Trump and Lutnick cut a mining deal their sons stand to profit from

In November 2025, the U.S. government secured an agreement from Kazakhstan to give Cove Kaz Capital — a small, U.S.-registered firm later renamed Kaz Resources — access to one of the world's largest untapped reserves of tungsten, a metal critical to munitions, military aircraft, and semiconductors. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick met Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev at the St. Regis hotel in New York in September 2025, having earlier written to Tokayev to urge that the contract go to the firm, then known as Cove Kaz; President Trump joined by phone and, according to the firm's executive chairman Pini Althaus, "did the final negotiation" with Tokayev. The deal was signed on November 6, 2025, during a Washington summit with the leaders of Central Asia. Under its terms, Althaus's firm holds 70 percent of the venture and Kazakhstan's state mining company 30 percent. Ahead of the deal, the U.S. Export-Import Bank and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation — on whose boards Lutnick sits — issued letters of interest pledging as much as $1.6 billion in combined financing, roughly $900 million from the Export-Import Bank and up to $700 million from the Development Finance Corporation; as of mid-2026 none had been disbursed, pending further approvals.

Within weeks of the September negotiations, investors connected to the families of both Trump and Lutnick took positions in the deal. A special-purpose vehicle backed by Dominari Securities — the Trump Tower-based firm partly owned by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump — invested, through a subsidiary of ASP Isotopes, the Nasdaq-listed nuclear-energy company of British investor Paul E. Mann, in Skyline Builders, a Nasdaq-listed former road-construction firm. On October 31, 2025, Skyline took a 20 percent stake in Althaus's Kazakhstan mining company for $20 million. That same month, Cantor Fitzgerald — the investment firm controlled by Lutnick's family and overseen by his sons Brandon and Kyle Lutnick — helped raise $210 million for ASP Isotopes. In April 2026, the parties announced a reverse merger that would replace Skyline on the Nasdaq with a new entity, Kaz Resources, taking the mining operation public. Spokesmen for the Trump sons said they were passive investors with no management role, and Althaus said he had never met them and did not know they were involved. The White House and the Commerce Department rejected any suggestion that government actions were improperly mixed with family business, and noted that Lutnick had sold his ownership stake in Cantor.