Trump Cut a Billion-Dollar Mining Deal. His Sons Stand to Profit.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/28/world/europe/trump-lutnick-sons-kazakhstan.html

Trump Cut a Billion-Dollar Mining Deal. His Sons Stand to Profit.
An agreement between the U.S. and Kazakhstan has given a group of American investors with ties to the president and the commerce secretary access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten.
By Paul Sonne and Eric Lipton
June 28, 2026 Updated 7:57 a.m. ET

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Ahead of the deal, the Trump administration approved preliminary applications for as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing for the American company, now called Kaz Resources, which plans to break ground on the project in rural Kazakhstan.

It was not only Mr. Trump and Mr. Lutnick who saw an opportunity.

Their sons were soon doing business with partners in a deal that their fathers were negotiating, continuing a pattern of self-enrichment in the second Trump administration that has few precedents in American history.

Within weeks of the St. Regis negotiations, investors with a firm called Dominari Securities, which is housed at Trump Tower in New York and partly owned by the president’s two eldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, joined with other partners to take a 20 percent stake in the Kazakhstan project.

Around the same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, an investment company controlled by Mr. Lutnick’s family and overseen by his sons Brandon and Kyle Lutnick, helped one of the lead investors working with Dominari on the Kazakh deal raise $210 million in new capital for a related entity. Such rounds of fund-raising typically net Cantor millions of dollars in fees.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/28/world/asia/kazakhstan-trump.html

Kazakhstan’s Leader Deepens U.S. Ties, Saying Trump Was ‘Sent by Heaven’
The Central Asian nation is aggressively courting President Trump’s Washington to counterbalance its powerful neighbors, Russia and China.
By Paul Sonne
June 28, 2026, 5:39 a.m. ET

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Kazakhstan is a junior partner to Russia in a NATO-like military alliance and a European Union-like trade bloc. But that hasn’t stopped its leaders from aggressively courting Washington under President Trump, prompting a slew of business deals, a series of high-level meetings and a frenzy of engagement with American companies.

In Washington, Mr. Trump has dispensed with America’s traditional talk of human rights and democracy in connection with foreign policy. He has instead embraced a mercantilist approach, judging countries like Kazakhstan by what deals they can offer. A top priority has been securing access to Kazakhstan’s large supply of critical minerals and ensuring that they can be exported via the Middle Corridor, a route that crosses the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus to avoid Russia.

[Kazakhstan’s president Kassym-Jomart]Tokayev’s authoritarian ways — he recently changed Kazakhstan’s Constitution to strengthen his power — once hindered his country’s relationship with the United States. But under the second Trump administration, which dismantled U.S. Agency for International Development programs working on human rights issues in Kazakhstan, such concerns are no longer an irritant for Washington.

The Kazakh leader has joined Mr. Trump’s Board of Peace. He signed up to the Abraham Accords even though Kazakhstan already had diplomatic relations with Israel. And he led a high-level delegation of Central Asian leaders to Washington last year, during which the Kazakh state mining firm signed a tungsten deal with a U.S. company that was later revealed to be backed by Mr. Trump’s sons.

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