Just when it seemed Donald Trump’s pardons and commutations couldn’t become any more scandalous, the president appears to have dug a hole in the bottom of the barrel. The Wall Street Journal reported:
President Trump has pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the convicted founder of the crypto exchange Binance, following months of efforts by Zhao to boost the Trump family’s own crypto company. The president signed the pardon on Wednesday, people familiar with the matter said.
The closer one looks at the details of this story, the more corrupt it appears.
When Zhao was first prosecuted a couple of years ago, the federal case was a joint effort launched by the Justice Department, the Treasury Department, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, which collectively argued that Binance became the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange “in part because of the crimes it committed.”
Then-Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen added that the company’s “willful failures allowed money to flow to terrorists, cybercriminals, and child abusers through its platform.”
Trump returned to power a year later, at which point Zhao, one of the wealthiest people in the world, and his allies began a campaign for a possible presidential pardon. The billionaire pursued a pardon in part by hiring lawyers and lobbyists with ties to the Trump administration. But just as importantly, Binance struck a business deal with World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto startup.
As The New York Times reported, “That deal alone is poised to generate tens of millions of dollars a year for the Trumps and the family of Steve Witkoff, the president’s top Middle East adviser.”
Zhao helped finance the president’s stablecoin and advance a business deal that’s likely to put money in the pockets of Trump and his family, all while lobbying for a pardon.
Evidently, it worked.
In a written statement, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to defend the president’s intervention in the case by claiming that Zhao was a victim of the Biden administration’s “war on cryptocurrency.”
Among the obvious problems with this claim is that Zhao is a convicted felon who pleaded guilty to money laundering. Q: On the pardon of Changpeng Zhao, Binance has significant business interests with World Liberty Financial, the president family's crypto company. How do you respond to criticisms that this is a corrupt act?LEAVITT: I would respond and say the president is exercising his constitutional authority Later during a press briefing, a reporter asked how the White House responds to fairly obvious criticisms about the apparent corruption behind Trump’s latest pardon. “The president is exercising his constitutional authority to grant clemency requests,” Leavitt replied. In other words, Trump did this because he could. With each new scandalous pardon, it becomes clearer that Trump isn’t the least bit concerned about appearances or the pretense of propriety. He’s corrupting the process. He knows he’s corrupting the process. He knows we know he’s corrupting the process — but he’s doing it anyway.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
Latest Post
Recommended
