Am Ventures Vc Trump Kids
-=-=
MMA
Fox is deeply enmeshed in potential corruption investigations surrounding the Trump family and Pentagon contracts
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 11/06/26
Fox News has spent the last two years concealing from their viewers the miasma of corruption surrounding President Donald Trump. Now that Democrats have taken control of the House and Senate and are pledging investigations, some at the network are speaking out in defense of the Trump family’s self-dealing business interests — and in so doing, exposing Fox’s own role in the scheme.
Co-host Brian Brenberg suggested on Thursday’s edition of Fox Business’ Money in the Morning that Democrats probing Pentagon contracts with drone makers would “jeopardize national defense” in order to “go after Trump family.” He added, “If you're trying to score political points with the secretary of war, you are not thinking about military readiness, if you’re Democrats, and that is their big flaw in my view.”
Likewise, after co-host Dana Perino suggested on Thursday’s edition of The Five that Democratic investigations would “burn up a lot of time” that could be spent “moving legislation,” her colleague Jesse Watters responded by contrasting Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump favorably with former President Joe Biden’s son Hunter. “I mean at least the Trump boys are doing things with minerals and drones and real estate,” Watters claimed. “I mean, they actually create value.”
The potential probes Brenberg and Watters criticized would inevitably hang a lantern on Fox’s incestuous relationship with the Trumps and the Trump administration. One of Fox's own contributors — Powerus founder Brett Velicovich — is president of a drone company Trump’s eldest sons are invested in that received Pentagon contracts, and the defense secretary that oversees the Pentagon is former Fox host Pete Hegseth.
Powerus is “a new drone company backed financially, in part, by Trump’s eldest sons” that “emerged from a crowded field to snap up multimillion-dollar contracts in the U.S. and overseas” including “a $90 million Air Force contract,” as Fox’s corporate cousins at The Wall Street Journal detailed in a profile of the firm published last week.
The Journal detailed that a defense firm backed by a president’s family members receiving government contracts is unprecedented:
A fund backed by the Trump sons, American Ventures, has cashed out at least $6 million from its investment to date. The fund owns about 3.4% of Powerus, according to a securities filing, and holds warrants that can convert to tens of millions of additional shares in the future.
Dominari Holdings, the financial firm behind American Ventures, helped take Powerus public. The Trump sons each own around 6% of the investment bank, which often merges underperforming publicly traded companies with businesses in buzzy industries.
To ethics experts, Powerus is an example of the blurred lines of government and private business in the second Trump administration that are without modern comparison. “Never have we seen a president’s family benefiting from military contracts,” said Richard Painter, a White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush.
The Journal further reported that Trump had posted praise of Velicovich on social media shortly after one of the Fox contributor’s appearances on the network last summer, an example of what I’ve termed the Fox-Trump feedback loop.
Powerus is part of a “a portfolio of defense technology start-ups” Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have invested in “that are benefiting from new Pentagon priorities and spending, further entangling the United States’ interests and the Trump family’s financial fortunes in an area with immense stakes for national security,” The Washington Post reported in July. Earlier this year, then-Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo congratulated Eric on air after one of those companies landed a robotics contract from the Pentagon.
Donald Trump Jr. helped secure the Pentagon leadership that is now rewarding the companies in which he and his brother have invested. He reportedly played a key role in ensuring Hegseth’s confirmation as defense secretary, helping to orchestrate a right-wing campaign to cement the necessary Republican Senate votes following weeks of disturbing reports about the wildly unqualified Fox host’s competence and character. The president’s son subsequently claimed on his podcast that he had been “assisting” Hegseth “with personnel decisions” and prioritizing “candidates who wanted to spend more money on drones,” the Post reported.
The drone deals are just one of a vast array of shady business deals involving the president and his family which could come under scrutiny in the months ahead.
Fox hosts spent years trumpeting House Republican probes of Hunter Biden’s business interests that dealt with a tiny fraction of the money implicated in the Trump family scandals and which were never successfully linked to any decision Joe Biden made in government.
But once Trump returned to the White House and his sons began using the network’s “Biden Crime Family” conspiracy theory as a business plan, Fox’s reporters and pundits either turned their backs on the subject— or openly moved to cash in.
And now that Democrats are promising to investigate the corruption these pundits ignored, Fox personalities are denouncing the probes as a “witch hunt” (Greg Gutfeld), “ruthless upcoming lawfare campaign” (Sean Hannity), a “weaponization routine” (Dan Bongino), and a “revenge agenda” (Donald Trump Jr.’s business partner Laura Ingraham).
//
06/04/26
02/11/26
The Trumps turned Fox’s “Biden Crime Family” conspiracy theory into a business plan
04/13/26
-=-=
-=-=
AN 11 26
The Trump administration awarded a small biosecurity company nearly $40 million to screen for Ebola and other infectious diseases just months after a firm linked to President Donald Trump’s elder sons invested in its parent company, according to records and interviews.
