A REPUBLICAN SENATOR ASKS HIS OWN JUDICIARY COMMITTEE TO SUBPOENA THE PRESIDENT’S SON — HIS LIST INCLUDES ADVISORY ROLES AT TWO PREDICTION MARKETS THE CFTC REGULATES — “WE SHOULD NOT UNPLUG IT NOW”

John Curtis, the Republican senator from Utah, wrote to Chuck Grassley and Dick Durbin on Monday asking the Senate Judiciary Committee to subpoena Donald Trump Jr. and Hunter Biden. The subject he names is “the use of presidential family relationships for private financial benefit, preferential treatment, or access.” On X he was blunter about the politics of it: “Republicans nearly wore out the subpoena machine investigating Hunter Biden’s foreign relationships. We should not unplug it now.”

Read his list. World Liberty Financial. The Trump memecoin. A Russian oligarch who paid for a wedding celebration. And then the two that belong on this page: advisory roles at Kalshi and Polymarket, with 1789 Capital invested in the second.

Those are not hotels. They are venues under the CFTC, and on the same day Curtis’s letter became public, that agency issued an advisory warning that the event contracts these venues list can be steered by the very people the contracts are about. Nobody needs to allege a crime for the shape to be a problem. A prediction market is worth something only because its outcomes cannot be arranged. Two of them have the president’s son as an adviser, and the regulator that decides what they may list answers to the president.

This is what it costs to build markets that need a referee. You get the referee the election gave you, and every few years the country argues about whose family is standing next to him. Bitcoin has no advisory board and no seat to sell. That is not a virtue anyone designed in. It is what is left when you remove the people who could be bought. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $86,468.