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The Price of a Pardon: Trump Just Wiped the Slate Clean for Crypto's Kingpin
Let’s not pretend we’re surprised. Let’s not clutch our pearls and act like this is some shocking deviation from the norm. The official news is in—Trump pardons Binance founder Changpeng 'CZ' Zhao—and if you think this has anything to do with “justice” or a principled stand against the “war on cryptocurrency,” then I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you, tokenized on the blockchain, of course.
The White House press release is a masterpiece of gaslighting. They claim CZ was a victim of the Biden administration’s crusade against crypto, pursued “despite no allegations of fraud or identifiable victims.” It’s a talking point so slick, so perfectly polished, you can almost see the reflection of the lobbyist who wrote it. You can almost hear the quiet hum of the air conditioning in the West Wing office where someone signed off on this nonsense.
No identifiable victims? Tell that to the Treasury Department. Tell that to Janet Yellen, who, back when reality still mattered, stated that Binance’s “willful failures allowed money to flow to terrorists, cybercriminals, and child abusers through its platform.” That’s not my opinion; that’s the official finding of the United States government. The company paid a $4.3 billion fine for it. You don’t pay the largest corporate fine in history because you forgot to file some paperwork. You pay it because you got caught running a global laundromat for the worst people on Earth.
So, which is it? Was the Treasury Secretary lying then, or is the White House lying now? Are we really supposed to believe that facilitating payments for terrorist groups doesn't create victims? It’s a rhetorical question, I know. The answer is obvious.
Follow the Money, It's Not That Hard
This whole affair is like a badly written crime novel where the author leaves clues the size of billboards. The motive isn't hidden on page 300; it's right there in the prologue. For months, Trump, the former crypto skeptic, has been screaming from the rooftops that he’ll make America the “crypto capital of the planet.” And in a stunning coincidence, his family’s personal wealth has become inextricably linked to the very man he just pardoned.
The Trump family’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, has reportedly added over $5 billion in paper wealth to their fortune. And where is this brave new financial empire hosted? Where do its proprietary tokens gain their legitimacy? Why, on the Binance exchange, of course. It’s all one big, happy, unregulated family.
It gets better. Earlier this year, an Emirati investment firm called MGX cut a deal to use the Trump family’s stablecoin for a $2 billion transaction with—you guessed it—Binance. The deal was a massive win for the Trumps, effectively a $2 billion deposit into their ecosystem. And what was happening while this deal was being brokered? Oh, right. Binance was actively lobbying the White House for CZ’s pardon. CZ himself paid a D.C. lawyer $30,000 for “executive relief.”
This isn't a pardon. This is the final payment on an invoice. It’s the closing of a loop so blatant, so shamelessly transactional, that it feels like an insult to our collective intelligence. They aren’t even trying to hide it anymore. The entire arrangement is a perfect metaphor for modern power: a system where financial and political interests merge into an indistinguishable sludge, and the constitutional power to grant clemency is just another asset to be leveraged. They set up this whole ecosystem where they profit, then pardon the guy who makes it possible, and we're just supposed to... what, applaud their business acumen?
A Pattern of Forgiveness for the 'Right' People
Look, CZ isn’t an outlier; he’s the new template. This is just the latest and most audacious entry in Trump’s Pardon-a-Thon for the Financially Convenient. He pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the Silk Road online drug market, a hero to the libertarian crypto-anarchist crowd. He pardoned the founders of the BitMEX crypto exchange, who also pleaded guilty to anti-money-laundering violations. He pardoned fraudsters like Trevor Milton and the Chrisleys. He even commuted the sentence of George Santos, a man whose entire life is a work of fiction.
This is just corrupt. No, 'corrupt' is too clean a word—it's a grift operating under the color of law. There’s a whole cottage industry of lobbyists in D.C. now whose only job is to get their white-collar criminal clients in front of the right people at the White House. Justice in America is becoming a subscription service, and guys like CZ just paid for the platinum tier.
It’s moments like these that make you feel completely detached from the world the powerful inhabit. I just paid a $75 ticket because my car was parked two inches over a white line for ten minutes while I ran into a bodega. It’s my fault, offcourse, I broke the rule. Meanwhile, a guy who ran a multi-billion dollar exchange that, according to our own government, serviced terrorists, gets his record wiped clean because his business is financially entangled with the President’s family. It’s just... insane.
Then again, who am I to judge? In this new economy, maybe this is how business is done. Maybe I'm the dinosaur for still believing that things like "anti-money-laundering laws" are supposed to apply to everyone. Perhaps the real crime is not being rich enough to buy your own pardon.
The Swamp Has Been Tokenized
Let’s be brutally honest with ourselves. This was never about a “war on crypto.” It was about a war on accountability. The pardon of Changpeng Zhao isn’t a victory for financial innovation; it’s a victory for transactional politics. The promise to “drain the swamp” has been replaced by a new business model: selling VIP access passes to it on a decentralized exchange. This wasn't an act of mercy. It was a merger and acquisition.