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.”
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