision-making no longer belongs to the American people. It belongs to whoever can pay the most, hide it the best, and wait it out.
As someone who has worked inside the national security system, I want to be very clear: the risk here is serious.
Advanced AI chips aren’t just commercial products. They underpin surveillance systems, military capabilities, cyber operations, and global intelligence dominance. Decisions about who gets access to them are supposed to be driven by national security risk assessments, not private financial entanglements with the president’s family.
When those lines blur, national security becomes transactional. And once that happens, the damage doesn’t stay contained. It ripples through alliances and corrodes intelligence-sharing. Furthermore, it shatters America’s credibility when we warn the world about corruption and foreign influence.
This isn’t just corruption. It’s governance by auction.
Trump says he knew nothing about this deal. That doesn’t make it better. It makes it worse.
Whether through direct knowledge or willful blindness, the outcome is the same: a presidency structurally exposed to foreign money, foreign leverage, and foreign interests. Modern bribery doesn’t arrive in envelopes, it arrives through access and leverage. And it is the exposure of this country: its policy, its security, its future, to the highest bidder.
The post doesn’t end here. Open the link and continue reading this alarming post.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is what’s so frustrating about this blog. You see the problem, but only one side of it, like the woman Oliver Sacks wrote about who could only see one half of the visual field.
Yes, our government is for sale – both parties and to the same bidders. This is not a new thing since Trump. The main qualification for getting backing from either the RNC or the DNC is the candidate’s ability to fundraise, not their policies, not their integrity, not their values, not their past actions. Obama ranted about Citizens United, but he never lifted a finger to do anything about it, nor has any Democratic president or congress since.
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“The presidency is not a private business. U.S. foreign policy is not a commodity. And national security is not for sale.”
Unfortunately, unless we have strict rules with a way of enforcing them, the grift and national security risks may continue in the future. We can no longer depend on good character of a President to set aside his or her self-interests. We need explicit rules and consequences for infractions of those rules. In fact, we need more rules for all of our elected representatives in order to stamp out insider stock trading and buying elections, and we need to eliminate the corrupting influence of dark money in elections. We need a big blue majority to make any of these aspirations a reality.
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THE U.S. SUPREME COURT hung the For Sale sign on all levels of American government back in 2010 when the Court issued its “Citizens United” ruling. Billionaires and corporations quickly bought everything, resulting in the inconvenient truth that AMERICA HAS BEEN AN OLIGARCHY FOR YEARS: After researching government laws passed since Citizens United, Princeton University researcher Martin Gilens and Northwestern University researcher Benjamin Page documented that the U.S. is no longer a representative republic because the government does not represent the interests of the majority of the country’s citizens, but is instead ruled by the rich and powerful. The researchers analyzed 1,800 U.S. policies enacted over a period of two decades and compared the laws and regulations that were passed to those favored by average Americans to those favored by wealthy Americans and corporations, and here’s what the research revealed: “EVEN WHEN A MAJORITY OF CITIZENS DISAGREES WITH ECONOMIC ELITES OR WITH ORGANIZED SPECIAL INTERESTS, ORDINARY CITIZENS GENERALLY LOSE.” That’s an oligarchy masquerading as a republic.
Today, America has the best government that money can buy and is serving the interests of corporations and billionaires, not We the People. Thing is, nearly 50% of Americans like it this way. Remember that when Benjamin Franklin was leaving Independence Hall after signing the Constitution, the wife of the mayor of Philadelphia stopped him and asked: “Well, Mr. Franklin, what type of government have you given us?”
Franklin’s response was: “A republic, Madam — if you can keep it.” Keeping a republic requires a lot of work, studying issues and candidates. Half of America today would rather just turn everything over to a “strongman” leader so that they can cruise social media. If you remember the long ago Pogo political cartoons that ran in those ancient things called “newspapers”, you might remember the warning written across the stern of Pogo’s little pirogue: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
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In 2016, I attended a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, and she said she would overturn Citizens United, if elected.
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