It’s always telling when a Republican politician most people have never heard of, even among Republicans and conservatives, all of a sudden makes news by bashing his own party or the standard-bearers in his party. People who have not bashed Democrats in the same way, and yet they decide that for their coming-out party, they will make some noise by taking on their own Republican president and his family.
But that’s what we have with Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah), who has requested that the Senate Judiciary Committee subpoena Donald Trump Jr. after it has been reported that junior may have accepted financial support for his May wedding from a “Russian oligarch” who is alleged to have ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
More on those allegations in a minute, but at the outset, they feel a little too on the nose for anti-Trumpers. It all fits a little too neatly into what feels like a political op conducted by the left. In fact, the narrative follows almost to the letter the tired, old, debunked “Russia, Russia, Russia” smear campaign that dates back to 2016. But there are other reasons to smell a rat in all of this.
The allegations against President Donald Trump's son arose out of reporting from a leftist propaganda organization called ProPublica. Curtis, who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, used that leftist media report as the basis for his formal letter of request that the Senate Judiciary Committee investigate junior.
More recently, questions have arisen about the relationships of President Trump's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., with foreign business figures and the acceptance of significant gifts. These include a lavish wedding afterparty, on a private island, provided by Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev, who reportedly traveled to China as part of a delegation accompanying Vladimir Putin shortly before giving the gift.
These concerns are compounded by Donald Trump Jr.’s active promotion of family-backed cryptocurrency ventures, his continued pursuit of international real estate deals involving direct meetings with foreign heads of state, and his reported investments in defense contracting. This pattern extends to his significant financial and advisory ties to prediction-market platforms that depend on favorable federal regulatory decisions being considered by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
These reports raise legitimate questions about foreign access to members of a sitting president's family and whether such relationships can create actual or perceived expectations of favorable treatment. They also may create expectations of a returned favor that would not be in the best interests of the American people or our allies, and could even create national security vulnerabilities, Curtis wrote.
Curtis’s complaints ring hollow for a few reasons. First, he’s accepting the reporting of a leftist propaganda site, and only one report at that, as the basis to turn the wheels of the Senate against his own party’s leader’s son. Second, while his focus is on alleged financial support for a wedding, Curtis himself introduced unrelated “concerns” over junior’s business affairs. My take is, if you want to investigate Donald Trump Jr.’s business affairs, then make it about that. But why bring that up here? (We know why.)
The stench from Curtis is starting to worsen. Third, why haven’t we seen Curtis on the vanguard of the Senate’s efforts to root out Democrat corruption in places like California, Minnesota, and New York, along with election malfeasance across the country? Those situations are far easier to identify, and as a bonus, they center on investigating Democrats.
🚨Report: Utah Senate “Republican” John Curtis is now demanding a investigation into Donald Trump Jr pic.twitter.com/wCiN321qp9
— The Calvin Coolidge Project (@TheCalvinCooli1) September 23, 2026
But there is one more thing about this that seems to expose Curtis’s disingenuousness, which is an obvious attempt to give himself cover in the name of fairness.
In his letter to the Judiciary Committee’s chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and ranking member Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Curtis asked them to include former President Joe Biden’s son Hunter in the “investigation into the use of presidential family relationships for private financial benefit, preferential treatment, or access by domestic and foreign interests."
In his letter to the Judiciary Committee, Curtis said he included Biden in the request in relation to his own business dealings with such foreign interests as China and Ukraine. Here's the thing: He already knows that Hunter Biden has been investigated, pardoned, and completely exposed. This aspect of his request is embarrassingly pro forma. We all know what Curtis is up to here. I suspect he wants us to know.
Curtis first arrived on Capitol Hill as a congressional representative in November 2017. Utah voters elected him to the Senate in 2024, which means Trump will be long gone when Curtis presumably runs for reelection in 2030. Like so many in the Senate, this may make him feel immune from Trump’s wrath over disloyal, politically treasonous moves like this one.
Curtis had many years to make a name for himself on the issue of “presidential family relationships for private financial benefit” when the only potential target was Hunter Biden, and Curtis chose not to make a peep. Only now, on the basis of some agenda-driven reporting from a leftist news site, does Curtis decide to take it upon himself to introduce the issue.
