纽约时报调查：特朗普政府清洗CFTC加密监管人员

On May 24th, 2026, the New York Times published an investigation alleging that Korean enforcement staff at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission were purged after raising red flags about three specific crypto firms connected to the Trump family. Crypto enforcement actions at the agency collapsed from over 80 cases under Biden to just two under the second Trump administration. Yes, you heard that correctly. two cases in roughly 16 months, both filed against individual operators, while at least five active investigations into politically connected firms were quietly dropped.

But the truly extraordinary part isn't just the three firms that walked away with regulatory cover worth billions. It's who replaced the Korea staff and where those officials ended up the moment they cashed out of government. So today, we'll walk you through exactly what the times documented, dismantle the convenient framing that this is simple deregulation, and lay out the structural pattern you need to understand before the next blowup arrives.

My name is DC, and you're watching the Coin Bureau. Now, before we get into the specifics, you need to understand a piece of context that almost every headline on this story has decided to skip. For four years, the loudest argument in crypto was that the CFTC and the SEC under the previous administration had weaponized enforcement against the entire industry. That was the original operation chokepoint 2.0 thesis. And to be fair, the December 2025 House Financial Services report confirmed a coordinated multi- agency campaign to debank crypto firms through informal pressure rather than formal rules.

So when Gary Gensler walked out of the door, the assumption across crypto Twitter was that the war was finally over and the good guys had won. That assumption is now being tested in the most uncomfortable way possible because the same regulatory capture machine that was pointed at the industry is still running. It has simply been pointed at a new set of targets and the people benefiting from it are a very very small very specific group of politically connected insiders.

Which brings us directly to what the Times actually reported in spring 2025. Three senior enforcement division leaders at the CFTC, the chief council, the deputy director, and the chief trial attorney were placed under internal investigation. The reasons given were described as vague and none of the officials were told the specific allegations against them. By Christmas of that year, two additional Korea officials who had directly questioned the regulatory treatment of three specific firms were placed on administrative leave, barred from the office, and put under their own internal investigations.

Three more enforcement staff working on crypto cases were removed from the roles without any explanation at all. A former CFTC trial attorney named Andrew Rogers told the Times, and I quote, "There was a sustained effort to oust enforcement staff who worked on some of the agency's more significant cryptocurrency matters." Inside the agency, the message reportedly delivered to the remaining staff was even shorter. It just said, "Don't cause trouble."

And while all of this was happening, the AY's overall workforce dropped 21% in a single fiscal year. At the same time, the Coin settlement was finalized for a number significantly lower than what the AY's own lawyers had projected and argued for internally. Existing cases were also negotiated down under pressure that was applied from the top. Now, the political appointees at the center of the story are three people and the revolving door evidence on two of them is genuinely extraordinary.

Caroline Tham serving as acting chair of the CFTC from January through December 2025. According to the Times, she personally intervened to override career staff objections and fasttrack approvals for the three firms we are about to discuss. In December 2025, she left the CFTC to become chief legal and administrative officer at Moonpay. Moonpay has a partnership with Poly Market, one of the three firms whose approval she championed.

Bridget Wales served as a senior council to Caroline Fam. The Times reports that Wales circulated a pre-written memo endorsing Gemini's Titans registration application while Korea staff were still in the middle of examining the firm submission. In March 2026, she became general counsel at Gemini Titan, the firm whose application she had pushed through. And the current chair, Michael Celic, was confirmed in December 2025.

He is currently the sole sitting commissioner at the agency. The four remaining seats are vacant, which means Celic has near unilateral authority over rules, settlements, and litigation with no commissioner check on any of it. These aren't loose data points. They form a documented machine. You might think that even if individual approvals were rushed, the underlying firms must have been clean enough to reserve them. But that ignores what Korea staff were specifically warning about.

So let's start with Poly Market. Poly Market received investment from 1789 Capital, a venture firm partly owned by Donald Trump Jr., who also serves as an unpaid adviser. In 2022, the firm settled with the CFTC for $1.4 million for operating as an unregistered derivatives exchange and was forced to block US. In 2025, after the CFTC dropped its open investigation, Poly Market spent $112 million on acquiring QCEX, a dormant CFTC licensed exchange and then received a no action letter allowing it to reopen for US users.

Korea staff flagged that this platform lacked adequate fraud protections, and the evidence on why that concern was rational is hard to dismiss. A Colombia University study found that roughly 14% of polymarket wallets exhibited behavior consistent with coordinated wash trading with wash activity peaking near 60% of volume in December 2024. A Wall Street Journal analysis found that 67% of all platform profits were captured by just 0.1% of accounts, approximately 2,000 wallets.

A single French trader reportedly netted $85 million on the 24 US presidential election outcome alone. A US Army soldier used classified government information to bet $33,000 on the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and walked away with roughly 400,000. And of course, Poly Market's founders publicly described the platform's tendency to incentivize people with non-public information to leak it as quote cool.

Then there's Crypto.com. In October 2025, the company signed an exclusive partnership with Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of Truth Social. That partnership launched Truth Predict, a prediction market accessible directly through Truth Social alongside a joint venture managing a digital asset treasury denominated in Crypto.com's own Crow token. Korea staff at the CFTC raised concerns that the firm was not treating small retail bettors fairly, but the company's response to the times was that it fully abides by all federal regulations.

And the third firm is Gemini Titan, an affiliate of the Gemini exchange founded by Cameron and Tyler Winklvos. The link here is not as obvious, but the Winklwas twins are also major financial backers of American Bitcoin Corp, a company co-founded by Eric Trump. The CFTC's career staff noted that Gemini Titan had not completed the mandatory regulatory review required before opening for business. That is the application that Bridget Wales preemptively endorsed in writing before becoming the firm's general council.

Gemini did not respond to the Times. So to put it simply, you have three firms, each tied to a different branch of the Trump family financial network, each receiving expedited regulatory treatment. and two of the officials who delivered that treatment are now collecting paychecks from the firms they helped clear. This brings us to the part that most coverage of this story has been too polite to say out loud. Calling this deregulation is inaccurate.

Deregulation means the same

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