Trump pardons Binance founder Changpeng Zhao
By Alayna Treene, Allison Morrow, CNN
(CNN) — President Donald Trump has pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who pleaded guilty to a money laundering charge in 2023, the White House said Thursday.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that Trump “exercised his constitutional authority by issuing a pardon for Mr. Zhao, who was prosecuted by the Biden Administration in their war on cryptocurrency.”
Leavitt argued that the Biden administration’s sentencing of Zhao was too harsh — a view the president and his top advisers share after Binance’s months-long lobbying campaign for a pardon for Zhao, who goes by CZ.
The pardon, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, could open the door for Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, to operate in the US once again.
Trump, a former crypto skeptic who did a 180 on the alternative financial assets while running for a second term, has pledged to make the US the “crypto capital of the planet.” In launching a multi-faceted crypto empire, the Trump family has also established direct financial links to Binance over the past year.
The Trump family’s crypto firm, World Liberty Financial — on which their wealth is increasingly dependent — is hosted on Binance. The exchange has also helped popularize World Liberty Financial’s proprietary tokens, the sale of which has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in fees for the Trump family.
The Wall Street Journal estimated that World Liberty Financial has added more than $5 billion in paper wealth to the Trump family fortune — eclipsing the president’s real estate assets.
Earlier this year, MGX, an Emirati-backed investment firm, agreed to use World Liberty’s dollar-backed stablecoin, USD1, for a $2 billion investment in Binance. The deal was a huge win for World Liberty Financial, which effectively received a $2 billion bank deposit. At the time, Binance was actively lobbying for Zhao’s pardon.
Asked at Thursday’s White House press briefing about Democratic criticisms of the pardon as corrupt, Leavitt said the White House has “a very thorough examination of every pardon request that comes to the president’s desk.”
She told reporters that she spoke directly with the White House counsel about the pardon, and that the administration believes Zhao’s case was “overly prosecuted” under the Biden administration, which she claimed was “very hostile to the cryptocurrency industry.”
Zhao was sentenced to four months in prison in May 2024 after pleading guilty to charges that he failed to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program.
Zhao stepped down as CEO of Binance, the crypto exchange he founded in 2017, and agreed to pay $200 million in fines. The company agreed to pay more than $4 billion in fines and other penalties as part of a coordinated settlement with the federal government in 2023. Binance admitted to engaging in anti-money laundering activities, unlicensed money transmitting and sanctions violations.
Zhao isn’t the only crypto mogul to win a reprieve from Trump since his return to the White House. Shortly after returning to office, Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, a cause celebre of the Libertarian crypto world, who had been serving a life sentence for creating the Silk Road marketplace, which the Justice Department had described as “the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet today.”
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. And, in March, Trump pardoned three co-founders of BitMEX, a crypto exchange, who had pleaded guilty to violating anti-money-laundering programs.
This story has been updated with additional information.
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