While in Congress, Curtis was the one who introduced a resolution to have Trump censured over the Jan. 6, 2021, riots on Capitol Hill. He refused to sign an amicus brief in the case of Texas v. Pennsylvania that challenged the results of the 2020 presidential election. Instead, he did vote to certify both Arizona's and Pennsylvania's results in the 2020 Electoral College vote count.
In May 2021, he voted with all Democrats in favor of what amounted to a partisan witch hunt tied to the January 6 riots – a “bipartisan” 10-member commission to conduct an analysis of those riots. In 2022, Curtis voted for the Respect for Marriage Act, which federally codified the right to same-sex marriage as the law of the land.
In Trump’s second term, Curtis has been a sometimes unreliable vote on Trump administration appointees. Predictably, he’s gone on record that he will not vote to end the filibuster, which is one of two major obstacles standing in the way of passing the Save America Act. The other obstacle is Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.).
This year, he voted with Democrats to kill the Trump administration’s anti-weaponization fund.
Curtis's defenders, and he himself, will likely point to his record of voting with the president most of the time, but seriously, you know he's only done that to blend in with the wallpaper in Washington when it's been convenient. It seems that any time this guy wants to make a statement, he tries to do so at the expense of Trump and MAGA.
As for that Donald Trump Jr. wedding, the president did not attend, citing the demands of the office as more pressing. When asked about this at the time, the president said of his son, "He'd like me to go, but it's going to be just a small, little private affair… This is not good timing for me. I have a thing called Iran and other things.”
More recently, when asked about those reports that a Russian named Umar Kremlev paid for some of the festivities around the wedding, the president said, “Well, it's totally, it's totally allowed. And a lot of people have parties and all, but it's totally allowed… But as I understand it, he paid them back. He didn't want to have that, so I hear he paid them back. A person that he knows pretty, I guess a friend of his, gave him a wedding party. That's very common.”
Yes, we have to talk about optics
In this space, we sometimes talk about “optics,” and this is one of those times. With all of the money the Trumps have, and the fact that the whole family lives in a fishbowl where most of the world is looking for something to hold over their heads, this is not a good look. But that’s all it is. It doesn’t rise to the level of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, which Democrats weren’t all that flustered by.
The Trumps could have covered all expenses of this wedding without missing a beat, and perhaps they could have vetted the guest list a little better. But unlike Hunter Biden, whose decadence and leechiness are legend, this pales in comparison. Donald Trump Jr. is no bag man for his father, who didn’t need the presidency to make money.
I’m reminded of the time on June 9, 2016 (yes, I had to look that date up), when his father was running for president for the first time. That was when Donald Trump Jr. decisively ended a meeting with a Russian by the name of Natalia Veselnitskaya, who, to Trump’s surprise, offered him “dirt” on the Clintons and other things. This meeting had been arranged through Moscow developers Emin and Aras Agalarov.
The younger Trump’s instincts on that day were sound and worth keeping in mind as you start to hear baseless claims around this wedding story. Trump Jr. instinctively smelled a set-up then, but if only he knew at the time what the left and some of America’s own intelligence operatives had in store. The point here is that you have to trust that Donald Trump Jr. has pretty solid self-awareness and knows where the risks are. He’s earned the right to receive the benefit of the doubt that, in this case, there is no “there” there.
Of course, we all know this won’t stop the Democrats from using this most recent kerfuffle to inflame the situation should they win a majority in the House or the Senate in November.
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, already penned his own request for more information from the administration, demanding information about the president’s son’s ties to Kremlev. And so it begins.
So if you’re wondering if “Republican” Sen. Curtis’s intentions are pure, consider the company he’s keeping on this issue.
Dick Durbin issued his own statement, saying, “For the Committee to ignore this matter is to run the risk of being complicit in a coverup. I will join in supporting Senator Curtis’ request of the Senate Judiciary Committee.”
This puts Curtis squarely in the Democrat camp in its effort to target the sitting Republican president. This is not about truth-finding. It’s about undermining his own party’s leader and working to destroy what’s left of his second term as president.
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