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Nigel Farage has been paid by a cryptocurrency adviser to US President Donald Trump, who worked with Paul Manafort – Trump’s former campaign chair, jailed for financial crimes after investigations into his Kremlin-aligned influence operations – to lobby the president on Bitcoin policy.
David Bailey, chief executive of BTC Inc and a senior cryptocurrency adviser to Trump, brought Manafort into his lobbying operation in early 2024. Together, Manafort and Bailey spent the rest of the year working to persuade Trump to embrace Bitcoin and establish America’s first Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.
Bailey subsequently paid Farage a speaking fee through BTC Inc, months before the Reform UK leader unveiled a pro-crypto policy platform that mirrors the Trump administration’s digital asset agenda.
Paul Manafort’s role in the development of Trump’s entire cryptocurrency strategy raises questions about Bitcoin’s role as a vehicle of Russian influence, in particular as a mechanism to weaken national fiat currencies.
It also links Farage to one of the most controversial figures in modern American politics – and raises questions about whose interests are actually being served by Reform UK’s proposed Cryptoassets and Digital Finance Bill.
Trump’s Campaign Chair
Paul Manafort’s involvement in shaping Trump’s Bitcoin policy represents a remarkable political rehabilitation. The veteran Republican operative was convicted in 2018 on charges including tax fraud and bank fraud, stemming from his work advancing Russian interests.
A bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigation concluded in August 2020 that Manafort’s activities “represented a grave counterintelligence threat” to the United States. The committee found that while serving as Trump’s 2016 campaign chairman, Manafort regularly shared internal campaign polling data and strategy with Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the report identified as a Russian intelligence officer. The US Treasury Department later confirmed that Kilimnik “provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy.”
Manafort’s work for Russian-aligned interests stretched back decades. From 2005, he held a $10 million annual contract with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska – described as closely aligned with Vladimir Putin – for work that Manafort said would “greatly benefit the Putin Government.” The Senate committee concluded this influence work was “in effect, influence work for the Russian Government and its interests.”
Between 2004 and 2014, Manafort worked as chief political adviser to Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, and his Party of Regions, which US diplomats described as “a haven” for “mobsters and oligarchs.” Manafort received millions in undisclosed payments to rehabilitate Yanukovych’s image in the West and advance pro-Kremlin policies, including blocking Ukraine’s NATO membership.
Trump pardoned Manafort, who has always denied representing Russian political interests, in December 2020.
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Manafort’s Return
By early 2024, David Bailey had recruited Paul Manafort to help orchestrate what would become one of the biggest political pivots of Trump’s campaign: his transformation from crypto sceptic to Bitcoin champion.
Bailey was first connected to Manafort after a meeting of fellow Bitcoin evangelists in Puerto Rico which included Tracy Hoyos-López – Manafort is her sister’s godfather. Manafort then plugged Bailey into the heart of Donald Trump’s campaign team.
Over the next few months, Bailey and Manafort worked to educate Trump’s inner circle on Bitcoin policy, craft messaging that would appeal to crypto investors as a new MAGA constituency, and develop the policy framework for what Trump would later promise: making America the “crypto capital of the world.”
This culminated in a pivotal meeting at Trump Tower in New York, orchestrated by Manafort. Bailey attended with Hoyos-López and several other crypto advocates. By mid-June, Bailey and Manafort arranged for a group of Bitcoin mining executives to meet Trump at a 90-minute high-level crypto roundtable at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida.
In December 2025 at a conference hosted by Bailey’s BTC Inc, Manafort took credit for Donald Trump’s new crypto agenda. On stage with Bailey associate Hoyos-López, Manafort confirmed that in February 2024, Trump told him over several conversations that he was concerned about “the lawfare that he was experiencing with the Biden administration going after him criminally [and] the problems of debanking” – to which crypto appeared to be a potential solution:
“So when we raised the issue of trying to bring the crypto industry onshore, he [Trump] was very receptive. And David Bailey was one of the critical early people we brought in to talk with him and explain to him the details of it which he immediately got. And after the first roundtable we had with him, he was all in. In fact we were putting together the framework for him announcing his commitment to Bitcoin when he was doing an event in Mar-a-Lago and while I was in Washington in a meeting I got a phone call saying President Trump just announced that he’s for bringing crypto on shore and he got ahead of us a little bit because he wanted to get the message out.”
Bailey’s collaboration with Manafort had, in other words, proved devastatingly effective. Trump, who had previously dismissed Bitcoin as a scam, began appearing at Bitcoin conferences as if they were campaign rallies. He promised to halt what he called a regulatory “witch-hunt” against crypto exchanges, pledged to fire Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler, and – echoing Bailey and Manafort’s core pitch – floated the idea of a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve that would place Bitcoin alongside gold and dollars in America’s official holdings.
Trump’s entire crypto agenda was, in other words, largely constructed under the influence of Manafort, a man who multiple US official inquiries had found significantly advanced Russian interests, often at the expense of American interests.
By January 2025, Manafort turned up as a VIP guest at the Crypto Ball celebrating Trump’s second inauguration, which was attended by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, as well as incomi