Warren and Reed Demand DOJ/Treasury Probe of World Liberty Financial Token Sales to Sanctioned Actors

Senators Elizabeth Warren (ranking member, Senate Banking) and Jack Reed (ranking member, Senate Armed Services) sent a letter dated May 14, 2026 to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche calling for DOJ and Treasury investigations into World Liberty Financial’s repeated failures to detect ties to sanctioned criminals, setting a May 26, 2026 deadline for written responses on possible enforcement. The senators cited the October 2025 U.S. sanctioning of leaders of WLF’s crypto partner for ties to the Prince Group — “a massive transnational criminal enterprise” — and stated that throughout 2025 WLF “reportedly sold tokens to buyers conducting business with North Korean state-sponsored hackers, sanctioned Russian money-laundering entities, and other illicit actors.” The letter was timed ahead of the Senate Banking Committee’s crypto market-structure markup, asserting “WLF has repeatedly failed to maintain safeguards needed to prevent illicit actors from exploiting its platform.”

This is the third distinct Warren-led WLF action in five months — the January charter-halt request (2026-01-23--occ-comptroller-gould-refuses-warren-demand-pause-wlfi-charter), the February UAE-disclosure grilling (2026-02-26--warren-grills-gould-wlfi-uae-disclosure-hearing), and now a sanctions-compliance probe on a separate track. The structural pattern is the timing: an oversight demand issued the same day as a markup that would legitimize the very firm under scrutiny, so the legislation advancing the industry runs in parallel with the request that would constrain it. It cross-cuts the firm’s near-approval for a federal bank charter (2026-05-21--wlf-nears-occ-conditional-approval-national-trust-bank-charter-usd1): the charter advances while the sanctions probe is pending.