As Pakistan mediates US-Iran ceasefire, how ‘crypto bro’ Bilal Bin Saqib reset ties in Trump 2.0 | Cut The Clutter

Episode 1673 of #CutTheClutter, originally published on 31 May 2025, connects the dots to explain how Pakistan inveigled its way into the White House in Trump's second term.

Having successfully mediated a two-week ‘ceasefire’ between Iran and the US, Pakistan has exhibited its utility to the Trump White House. But this reset in ties between Washington and Islambad in Trump’s second term has a ‘crypto’ thread that ThePrint Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta highlighted on 31 May 2025, in episode 1673 of #CutTheClutter. At the centre of this ‘crypto’ thread is Bilal Bin Saqib, who was appointed head of the Pakistan Crypto Council in 2025 at age 32. The son-in-law of a corp commander in Pakistan, Bilal is also an adviser in a firm co-founded by Zach Witkoff, the son of Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East. The latest developments underline how Trump’s Pakistan tilt in his second term is not sudden or unexpected. Instead, it has been in the works for nearly a year now.

Here’s the full transcript, edited for clarity:

Developments since the Pahalgam massacre (22 April 2025) have moved very fast. What has defied expectations is the dramatic shift in American attitude towards Pakistan. You can definitely see an American warmth with Pakistan. It’s the same Trump who, in his first term, had accused Pakistan of indulging in deceit—a country that couldn’t be trusted, a country that was harbouring terrorists. But you saw some changes in Trump 2.0.

We saw in February (2025), for example, the lifting of the block on $397 million of aid to Pakistan towards its military programme, mostly to help extend the life of its F-16s. This aid was blocked in the past and the Biden administration did not lift the block.

Then, in his address to a joint session of Congress (4 March 2025), Trump thanked Pakistan. That made Pakistan very happy. It was probably the only country in a large swathe of the world that he mentioned by name, and he thanked them for handing over a terrorist (Mohammad Sharifullah) who was involved in a bombing on 26 August 2021 that killed 13 American service members and Afghan civilians in Kabul, around the time American forces were withdrawing from there and Taliban were taking over.

And then we saw, after the Operation Sindoor ceasefire on 10 May 2025, Trump boasted several times that he had brokered the ceasefire between India and Pakistan, and that he used trade as an instrument of diplomacy or leverage to bring it about.

He also told Fox News in an interview on 16 May 2025, “Pakistanis are brilliant people. They make some incredible products. We can trade with them. We can buy these from them.” Everybody wondered what these products were. And that has remained a bit of a mystery. That has also confused a lot of the Washington watchers, Pakistan watchers.

But, something dramatic has happened between Pakistan and Trump. If you want to understand that, you have to keep in mind two things: cryptocurrency and rare earth minerals.

First, the claim that Pakistan has trillions of dollars’ worth of rare earth minerals, that’s not proven as yet. And the regions of Pakistan which might have these minerals have other issues, besides the fact that the Chinese treat those as their own.

There’s also a third factor, lobbying. So what did the Pakistanis do? When Trump 2.0 came in, the Pakistanis saw an opportunity and they figured that Trump is transactional.

They couldn’t compete with India on big deals, imports, trade, shifting manufacturing of critical products from China to India. Those are sovereign-to-sovereign issues.

So what the Pakistanis focused on was personal.

In early January 2025, Pakistan hired a lobbyist in Washington, somebody who was known to be close to Trump’s family. So Pakistan was not appealing to Trump at a policy level, or sovereign-to-sovereign level. It was appealing to him at a personal level. This lobbyist, along with an American billionaire, Gentry Beach, went to Pakistan in January 2025.

A Texas financier and a Donald Trump Jr friend, Beach met Shehbaz Sharif and his entire cabinet. Beach later also boasted at a Mar-a-Lago dinner, “Wherever I go, they treat me like President Trump.” (The Pakistanis can really roll out the red carpet. And on the way back, each member of the delegation might get a copy of a finely woven carpet. That’s what Zia-ul-Haq used to hand out, including to foreign journalists who came visiting.)

