UAE ‘spy sheikh’ takes 49% stake in Trump family’s bank venture: WSJ

NEW: The UAE's national security adviser has taken a 49% stake in the Trump family's bank venture, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The UAE's spy chief now owns 49 percent of the Trump family's bank. That's the Wall Street Journal's reporting tonight, and it's the kind of sentence you have to read twice.

The buyer is Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed, the UAE's national security adviser, the man the press has long called the spy sheikh. He runs Abu Dhabi's intelligence apparatus and a sprawling business empire, and now, per the Journal, he holds just under half of a banking venture owned by the family of the sitting American president.

And the two worlds aren't strangers. You can see them here, seated together in the Oval Office. Forty nine percent, notice, not fifty. Just under the line where control gets awkward on paper.

So a foreign intelligence chief is now the near equal partner in the First Family's bank. Whatever Washington's ethics lawyers were doing tonight, they're doing something else now.

This is Liu Yang, reporting for HIT.