In Another Pay-To-Play Scandal, Trump Pardons Corrupt Crypto Billionaire

 

It's another day ending in "y," so the cascade of Trump Crime Family corruption continues:

The Trump administration excels at sowing uncertainty. But it is sending an unambiguous message to crypto entrepreneurs who may be operating on the fringes of the law, or outside of it: Don’t worry about a thing.  

Changpeng Zhao, the founder and former CEO of crypto exchange Binance, served a four-month prison sentence after pleading guilty in 2023 to charges related to anti-money-laundering violations. Zhao, widely known as “CZ,” was released in September 2024. After months of lobbying the Trump administration, he received a pardon, with the White House saying Thursday it believes his case was “overly prosecuted” by the Biden administration.

The pardon is expected to help Binance return to the United States after a yearslong investigation found that the company had allowed criminals to freely transact on its platform, enabling actions including child sex abuse, narcotics trafficking and terrorist financing. (The company and Zhao pleaded guilty in one of the largest corporate settlements with federal authorities in US history.)  

Zhao’s case was a major victory for the Biden administration, coming just weeks after a jury found Sam Bankman-Fried guilty of multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy in connection with the collapse of his company, FTX, a onetime rival to Binance. (Bankman-Fried, who was sentenced to 25 years in a federal prison, is also angling for a pardon, according to the New York Times.)

At that time, prosecutors and financial regulators had an icy stance toward crypto that the industry has long painted as hostile — a fact that helped galvanize crypto advocates to support Trump, who embraced them (and their very wealthy donors) during his re-election campaign. 

Trump, once a skeptic of digital assets, is now a full-fledged crypto mogul. Having amassed more than $5 billion in paper gains through his own and his family’s various crypto projects, Trump’s digital asset portfolio now eclipses his real estate holdings.

But Trump’s success in crypto is thanks in no small part to connections he and his eldest sons have forged with industry bigwigs, including Zhao, whose own net worth is estimated at more than $85 billion.

The Trump family’s crypto platform, World Liberty Financial, is hosted by Binance, and the exchange has been a key driver in the growth of World Liberty’s dollar-pegged token, USD1. Earlier this year, as Zhao was actively seeking a pardon, Binance accepted a $2 billion investment from an Emirati-backed investment firm using USD1 — a boon for World Liberty Financial, which effectively received a $2 billion bank deposit.

Zhao's isn't the only case of a corrupt crypto billionaire getting a "get out of jail" card from the sticky fingered Malignant Fascist:

Justin Sun, the Chinese crypto billionaire who poured tens of millions of dollars into World Liberty Financial soon after it launched, had been facing civil fraud charges in the United States under the Biden administration. The Securities and Exchange Commission dropped the case against Sun in February. 

Sun, who’d reportedly avoided setting foot on US soil for fear of being arrested, was a VIP guest at Trump’s private crypto dinner in May — an event for which guests competed for invitations by buying the president’s memecoin.

Other white-collar defendants Trump has blessed with pardons include Ross Ulbricht, a cause célèbre of the Libertarian crypto world, who had been serving a life sentence for creating the Silk Road marketplace, which the Justice Department once described as “the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet.”

The sundowning Malignant Fascist had his usual word salad response when questioned about Zhao's pay- to- play pardon:

“Let me just tell you that he was somebody that, as I was told, I don’t know him, I don’t believe I’ve ever met him … he had a lot of support, and they said that what he did is not even a crime,” Trump told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins during a roundtable in the White House State Dining Room on Thursday. “It wasn’t a crime, that he was persecuted by the Biden administration, and so, I gave him a pardon at the request of a lot of very good people.” 

In the MF's fraudster- friendly dictionary, "prosecuted" means "persecuted" if done by a political foe, but doesn't apply if you're pursing revenge prosecutions yourself.  

Of course, this latest story about the utter corruption of the Malignant Fascist and his crime family will get supplanted by another MF outrage within the hour (more Epstein files coverup, White House demolition, trade wars, extra-judicial murders of foreign nationals, shake downs, government shutdown stonewalling, etc.?).  The dystopian nightmare we're living in courtesy of the MF and his legions of malevolent dimwits is only going to get darker and more desperate.  After all, he still has elections to sabotage or simply ignore.