The distinction between the Trump family and the US government therefore started to blur.

While the White House insists that all of Trump’s family businesses are now in trusts controlled by his children and the President has nothing to do with them, there are these companies, particularly in cryptocurrency, that warrant a closer inspection.

What you also need to know is that this is not just about crypto, this is about politics, diplomacy, lobbying and fixing, which is what the Pakistanis did quite brilliantly.

Soon after Gentry Beach met Shehbaz Sharif, his son, i.e. Gentry Beach Jr, aged just 20, landed up in Pakistan in February 2025. He met the finance minister of Pakistan, Muhammad Aurangzeb, who is a former JP Morgan Chase guy, and sold him the idea of Pakistan getting involved in crypto business. All of this is reported by Rebecca Ballhaus and Angus Berwick of the Wall Street Journal who did a wonderful story.

Pakistan also figured that there was an opportunity. While this was happening, a former finance minister of Pakistan was also floating in Washington looking for Trump family business deals because Pakistanis diagnosed it right—access to the new White House is through Trump family businesses. Rules of the game on conflict of interest had changed. 

Gentry Beach Jr, when he went to Pakistan, was accompanied by two representatives—a Dubai sheikh and a Russian tech executive who is the co-founder of something called Islamic Coin. That’s also a crypto business.

Beach Jr was also accompanied by Keli Whitlock. Whitlock is chief business officer of a US blockchain firm. Her sister is married to US Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth. At Donald Trump’s inauguration, she was sitting right behind Hegseth and his wife. But once again, US Department of Defense is quoted by the Pentagon as having said, “But this has nothing to do with the Secretary of Defense, his own businesses. This is a private business.”

Whitlock, during the visit to Pakistan, was also accompanied by the CEO of her firm. This is when Pakistan dramatically decided to set up a national crypto council and appointed Changpeng Zhao as an adviser to the council.

Zhao is a co-founder of Binance, the crypto exchange found guilty of much wrongdoing in the US. Zhao had pleaded guilty to money laundering, etc., in November 2023. He was sentenced. Banned from running his exchange in the US, he was looking for a pardon from Trump.

So Zhao was appointed as an adviser to this national crypto council, which had just been set up in Pakistan, where crypto is still illegal. In fact, the State Bank of Pakistan (their central bank) and also the ministry of finance, told their finance ministry’s national assembly standing committee on 30 May 2025 that crypto was illegal in the country.

Nevertheless, Pakistan was after something else.

As this was happening, a young man called Bilal Bin Saqib—a bit of a crypto wiz and listed among the Forbes 30 under 30—was appointed an adviser to a firm called World Liberty Finance Inc (WLFI). This firm is run by Zach Witkoff, who is the son of Steve Witkoff, a well-known property developer, an old friend of Trump’s, and now his special envoy to the Middle East and, increasingly, also to Russia. His son, obviously, knew this Bilal Bin Saqib, who’s a kind of a global citizen because he’s done much work in Britain. He’s been a speaker on the crypto circuit in the US as well.

Zach Witkoff appointed Bilal Bin Saqib as an adviser to his company, WLFI. And, as the Wall Street Journal summed it up, “Pakistan now had a Trump connection.”

Pakistan, in a jiffy, set up the Crypto Council of Pakistan in March 2025 and young Bilal was appointed its head at age 32. The Pakistanis are very fleet-footed. Remember how quickly they moved in 1971, brokering those secret visits by Henry Kissinger to Beijing to bring about a Chinese-American thaw to counter the Soviet influence at that point.

Now what happens? On 26 April 2025, just four days after the Pahalgam attack—when India and Pakistan put restrictions on each other—many in India, particularly in the OSINT community, tracked a private jet coming in from the Gulf into Pakistan. It landed in Islamabad. It had the management of WLFI, led by Zach Witkoff and two co-founders. As they landed, they are they were received by young Bilal Bin Saqib.

