(Headline USA) President Donald Trump on Thursday pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who created the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange and pled guilty in 2023 to enabling money laundering.
Zhao served prison time for failing to stop criminals from using the platform to move money connected to child sex abuse, drug trafficking and terrorism.
“I failed here,” Zhao told the court last year during sentencing. “I deeply regret my failure, and I am sorry.”
Trump says he was told Zhao ‘wasn’t guilt of anything’
The president says of pardoning crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao “a lot of people say that he wasn’t guilty of anything.”
Zhao founded the Binance crypto exchange. Trump said he didn’t believe he’d ever met Zhao, but had “been told” he “had a lot of support, and they said that what he did is not even a crime.”
Trump said Zhao had been “persecuted by the Biden administration” and added, “I gave him a pardon at the request of a lot of very good people.”
Zhao served four months in prison after reaching a deal with the Justice Department to plead guilty to charges of enabling money laundering at Binance.
Leavitt said the president has “the constitutional authority to grant clemency requests, and that he and the White House have a very thorough examination of every pardon request that comes to the president’s desk.”
She said during her briefing with reporters that the pardon for Binance founder Changpeng Zhao was “thoroughly reviewed by the White House counsel office” and that the crypto billionaire known as CZ faced “an overly prosecuted case by the Biden administration.”
“The Biden administration was pursuing an egregious over-sentencing of this individual. And the previous administration was very hostile to the cryptocurrency industry,” she said. “So the president wants to correct this overreach.”
Leavitt said in a statement Thursday that the Biden administration prosecuted Zhao out of a “desire to punish the cryptocurrency industry.”
Zhao has deep ties to World Liberty Financial, a crypto venture the Republican president and his sons Eric and Donald Jr. launched in September.
Trump’s most recent financial disclosure report reveals he made more than $57 million last year from World Liberty Financial, which has launched USD1, a stablecoin pegged at a 1-to-1 ratio to the U.S. dollar.
World Liberty Financial also recently announced that an investment fund in the United Arab Emirates would be using $2 billion worth of USD1 to purchase a stake in Binance. Zhao also has publicly said he’d asked Trump for a pardon that could nullify his conviction.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press.