The contracts, one to screen for Ebola in several U.S. airports and the other to respond to disease outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of Congo, are seven times the total value of government contracts the company had directly received before.
The company, XpresTest, has years of experience monitoring for COVID-19 and other diseases for the government at U.S. airports. That makes its parent, XWELL, an unusual hybrid, selling both spa treatments and biosecurity services. Last year, it made most of its money from waxing salons and airport spas that offer manicures, massages and “chakra beds.”
The contracts are the latest example of the president’s family benefiting financially from his administration’s actions. And the stakes for these deals are particularly high. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, an Ebola outbreak has killed more than 5,000 people this year, and the federal government is trying to stop the pathogen from coming to the U.S.
XpresTest has never worked with Ebola or provided biosecurity services abroad, let alone in the kind of volatile locales it’s now expected to work in. The CEO of its parent company, Ezra Ernst, said XpresTest won both contracts in a competitive bidding process and pointed to its years of experience doing screening for COVID-19 and other pathogens at American airports. But even he acknowledged that working internationally is “a new thing for us” and expressed uncertainty about being able to complete the work in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
“This is a risky contract. I’m not sure we can do it,” Ernst said in an interview.
Jeremy Konyndyk, who helped oversee the U.S. government’s response to a 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, said there are some parallels between monitoring for COVID-19 and Ebola at airports, but he said it’s concerning that the government would award such a lucrative contract to a company that has no experience in Africa.
“There are countless organizations in the world that have decades of experience doing this work,” Konyndyk said. “I have to wonder why the hell they’re not going with someone who has actually done this before.”
Under previous administrations, the U.S. government addressed international disease outbreaks in partnership with the World Health Organization. But Trump withdrew from the group last year, dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, which handled much of this work, and dramatically scaled back the global presence of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
At the same time, the State Department launched the America First Global Health Strategy, which calls for the U.S. to use aid to foreign countries to “promote American companies and American innovations abroad.” This March, the State Department announced it would be giving up to $4.5 billion in funding for various purposes, including responding to infectious disease outbreaks.
Under that program, XPresTest was awarded $20 million. Other funding went to better-known global aid nonprofits, including International Medical Corps, Save the Children and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, whose awards ranged from $25 million to $35 million.
The CDC also awarded XPresTest a contract, for $18.8 million.
In response to questions from ProPublica about XPresTest and its parent company, XWELL, the State Department noted the firm’s previous work screening for diseases at airports under a contract with the CDC and said its own award was made “through a competitive process that builds on this successful model.”
The CDC did not respond to a request for comment.
A spokesperson for the president’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric Trump said that they are “merely passive, minority investors in a fund that invested in this company,” and that they had no “involvement in or knowledge regarding the negotiation or procurement of any of its contracts, including any government contracts.”
“Both are private citizens who hold no government positions, broken no laws and who have every right to pursue lawful business and investment opportunities,” the spokesperson said.
The Trump sons’ connection to XWELL was established in February, when a fund called American Ventures invested in the company. The fund was launched by Dominari Holdings, a small financial firm with offices inside Trump Tower in New York. The leaders of Dominari hired the Trump sons as advisers after their father was elected to a second term and granted them a stake of more than 10% in Dominari.
Anthony Hayes, the CEO of Dominari Holdings, told ProPublica, “We have never seen or even heard of Don or Eric using their family name to influence the granting of a government contract.”
American Ventures has taken stakes in other companies that have benefited from Trump administration actions. The Florida-based drone company Powerus got a contract worth up to $90 million from the U.S. Air Force five months after the Trumps’ involvement was announced. Through American Ventures, Donald Jr. and Eric Trump also are acquiring a stake in a critical minerals group that has received U.S. government support to mine for tungsten in Kazakhstan. The Trumps have described themselves as passive investors who do not advocate for the companies they have stakes in before their father’s government.
XWELL was founded in 2006 as a line of airport-based spas that provided massages and facials. During the pandemic, the company, then known as XpresSpa Group, got $5.5 million from the CDC to offer travelers COVID-19 testing. It also collected waste from airplane toilets to check for new viral strains. It has done similar work for at least one other company that has received government contracts.
In January, XWELL announced that it was hiring a former senior adviser at the CDC who created and led the agency’s traveler surveillance program. The firm said the move was part of a plan to expand “its traveler-based pathogen surveillance capabilities to support international travel hubs and large-scale mass gathering events worldwide.”
The following month, American Ventures invested about $30 million in XWELL. The company had lost money the previous year. “We were so cash-strapped, close to bankrupt,” its CEO said.
Its valuation before the cash infusion was just $3 million. In exchange, American Ventures got a roughly 10% stake in the company to start, with an option to essentially print and sell millions of shares in the future.
Why American Ventures would invest so much in XWELL is unclear. In other cases, when the fund has invested in similar tiny publicly traded companies, some of those firms have moved into hot new sectors and drawn publicity for their connection to the Trumps, then Dominari has offloaded shares. In this case, there is no indication it has sold any of its stake yet.
