As President Donald Trump’s biggest memcoin buyers such as Tron founder Justin Sun bask in his attention over dinner on Thursday, Democratic lawmakers and advocacy groups have arrayed a series of protests and complaint sessions to decry the president’s crypto event as fundamentally corrupt.

Trump will host his dinner for more than 200 of his leading memecoin investors, whose money will fill the coffers of the president’s own business entities. They’ve reportedly been invited to his capital-area golf course, the Trump National Golf Club Washington, D.C., outside of which the memecoin buyers may encounter protesters.

Some of the counter-programming for his dinner will start earlier in the day in front of the Capitol Building. At 12:45 p.m., Representative Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, will round up other lawmakers in front of the House steps to rail against Trump, accusing him of abusing his White House powers to «shamelessly promote and profit from a series of crypto ventures tied to himself and his family,» according to a notice about the event.

Waters will also introduce a new messaging bill «to block Trump’s memecoin and stop his crypto corruption, once and for all.» The legislation, which is unlikely to make headway in a Republican-majority Congress, would ban presidents, vice presidents, members of Congress and their families from «engaging in similar crypto crime.»

It’s the same type of ban that Democrats had been seeking to insert into crypto legislation, but Republicans have declined to let Trump-targeting language into the current digital assets bills, including the Senate stablecoin effort getting close to the finish line.

Later on Wednesday at 2:30 p.m., another press conference of Democratic lawmakers will feature Senators Chris Murphy and Elizabeth Warren, both of whom have been prominent in congressional criticism against Trump’s crypto actions. Murphy had introduced his own bill with a similar aim to Waters’, the Modern Emoluments and Malfeasance Enforcement (MEME) Act to stop federal officials from using their positions to profit from digital assets.

That event — also outside the Capitol — will additionally feature Senator Jeff Merkley, who also intends to join an evening protest right outside Trump’s golf course, hosted by progressive groups under the banner of Our Revolution. The message of the «America Is Not For Sale» rally is to push back on «a blatant example of political access being sold to the highest bidder,» according to the group.

The guest list for the memecoin dinner hasn’t been made public, but analysis of the buying of those coins suggest that the biggest spenders devoted millions for the privilege of joining the president at the event. The attendees’ anonymity is part of the problem, according to critics, who say that foreign buyers are gaining access to the president without the knowledge of the public.

Debate over the president’s crypto ties temporarily delayed progress on the U.S. stablecoin legislation meant to set up rules for domestic issuers, but the bill got back on track this week to clear an important procedural hurdle in the Senate on Monday.

Trump’s team has downplayed accusations of corruption. White House official Bo Hines said last week at CoinDesk’s Consensus 2025 conference in Toronto that the Trump family’s crypto ventures do not pose conflicts of interest, and they have «the right to engage in capital markets.»

Read More: Justin Sun Emerges as Donald Trump Memecoin’s Top Holder With $21.9M Stake

Prosecutors have charged Jeremy Jordan-Jones, the self-styled founder of a now-defunct crypto startup called Amalgam, with fraud, alleging that he swindled investors in his “sham blockchain” of more than $1 million, using the money to fund a lavish lifestyle.

According to prosecutors, Jordan-Jones painted Amalgam as a tech company that created blockchain-based point-of-sale payment systems, which he claimed had multi-million-dollar partnerships with sports teams including the Golden State Warriors and a professional soccer team in England’s Premier League, as well as a big restaurant conglomerate with more than 500 restaurants. None of these partnerships existed, prosecutors said. Jordan-Jones also allegedly solicited investments from would-be investors by telling them the money would be used to facilitate the listing of Amalgam’s non-existent crypto token on a crypto exchange.

While allegedly spinning stories for investors — including a venture capital firm, identified in a 2022 Forbes article as Brown Venture Group — prosecutors say Jordan-Jones was blowing their money on a luxurious lifestyle for himself, including “hotels and restaurants in Miami,” car payments, and designer clothing.

“Jordan-Jones, capitalizing on the publicity around blockchain technology, perpetrated a brazen scheme to defraud investors,” said U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton in a Tuesday press announcement. “He touted his company as a groundbreaking blockchain startup, backed by high-profile partnerships. In reality, Jordan-Jones’s company was a sham, and investors’ funds were siphoned off to bankroll his lavish lifestyle. This should be an example to would-be financial fraudsters that the women and men of the Southern District and the FBI are watching and to the investing public that fraudsters often use the promise of new technology to cloak their schemes.”

Additionally, prosecutors have accused Jordan-Jones of providing falsified documents to a financial institution, which he used to fraudulently obtain a corporate credit card, running up a $350,000 balance before the bank closed his account.

Jordan-Jones has been charged with one count each of wire fraud, securities fraud, making false statements to a financial institution and aggravated identity theft — charges which carry a combined maximum sentence of 82 years in prison. The aggravated identity theft charge carries a mandatory minimum sentence of two years.

Prosecutors in the case against Tornado Cash developer Roman Storm are attempting to to sidestep the possibility that a New York judge forces them to hand over additional evidence that could help Storm’s case.

In a Wednesday letter to the court, prosecutors pushed back against Storm’s lawyers’ assertions that they’d failed to meet their so-called Brady obligations — a constitutional requirement for prosecutors to turn over any potentially helpful evidence to the defense before trial.

At the heart of the debate is a recent production of evidence in another case in the Southern District of New York (SDNY): the legal pursuit of Samourai Wallet co-founders Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill. Both cases involve a crypto mixing service that prosecutors allege was knowingly used to launder crime proceeds,

In the Samourai Wallet case, however, prosecutors recently admitted to having a conversation with two Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) officials in 2023 — before pressing charges — in which the government employees said they didn’t believe the mixing service would qualify as a money transmitting business under their guidelines and didn’t need a license to operate. Lawyers for Rodriguez and Hill accused prosecutors of suppressing critical evidence and violating their right to due process. Last week, the judge overseeing the case denied their motion for a hearing on the matter, telling them instead to include their concerns in their pre-trial motion due at the end of the month.

Though the cases are separate, lawyers for Roman Storm expressed concern that the prosecution’s failure to inform them of their communications with FinCEN regarding Samourai Wallet’s status as a money transmitting business also potentially constituted a Brady violation in Storm’s case.

In their Wednesday response, prosecutors said that the FinCEN conversation wasn’t evidence.t was an opinion, not a fact, they stated, and therefore not required to be turned over to the defense. Prosecutors also claimed that their discussion with FinCEN was irrelevant to Storm’s case, because it wasn’t specifically about Tornado Cash.

“Tornado Cash simply was not part of the conversation,” prosecutors wrote. “While Samourai Wallet and the Tornado Cash service may share some superficial similarities, they operated quite differently.”

Prosecutors said that they didn’t have similar conversations with FinCEN about Tornado Cash, claiming that there were “no such interactions comparable to those described in the Rodriguez Disclosures.”

“As the government has repeatedly explained to the defense in this case, the government has neither sought nor obtained an opinion from any employee at FinCEN — or any other government agency — regarding whether the Tornado Cash service is subject to registration obligations,” prosecutors wrote. “Such an opinion — especially an informal opinion offered by employees who expressly disclaim to be speaking for the agency — would not be legally admissible and would not constitute Brady material.”

The case against Storm is expected to begin on July 14 in New York.