President Donald Trump pardoned billionaire Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of Binance, the world’s largest crypto-currency trading platform, which laundered billions of dollars in drug and darknet money. On Nov. 21, 2023, Zhao, a Chinese-born Canadian citizen pleaded guilty to enabling money-laundering, stemming from U.S. Department of Justice charges, and forfeited $2.5 billion and paid a criminal fine of $1.8 billion, for a total financial penalty of $4.3 billion. He was given a slap on the wrist four-month jail sentence, which he served in 2024.
President Trump has bombed 10 maritime vessels, as of this writing, in and around Venezuela and the Caribbean, in the name of ostensibly stopping the flow of drugs into the United States.
Yet when it comes to the City of London and Wall Street using crypto currency to blatantly launder billions of dollars in drug money, he adopts a different standard, even though money-laundering is the sine qua non of the drug trade.
When asked by a reporter on Oct. 23 about his pardoning of Zhao, Trump replied, “A lot of people say he wasn’t guilty of anything. He served four months in jail, and they say that he was not guilty of anything…. But let me just tell you, he was somebody, as I was told, I don’t know him, I don’t believe I’ve ever met him. He had a lot of support, a lot of support. And they said what he did was not even a crime, that he was persecuted by the Biden administration, and so I gave him a pardon at the request of a lot of good people.” President Trump painted himself into a corner with this statement, and it may become his Achilles heel. Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that “Mr. Zhao was prosecuted by the Biden Administration in their war on cryptocurrency.”
The U.S. Justice Department had a large amount of evidence against Zhao. The Department of Justice, in its Nov. 21, 2023 press release reported that, “one compliance employee wrote, ‘we need a banner “is washing drug money too hard these days—come to binance we got cake for you.”’”
