Just two years ago, 1789 Capital Management “was a struggling venture capital firm that earned consistently disappointing results by serially investing in total market flops,” but after recruiting President Donald Trump’s eldest son in the wake of the 2024 US election, it “suddenly had the Midas touch,” a key congressional Democrat highlighted this week, launching an investigation.
House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.)—a lawyer who managed the historic second impeachment of the president—revealed Thursday that the previous day he had sent a letter demanding answers from Donald Trump Jr., who is a partner at 1789 Capital, as well as company president Omeed Malik and chief investment officer Christopher Buskirk.
After the president’s son joined the firm, just four days post-election, Raskin wrote, “you became the overnight darling of the venture capital world, rocketing from $150 million in assets under management to an astonishing $3 billion. A trio of businessmen with heretofore lackluster records in the market was suddenly running the hottest firm in the United States, picking out with almost clairvoyant accuracy winner after winner by investing in companies that would soon come to win hugely lucrative federal government contracts and grants and favorable regulatory actions.”
“How did this miraculous transformation in the fortunes of your LLC come about?” he wondered. “Was it indeed magic? Or was it rank corruption, a toxic blend of trading on insider knowledge, and the use of insider political influence to steer major federal contracts and other financial benefits to Donald Trump Jr.'s new favorite businesses?”
“Based on his own personal business resume, Don Jr. may have been an unlikely choice to originate investments for an upstart venture capital company. His rare solo ventures—outside the paternal eye of the Trump Organization—have been well-documented flops, including investing in dry oil wells, hydroponic lettuce farms, and an African mining company,” Raskin noted. “But despite his proven record of business investment failure, Don Jr. has become the lucky charm for 1789 Capital.”
Raskin’s letter provides a series of examples in which 1789 Capital has identified “companies that are about to receive massive influxes of cash from the Trump administration or to benefit from significant changes in federal policies and regulations.”
“On the day Donald Trump was elected, Vulcan Elements was a small startup with no active manufacturing facilities and no history of fulfilling government contracts,” he detailed. “Then 1789 Capital invested several million dollars. Soon after this investment, Vulcan Elements boasted that it had been raking in federal dollars throughout its capital raise, securing nine different government contracts in the past eight months.”
“While the list of 1789 Capital portfolio companies that have benefited from favorable administration decisions is too long to explore in full here, three additional companies with strikingly similar success stand out,” he wrote.
There’s Anduril Industries, “an American technology company founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, a prominent Trump donor who has been dubbed ‘the godfather of Republican fundraising on the West Coast,’” which got an enormous $22 billion contract that was previously assigned to Microsoft just weeks after Trump’s inauguration, the letter notes. Then, it was reported that the VC firm was acquiring a stake in the company, which in March won another $20 billion contract from the US Army.
The letter also points out Juul, which “notoriously ushered in an epidemic of youth vaping in the United States by aggressively marketing its e-cigarettes to young people” and “had suffered a series of setbacks that nearly bankrupted the company” before Trump’s return to office. Just months after 1789 Capital quietly acquired a $5 million stake in the company, the Food and Drug Administration ditched previous efforts to ban its products and allowed the marketing of five products.
Raskin’s final example is the online prediction market Polymarket—which, at the time Trump was reelected, was banned from operating in the country by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and faced a federal investigation. Last summer, the Department of Justice closed that probe and the CFTC signed off on an acquisition that allowed the company to enter the US market. The letter notes that “a few short weeks later, it was revealed that 1789 Capital had already acquired a sizable stake in Polymarket.”
“Alas, it is now impossible to believe that your firm’s astonishing growth and success are due to anything other than insider political influence and thoroughgoing corruption,” the congressman wrote to the trio. “Indeed, President Trump recently admitted that his oldest sons have ‘inside information’ with ‘almost anything they do.’”
In a statement to MS NOW, which had early access to Raskin’s letter, counsel AJ Merton dismissed the accusations as “unsubstantiated talking points,” adding that “repackaging press clippings on congressional letterhead does not turn news headlines into evidence, and that practice is a hallmark of partisan stunts and politically motivated harassment, not oversight.”
However, Raskin still wants answers from 1789 Capital by September 9. He’s demanding a list of investments, communications with federal officials or contractors, records on how government policies may impact the firm, documents on the hiring of Trump’s son, and more. He also told the firm to preserve all communications between its employees and the administration.
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