The CFTC asks a court to erase its own $5 million penalty against a donor's exchange

Editor's note: official records show the agency moving to vacate its penalty, and reporting documents the donors' gifts and the pressure on the nominee, but no official record establishes the donations or the link.

The CFTC sued Gemini in 2022 over statements it made in 2017 while seeking to register a bitcoin futures product. In January 2025, in the last weeks of the previous administration, Gemini settled: a $5 million penalty and an injunction against making false or misleading statements to the agency. Before the inauguration the Winklevoss twins gave more than $1 million to MAGA Inc.; each had tried to give $1 million in bitcoin to the 2024 campaign, and both were refunded for exceeding the legal limit.

In the summer of 2025 Tyler Winklevoss messaged Brian Quintenz, the president's nominee to chair the CFTC and a former commissioner, about a letter Gemini's lawyers had sent the agency's inspector general accusing CFTC attorneys of misusing their offices to obtain a high-profile win. He asked how Quintenz planned to align with the administration's mandate to end the lawfare and make amends for it, and called the case seven years of lawfare trophy hunting. Quintenz replied that a confirmed chairman should handle it. In September he published the exchange, writing that the texts make clear what they were after from him and what he refused to promise. The White House withdrew his nomination that month and named Michael Selig, who became chairman in December. That same month Gemini's prediction-market product was approved, after the agency had reportedly said it would not be while the enforcement action was pending.

On May 27, 2026 the CFTC and Gemini jointly asked the court to vacate the penalty and the injunction. The agency's stated grounds are serious and, if accurate, damning of its own prior conduct: its Division of Enforcement resorted to inappropriate tactics to bring the case and extract a settlement, rested its complaint largely on a whistleblower account it now deems not credible, withheld evidence from a commissioner before the vote authorizing the case, and pursued Gemini rather than the fraud committed against it by a former chief operating officer and two customers who took improper rebates. Those findings, if sustained, would mean the original case should never have been filed. That is the countervailing fact, and it is a strong one. What the record documents is the sequence: donations, a nominee's public account of being pressed to commit on the donors' case, his withdrawal, and then the agency moving to undo its own penalty. It is not clear whether the $5 million, already paid, would be refunded. The same agency's intervention on behalf of another donor is documented at PAY-40, and the family's own crypto venture at CRY-03 and CRY-18.