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.” The move could open the door for Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange and the host of the Trump family’s crypto firm, to operate in the US again, and generated some concern that Trump was helping a man who had helped his family reap financial benefits.
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 monthslong lobbying campaign for a pardon for Zhao, who goes by CZ.
Trump defended his decision on Thursday afternoon, telling CNN’s Kaitlan Collins he issued the pardon, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, “at the request of a lot of very good people.”
“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, but I’ve been told by, a lot of support, he had a lot of support, and they said that what he did is not even a crime,” Trump said during a roundtable in the White House State Dining Room. “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.”
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.
Trump did not directly address whether his pardon was related to his family’s crypto interests, but acknowledged, “I pardon a lot of people,” during Thursday’s remarks.
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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CNN’s Donald Judd contributed to this report.
