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.