Elizabeth Warren torches Trump after ‘lap dog’ SEC drops Justin Sun charges in $10m deal

Justin Sun’s court battle is over, but the political firestorm over US President Donald Trump’s crypto ties is heating up.

On Thursday, Senator Elizabeth Warren, an outspoken critic of the crypto industry, launched a fierce attack against Trump after the Securities and Exchange Commission dropped charges against Sun. Rainberry, one of the companies associated with the Tron network, which Sun founded, will pay a $10 million settlement.

Key to her broadside is the fact that Sun is a major investor in World Liberty Financial, which is run by the president’s sons. Trump is also a co-founder Emeritus, according to the company’s website.

Sun bought at least $75 million in the project’s native WLFI tokens and approximately $18 million in the president’s TRUMP memecoin, which launched in January 2025. The Chinese-born crypto entrepreneur has appeared alongside Trump family members at conferences and private events.

“Justin Sun poured $90 million into Trump’s crypto ventures, and today the SEC agreed to drop its case against him,” Warren said.

“The SEC should not be a lap dog for Trump’s billionaire buddies, and any crypto legislation moving through Congress must stop the president’s crypto corruption.”

Warren’s diatribe is the latest Democratic Party denunciation of the Trump administration’s increasingly permissive stance toward the digital asset industry.

The scrutiny is mounting ahead of the crucial midterm elections later this year.

In January, Democratic congresswoman Maxine Waters, Ranking Member of the House Financial Services Committee, urged SEC Chairman Paul Atkins to step up enforcement.

The settlement is also the latest in a string of paused, halted and dropped cases against crypto companies since Trump was elected in 2024.

Coinbase, Ripple, and Kraken are just some of the industry players whose cases have been dropped or settled with the SEC

“The president has no involvement in business deals that would implicate his constitutional responsibilities,” White House counsel David Warrington told DL News in February.

Sun settles

The Tron founder is known for engaging in high-profile publicity stunts, including paying over $6 million for “Comedian,” an artwork of a banana taped to a wall, which he then ate at a press conference.

Sun’s settlement resolves a 2023 SEC lawsuit.

The agency accused Sun and his companies — Tron Foundation, BitTorrent Foundation and Rainberry — of illegally distributing digital assets, manipulating trading volume and concealing payments to celebrity endorsers.

Sun has neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing to the SEC’s allegations that he generated roughly $31 million in profits through orchestrated self-trading of his TRX token.

“Today’s resolution brings closure, but I never stopped building,” Sun said after the charges were dropped.

“I will continue to focus on accelerating innovation in the United States and around the world and look forward to working with the SEC to develop guidance and regulations for crypto going forward.”

Regulatory shift

The Sun deal marks one of the most consequential examples yet of the SEC’s enforcement retreat since Trump’s return to the Oval Office in 2025.

The agency has pulled back from more than half of the crypto cases it inherited from the Biden era, according to analyses by the New York Times. Some lawsuits have been frozen. Others were dismissed outright.

The shift dovetails with Trump’s broader repositioning as a crypto ally.

Since taking office, he has pardoned crypto figureheads, signed pro-industry executive orders, and appointed industry allies to key government roles.

Trump has also pardoned Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao, whose exchange paid $4.3 billion in penalties to US authorities and whose conviction stemmed from failures to prevent money laundering.

White House officials described Zhao’s pardon as closing the chapter on what they described as the Biden administration’s “war on cryptocurrency.”

The pardon has caught the eye of Trump’s political rivals, who have noted Binance’s ties to the Trump family’s crypto ventures. For instance, it custodies almost 72% of all USD1, World Liberty Financial’s stablecoin, according to Arkham data.

Binance CEO Richard Teng, and Zhao’s lawyer Teresa Goody Guillen, have both dismissed claims that the exchange helped boost USD1 before Zhao received the pardon.

Crypto market movers

• Bitcoin is down 3.9% over the past 24 hours, trading at $70,712.
• Ethereum is down 4.1% past 24 hours at $2,066.

What we’re reading

• Bitcoin price holds firm above $70,000. But market conviction is thin, analysts caution — DL News
• https://www.dlnews.com/articles/markets/crypto-fraudster-resurfaces-after-being-declared-dead/ — DL News
• SEC Sends Crypto Securities Framework to the White House — Unchained
• The Next Crypto Bull Market May Already Be Starting — Milk Road
• Ripple CEO backs President Trump’s ‘pointed message‘ to get Clarity Act passed — DL News

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email him at lance@dlnews.com.