Bilal is also not a nobody in Pakistan. His father-in-law is Lt Gen Omar Bukhari, currently the corp commander of Peshawar. He gets audiences with the army chief anytime he wants, for himself or for anybody else. He was also appointed an adviser to the Pakistani finance minister in the rank of a minister of state. The fact that he is the son-in-law of the corp commander in Peshawar was first highlighted by Pakistani columnist Ayesha Siddiqa.

So, Bilal now became a key figure and was now floating with WLFI leadership. They met key people in Islamabad. After that they flew to Lahore. There was a ceremonial reception for them in the Lahore Fort, which is normally done with patakhas (fireworks). The pictures were all posted on Instagram. After that, there was a fireside chat in Shalimar Garden where Jr Witkoff said, “Your country is sitting on trillions of dollars’ worth of rare earths.”

There are lots of Pakistanis who believe that, including the army chief since he thinks Pakistan is the new Medina, and just as the original Medina was fated to have great mineral wealth, mostly oil, similarly, this modern Medina is also fated to have great mineral wealth.

Once again, I would like to underline the fact that all the minerals are generally in Pakistan’s western frontier areas which have many claimants including the Chinese. So are they going to appreciate the Americans now getting a cheap easy deal there? But, the fact is, Pakistan used this leverage to inveigle their way into the Trump White House.

Just to recap, in January 2025, Pakistan hired one lobbyist. In April the same year, at $200,000 a month, they hired a lawyer plus two advisers. Among them was Keith Schiller, a former bodyguard of Trump’s. Again, the effort was to get into Trump’s family. They also hired Trump’s organisation lawyer, George Sorial.

Now, how regular is this, and how legal is this? In America, right now, there’s a lot of debate because Trump is changing the rules, because he’s mixing business with diplomacy. And the people he is hiring to do his diplomacy and his political work are also doing his business. And in a lot of that business his family is involved. 

For instance, 60 percent of the company WLFI is owned by the Trump family. And Zach Witkoff is going around telling the world to buy into this. In fact he had already sold 550 billion worth of stable coins as of May 2025. Basically, what they’ve created is USD1, like a cryptocurrency that is valued at $1. And this is secured with assets like government securities of the same value. When it’s traded on the exchange, it can acquire more value. 

So what they’re doing is they are enticing various countries to buy into this. And as more buy into this, the value will go up, and more and more countries are doing it. The company WLFI does not disclose anything. All they say is, “Once you invest with us all of you will get a share of the profit.”

The US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, headed by Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic Senator from Connecticut, sent requisitions to WLFI seeking details of the deals struck by the company around the world. In turn, WLFI sent them a legal reply, which was also tweeted by Zach Witkoff, basically saying there was nothing wrong. And they said in fact, “The company rejects this false choice between innovation and oversight. This is misuse of regulatory authority and this suppresses lawful innovation.”

They did not turn over any documentation on their deals, including with Pakistan, to the Committee. Within Pakistan, I saw some concern from good people who are saying this may not be the safest thing to do, because crypto assets is not where you put your reserves because Pakistan doesn’t have so much spare money or sovereign wealth fund.

So, there was an article from Khurram Husain in Dawn, and also Yousuf Nazar, who’s a former Citigroup top executive and also author of the book, ‘The Gathering Storm’. Both of them held out warnings against getting too besotted with crypto. 

But the Pakistanis are not doing it for the money, or because they love crypto. The Pakistanis are doing it because they don’t mind risking a few millions in US dollars, if in the process they can bring about a geopolitical shift in America’s view on this Subcontinent. 

So their critics are saying that Pakistani generals and the Pakistani establishment are geopolitically so obsessed that they are endangering Pakistan’s economy. However, the fact that there is a Trump tilt towards Pakistan, a personal Trump tilt, is also a reality. These stories, these details tell you how little does it take and how the Subcontinent’s family networks—a general, his son-in-law, his son-in-law’s access accordingly to everybody, all the high and mighty in Pakistan. And similarly, a US President, his son, the son’s close friend, and his special envoy and his son, a secretary of defense and his sister-in-law. All of them got  together, including a convicted crypto-exchange founder, i.e. Zhao of Binance, to hatch this incredible.