Trump Pardons Binance Founder
The timing of the pardon and the $2 billion family business deal
President Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao on October 23, 2025. Zhao founded Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. Five months earlier, an Abu Dhabi investment fund announced a $2 billion stake purchase in Binance, paid in a stablecoin created by the Trump family’s crypto venture.
The White House framed it as ending Biden’s war on crypto.
Connect the dots.
Zhao, known as CZ, pleaded guilty in November 2023 to willfully failing to maintain an anti-money laundering program at Binance. Not paperwork negligence. Federal prosecutors established that Binance deliberately prioritized growth, market share, and profits over compliance with U.S. law.
The company failed to report over 100,000 suspicious transactions. It violated the International Emergency Economic Powers Act by processing transactions for U.S.-designated terrorist groups, including al-Qaida and Hamas.
CZ served four months in federal prison. Binance paid $4.3 billion in penalties and accepted a three-year independent compliance monitor. One of the largest corporate fines in U.S. history.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt justified the pardon by noting there were no allegations of fraud or identifiable victims.
This is linguistic sleight-of-hand at its finest.
Technically correct but morally evasive. CZ wasn’t convicted of fraud like Sam Bankman-Fried, who stole $8 billion from FTX customers. But the distinction between actively stealing customer money and passively enabling terrorist financing is a legal technicality, not a moral one.
The victims of Bank Secrecy Act violations are abstract. The U.S. national security apparatus. The integrity of the global financial system. They don’t generate sympathetic headlines.
By reframing systemic money laundering failures as mere administrative issues, the White House made facilitating terrorist financing sound boring.
Federal prosecutors sought a three-year sentence for CZ. The judge rejected this as extraordinary and unprecedented, settling on four months. BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes received only probation for similar crimes.
Was the Biden DOJ singling out crypto companies?
Not really.
The severity wasn’t about crypto but about scale. Binance was the largest exchange in the world, handling billions in daily volume. The DOJ’s case was built on documented terrorist financing and over 100,000 unreported suspicious transactions. Hayes got probation because BitMEX was smaller and cooperated earlier.
The enforcement action was led by the DOJ’s Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section and the National Security Division. Career professionals, not political appointees. The same units that pursue sanctions evasion and terrorism financing regardless of who occupies the Oval Office.
Calling their work politically motivated persecution doesn’t just excuse CZ’s crimes. It delegitimizes the entire framework of financial crime enforcement.
The $2 Billion Question
In May 2025, MGX, an investment fund based in Abu Dhabi, announced it would purchase a $2 billion stake in Binance.
The payment mechanism?
USD1, a stablecoin developed by World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto venture. Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. run WLF. Financial disclosures show the Trump family had already generated over $57 million from it the previous year.
Eric Trump’s response to questions about the deal deserves attention:
You think I have anything to do with Washington DC? My father has nothing to do with our company. You think I’m really tracking AI chips flowing to where in the UAE? Give me a break.
The protest is instructive precisely because of what it acknowledges. There are dots to connect.
The UAE deal involved not just Binance and USD1, but also privileged access to AI chip technology. The company facilitating this, MGX, is a subsidiary of G42. That name should ring bells for anyone following U.S.-China tech competition.
G42’s CEO is Peng Xiao, a former MicroStrategy executive who renounced his American citizenship for Emirati citizenship. He previously led Pegasus, a subsidiary of the DarkMatter Group, accused of serious privacy breaches.
In 2019, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party raised concerns about Xiao’s expansive network of UAE and China-based companies that develop dual-use technologies and materially support PRC military-civil fusion.
G42 partnered with BGI Genomics, which the U.S. Defense Department blacklisted in 2021 as an official Chinese military entity. By June 2023, White House officials were raising concerns directly with G42’s chair, Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed, who doubles as the UAE’s national security advisor.
So when Eric Trump dismisses questions about AI chips flowing to the UAE, he’s either genuinely ignorant of his family business dealings or performing ignorance for the cameras.
Either way, the MGX investment in Binance sits at the intersection of U.S.-China tech competition, UAE power politics, and Trump family financial interests. All lubricated by a $2 billion crypto transaction.
The Timeline
The timeline tells the story.
