U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff Calls President Donald Trump's Invitation to Top Meme Coin Holders an "Impeachable Offense"

Answering a question from a town hall meeting attendee on Friday, Ossoff said:

Democratic U.S. senator for Georgia Jon Ossoff said that President Donald Trump’s invitation to the top memecoin holders for a gala dinner is an “impeachable offense.”

Answering a question from a town hall meeting attendee on Friday, Ossoff said that he is working hard to secure enough votes to impeach President Trump. However, with Republicans controlling the Senate, it’s a difficult task.

“He is granting audiences to people who purchase the memecoin that directly enriches him,” Ossoff said of Trump’s move.

The senator was referring to the gala dinner invite announced on Wednesday for the 220 top holders of the Trump memecoin. The dinner will be held at Trump’s Private, Members-Only Club in Washington, D.C..

According to the official website for Trump’s memecoins, the top 220 holders of $TRUMP will be invited to attend a gala dinner with the president on May 22. The dinner, advertised as the “most exclusive invitation in the world,” will be held at Trump’s Private, Members-Only Club in Washington, D.C..

The top 25 $TRUMP holders will also gain access to an “Exclusive Reception” before the dinner party, along with a VIP tour. Trump will be talking about the “Future of Crypto” at the dinner, the website says.

About 80% of the supply of the Official Trump memecoin, launched on Jan. 17, is owned by two companies: CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC. Both companies are part of a conglomerate owned by Trump.

According to the tokenomics, the above Trump-affiliated companies provided 10% of the supply to the liquidity pool. This means that these companies act as market makers, ensuring liquidity and fulfilling trades that come in. For this service, they charge a fee between 0.1% and 10% of each trade, depending on market demand.

Therefore, Trump indirectly benefits more from trading volume than from the price of his memecoin. Nathan van der Heyden, the head of business development at crypto firm Aragon, told Wired:

“If you have a coin and you control the market making and the fess generated, what you care about is volume and price movement, not price itself.”

In February, Reuters reported that the Trump-associated entities earned between $86 million and $100 million in trading fess by Jan. 30. The price of Trump, which reached a peak of around $75 on Jan. 19, had declined by 64% to around $27 during the same period. This meant that Trump-related companies earned huge fess while small traders lost money.

“The optics of profiting from selling your own coin are terrible, while profiting from the market making is opaque enough to protect your reputation,” said van der Heyden.

This move has sparked widespread criticism.

Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut wrote on X:

“The Trump coin scam is the most brazenly corrupt thing a President has ever done. We're talking about anything from petty cash to serious sums of money. It's best to assume that if you're a no-name college student who managed to scrape together enough to get no.220, you're not getting an invite.”

Many believe that if Trump benefits from his policies and decisions financially, there is a conflict of interest. Some have also pointed out that the invite could be used by individuals trying to get access to Trump.

Tony Carrk, U.S. executive director at Accountable.US, a non-partisan advocacy group, said in a statement:

“The President is openly inviting investors to have a bidding war over who can buy the most access to him while he laughs all the way to the bank.

“This pay-to-play scheme is on a staggering scale befitting the grift of mythic proportions that we've come to expect from this administration.”

Carrk added that Trump’s invite clearly indicates that he is abusing his position in office to put money in his own pocket.

Earlier this week, senators Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff sent a letter urging the U.S. Office of Government Ethics to launch an “urgent inquiry” into Trump’s dinner announcement. They wrote that the dinner invitation poses a “severe risk” that Trump and others could be engaging in “‘pay to play’ corruption.”