In June, XpresTest was awarded the CDC contract for what a public notice about the grant said was “Ebola entry screening services.”
XpresTest then received the State Department grant for “rapid, effective, and coordinated outbreak response” to infectious disease threats in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which began in September, according to a government database. The company is also planning to work in Kenya and Morocco. XWELL’s website shows it is now hiring specialists in Ebola response training and biosecurity in the U.S.
In July, after XpresTest was awarded the CDC contract, XWELL announced plans to sell the subsidiary along with its line of spas to a private facial spa company. Ernst, the CEO, said the government contracts played a role in the $13 million sale price and will follow XpresTest to the new company.
That means XWELL, the company that the Trump-linked investment fund took a stake in, will benefit financially from the Trump administration contracts if the sale closes, even though it won’t be involved in doing the work for the government.
XWELL said in a public filing that the sale was part of an effort “to pursue a new direction in the national security sector.” Ernst said he didn’t know the exact plans but thought the parent company might be looking to work with the Department of Defense.
XWELL did not announce either of XpresTest’s biosecurity contracts, which recently became public in federal contracting disclosures. Public companies like XWELL are required to report so-called material events, developments that could affect their share price, such as a large government contract. XWELL has publicized previous work for the federal government, including a $2 million, eight-week pilot program for testing COVID-19 in 2021.
When asked why his firm didn’t announce the awards, Ernst gave various reasons, including the possibility that XPresTest might wind up not being able to do the work — either because of its own inexperience working internationally or because the Trump administration might suddenly shift priorities and only pay for a fraction of the contract.
“None of these contracts are guaranteed,” he said.
The biosecurity awards add to the questions about the Trump family’s enrichment during his second term. The Trump family’s business activities extend far beyond Dominari and American Ventures. The president himself has made more than $1 billion from cryptocurrency ventures whose value has ballooned as his administration has taken a friendly stance to the industry. And other companies backed by his sons Donald Jr. and Eric have received billions of dollars in federal deals. Earlier this year, ProPublica reported that the Pentagon granted a small North Carolina startup linked to Trump Jr. a $620 million loan after a top aide to the president intervened on the company’s behalf. The Pentagon denied preferential treatment, and a spokesperson for Trump Jr. said he played no role.
The Trumps’ financial ties to government deals and actions are expected to be a primary focus of Congress in the coming months after Democrats won control of both the Senate and the House in last week’s midterm elections.
“When the government is corrupted for personal gain over the public interest, Americans lose trust and taxpayer dollars are wasted,” Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, wrote in a letter to colleagues last week.
-=-=
-=-=
dck11 26
Search Assist
American Ventures, a fund associated with Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, has invested in Powerus, a drone company that recently secured a $90 million contract from the U.S. Air Force. This connection has raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest due to the Trump family's involvement in the business.
propublica.orgOverview of American Ventures and Powerus
American Ventures is a fund linked to Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. It has invested in Powerus, a drone company that has gained significant attention due to its rapid growth and military contracts.
Key Facts about Powerus
Founded: October 2025
Initial Assets: $5.7 million
Current Valuation: Approximately $300 million
Recent Contracts: Secured a $90 million contract from the U.S. Air Force for drone interceptors.
Connection to the Trump Family
Investors: Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump are involved through American Ventures, which has a stake in Powerus.
Public Offering: Powerus went public in October 2026, following a merger with Aureus Greenway Holdings Inc., a golf course operator.
Concerns Raised
The involvement of the Trump family in Powerus has led to scrutiny regarding potential conflicts of interest, especially given the company's military contracts. Critics have expressed concerns about the implications of a president's family benefiting from government contracts.
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Company Name | Powerus |
| Founded | October 2025 |
| Initial Funding | $5.7 million |
| Current Valuation | $300 million |
| Major Contract | $90 million from U.S. Air Force |
| Public Listing Date | October 2026 |
| Trump Family Involvement | Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump via American Ventures |
Powerus aims to leverage its connections and contracts to expand its operations in the drone manufacturing sector, particularly in response to increasing military needs.
propublica.org
YahooDroneXL.co
https://dronexl.co › 2026 › 03 › 13 › trump-family-750-million-drone-portfolio
Trump Family's Drone Portfolio Reaches $750 Million as Pentagon Scales ...
Mar 13, 2026The Portfolio: American Ventures — a firm that lists Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump among its backers — holds stakes in three drone companies: Powerus, Xtend, and Unusual Machines, with combined paper value near $750 million.
Reuters
Drone startup tied to Trump sons aims to bring Ukrainian tech to US
Sep 30, 2026US drone startup Powerus, which is set to go public by merging with a company backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, aims to bring Ukrainian and other foreign technology to the US to help ...
Quartz
https://qz.com › powerus-trump-drone-startup-300-million-103026
Trump-backed drone startup Powerus grows into $300 million firm - Quartz
Oct 30, 2026How a Trump social media post helped launch a $300 million drone startup Powerus, backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, has won a $90 million Air Force contract and gone public within a year
-=-=