President Trump’s newest explanation for pardoning Changpeng Zhao: ‘I don’t know who he is.’
Andy McCarthy touched on this a bit over the weekend, but there was a new development Sunday night.
The Republicans have a very strong argument that President Biden had, at best, only the vaguest idea of who was getting a presidential pardon or a commutation of their sentences in the final days of his administration, and while it is unlikely that any court will ever rule those pardons invalid, it represents a blatant abuse of the pardon power. It is not asking too much that the president of the United States know a thing or two about the people he’s pardoning.
Leave it to President Trump to undermine the GOP’s position by deflecting questions about one of his own controversial pardons by insisting he knows very little about the individual who got the pardon. From President Trump’s interview on 60 Minutes:
NORAH O’DONNELL: This is a question about pardons. The Trump family is now perhaps more associated with cryptocurrency than real estate. You and your son– your sons, Don Jr. and Eric, have formed World Liberty Financial with the Witkoff family.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Right.
NORAH O’DONNELL: Helping to make your family millions of dollars. It’s in that context that I do wanna ask you about crypto’s richest man, a billionaire known as C.Z. [Changpeng Zhao]. He pled guilty in 2023 to violating anti-money laundering laws.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Right.
NORAH O’DONNELL: Looked at this, the government at the time said that C.Z. had caused “significant harm to U.S. national security”, essentially by allowing terrorist groups like Hamas to move millions of dollars around. Why did you pardon him?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Okay, are you ready? I don’t know who he is. I know he got a four-month sentence or something like that. And I heard it was a Biden witch hunt. And what I wanna do is see crypto, ’cause if we don’t do it it’s gonna go to China, it’s gonna go to– this is no different to me than AI.
My sons are involved in crypto much more than I– me. I– I know very little about it, other than one thing. It’s a huge industry. And if we’re not gonna be the head of it, China, Japan, or someplace else is. So I am behind it 100%. This man was, in my opinion, from what I was told, this is, you know, a four-month sentence.
But this man was treated really badly by the Biden administration. And he was given a jail term. He’s highly respected. He’s a very successful guy. They sent him to jail and they really set him up. That’s my opinion. I was told about it. I said, “Eh, it may look bad if I do it. I have to do the right thing.” I don’t know the man at all. I don’t think I ever met him. Maybe I did. Or, you know, somebody shook my hand or something. But I don’t think I ever met him. I have no idea who he is. I was told that he was a victim, just like I was and just like many other people, of a vicious, horrible group of people in the Biden administration.
“I don’t know who he is.” Well, Mr. President, if you’re going to give someone a pardon, you probably should know who he is.
There are a bunch of people who will reflexively insist that noticing that the president insists he doesn’t know anything about a man he pardoned is a form of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” No, this is quoting the president. Don’t get mad at me for telling you about it; get mad at the president for saying it.