Trump family launches crypto venture with USD1 stablecoin. Trump wins in November 2024. MGX announces $2 billion Binance stake purchase using USD1 in May 2025. Trump pardons CZ in October 2025.
During this period, Binance reportedly moved toward a deal to terminate its court-mandated compliance monitor early.
Senator Elizabeth Warren and colleagues explicitly flagged the convergence of CZ’s clemency application and Binance’s financial entanglement with the President’s family. They used the word corruption emanating from the White House.
The pardon wipes CZ’s criminal record clean. His civil rights are restored. The $50 million fine he paid personally is likely nullified. He can potentially return to Binance’s leadership, though this would require the DOJ to modify the corporate plea agreement that specifically excluded him from management.
Here’s the legal wrinkle the White House doesn’t emphasize.
The pardon applies only to CZ the individual, not Binance the corporation. The $4.3 billion corporate fine remains in full effect. The three-year compliance monitorship remains legally binding.
In theory.
In practice, the company is already moving to shed that scrutiny. The revised DOJ monitor selection guidelines issued in May 2025 emphasize budgetary constraints and require departmental approval of work plans. Translation: easier for corporations to argue for early removal.
If the monitor goes, the $4.3 billion becomes a one-time market access fee rather than a mandate for permanent reform. Without the monitor, who ensures Binance actually implements the anti-money laundering controls it failed to maintain when it was facilitating terrorist financing?
Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, the Securities and Exchange Commission dismissed the 13 serious charges it had filed against Binance and CZ in 2023. This included allegations of commingling customer assets.
The SEC stated explicitly this dismissal was based on discretion and as a policy matter.
DOJ pardon + SEC dismissal + potential early monitor termination = comprehensive regulatory clearance for the world’s largest crypto exchange.
Recently convicted of enabling terrorist financing. In exchange for, among other things, a $2 billion investment in a Trump family stablecoin.
The administration calls this ending Biden’s war on crypto.
A more accurate description: regulatory capture through transactional clemency.
While watching the news Thursday evening, I found it interesting that reporters were spending an inordinate amount of time talking about two stories – the indictments that came down about poker gambling and Trump’s destruction of the East Wing of the White House. Not once did I hear a reporter talk about Trump’s refusal to release the Epstein files, not once did I hear a reporter talk about Trump’s refusal to release the FBI tape of Tom Homan accepting a bribe, not once did I hear a reporter talk about Trump’s plan to force Ukraine to give up part of its territory to (his puppet-master) dictator Putin, not once did I hear a reporter talk about the rise of Fascism in the USA (driven by wanna-be-dictator Trump), not once did I hear a reporter talk about the Trump Gestapo creating havoc, and, yes, committing crimes in America’s cities. Not. Once. And, I did not hear any reporters, who were in front of Trump at a press conference, say and ask…..”President Trump, you lied yesterday, you lied today, WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?” And, I did not hear any reporter say and ask this, “President Trump, about that pardon you just issued to the cryptocurrency guy, how ‘bout explaining to us and to the American People, why we should not consider that a bribe? Are pardons for sale?”
While the destruction of the East Wing is disheartening, that story is far less important than the rise of Fascism in the USA. While rigging games of chance is detestable, that, too, is even more less important that the rise of Fascism in the USA. There is very little going on in the USA that comes even close to the outrageous disgusting fact that our President is a Liar, a Fraud, a Con, a Grifter, a Racist, an adjudicated sex-abuser, a convicted-felon, a best-friend of a pedophile, a Fascist, a person who calls Neo-Nazi’s and KKK’ers “fine people.”
What you see and hear coming out of Trump’s (lying) mouth, what you see and hear coming out of Liar Trump’s press secretary’s (lying) mouth, what you see and hear coming out of the mouths of his fascist cabinet members, advisors, and heads of government agencies is a perfect example of how a propaganda machine works. A propaganda machine floods the airwaves with lies, a propaganda machine floods the airwaves with distractions.
Hitler’s team was a master at propaganda. Trump will likely surpass Hitler as the greatest propaganda-master of all time.
THINK. ABOUT. THAT.
who knew that the MAGA TRASH would elect such a globalist?!