On the menu today: A pardon from President Trump that is stunning in its shamelessness, recklessness, and moral inversion; and some thoughts on what happens to individuals when they’re no longer useful to the political movements that embraced them.
There’s Nothing Good to Say About This Pardon
This newsletter, back on May 12, 2025: “The president of the United States should not be selling meme coins or other cryptocurrency while his administration is crafting federal rules for the regulation of that currency.”
In that edition, I linked to an Andy McCarthy column that reported, “[Crypto exchange] Binance is under U.S. government monitoring because of its criminal violations of federal money-laundering laws. In 2023, Binance’s founder and now Trump business partner, Changpeng Zhao, a Chinese-born Canadian billionaire, pled guilty to a felony money-laundering charge that landed him in prison for four months. He is said to be lobbying the president for a pardon. Zhao is just one of the darkly intriguing figures circling in and around the Trump family crypto venture.”
This week, that pardon arrived:
President Trump has pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the convicted founder of the crypto exchange Binance, following months of efforts by Zhao to boost the Trump family’s own crypto company.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump had “exercised his constitutional authority by issuing a pardon for Mr. Zhao, who was prosecuted by the Biden Administration in their war on cryptocurrency.” She added: “The Biden Administration’s war on crypto is over.”
The prosecutors who brought the charges and negotiated the plea deal would argue that they weren’t fighting a war on crypto, they were fighting a war on fraud and a company that gleefully embraced a wildly lucrative role conducting financial transactions among criminals, terrorist groups, and hostile states. From the announcement of the plea deal, back on November 21, 2023:
Binance Holdings Limited (Binance), the entity that operates the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance.com, pleaded guilty today and has agreed to pay over $4 billion to resolve the Justice Department’s investigation into violations related to the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), failure to register as a money transmitting business, and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).
Binance’s founder and chief executive officer (CEO), Changpeng Zhao, a Canadian national, also pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering (AML) program, in violation of the BSA and has resigned as CEO of Binance. . . .
“When you put growth above compliance, you end up in hot water,” said Chief Jim Lee of the IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI). “Our team of investigators uncovered that Binance disregarded anti-money laundering Know Your Customer laws, failed to register as a money transmitter, and willfully violated U.S. sanctions tied to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. When you do so, your business becomes a playground for bad actors. Hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit proceeds from ransomware variants, darknet transactions, and various internet-related scams moved through Binance in an attempt to evade detection by law enforcement.”
From the U.S. Department of the Treasury:
As an [money services business], Binance was required to report suspicious transactions to FinCEN through suspicious activity reports (SARs). FinCEN’s investigation revealed that Binance’s former Chief Compliance Officer told personnel that the CEO’s policy was to not report such activity, and Binance never filed a single SAR with FinCEN. Binance willfully failed to report well over 100,000 suspicious transactions that it processed as a result of its deficient controls, including transactions involving terrorist organizations, ransomware, child sexual exploitation material, frauds, and scams.
Terrorist Financing. Binance failed to report to FinCEN transactions associated with terrorist groups including Al Qaeda, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
Ransomware. Despite being one of the largest receivers of ransomware proceeds, and transacting in millions of dollars of ransomware proceeds from attacks involving at least 24 different strains of ransomware, Binance failed to report these transactions.
Child Sexual Abuse Materials. Binance never reported transactions with websites devoted to selling child sexual abuse materials, including Dark Scandals.
Darknet Markets, Scams, and Other Illicit Activity. Despite sending and receiving virtual assets proceeds from large-scale hacks, account takeovers, and darknet markets dealing in illegal narcotics, counterfeit and fraud-related goods and services, as well as other illegal contraband, Binance never reported any such transactions.
Now, there aren’t a lot of large financial institutions that are willing to do work with al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, ransomware hackers, and kiddie-porn enthusiasts, all simultaneously. These are the kinds of guys who usually end up portrayed as the villains in Jason Statham movies.
In a court filing, U.S. Attorney Tessa Gorman said Zhao caused “significant harm to U.S national security” through his criminal acts and “violated U.S. law on an unprecedented scale . . . in January 2020, blockchain-analytics firm Chainalysis reported that in 2019 Binance processed $770 million in funds from illicit actors.” She added, “Binance critically undermined the effectiveness of U.S. sanctions against Iran. . . . Binance processed trillions of dollars in unmonitored transactions, hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions involving illicit proceeds, and over a billion dollars in transactions that violated sanctions.”
(The idea that Gorman was some sort of left-wing prosecutor waging a rogue, unhinged war on crypto does not hold water. She’s a career civil servant, and back in 2018, President Trump announced his intention to nominate Gorman to be a district judge on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. President Trump removed her from her position as U.S. attorney in February, with no explanation; but she also remains on staff in the U.S. attorney’s office as an assistant U.S. attorney.)
According to the indictment, Zhao, who is a citizen of Canada and the United Arab Emirates, told his team that when it came to complying with U.S. law, “Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.” Then there’s this delightful detail:
One Binance compliance employee said in a written communication that the company had an open door to people laundering drug money, according to the government. “Is washing drug money too hard these days,” the employee wrote. “Come to Binance we got cake for you.”
The $3.4 billion settlement with the U.S. Treasury Department was the largest in its history. In a first-ballot Hall of Fame example of corporate public relations speak, Binance called its crimes that it pleaded guilty to and the plea agreement, “a challenging yet transformative chapter of learning and growth.”
And Changpeng Zhao just got a full pardon from President Trump.
And it’s not just Zhao himself:
Executives from cryptocurrency exchange Binance met with Treasury Department officials last month and discussed loosening U.S. government oversight on the company, while it was also exploring a business deal with a Trump family crypto venture, according to people familiar with the talks.
Oh, and from the Wall Street Journal, in August:
The Trump family’s crypto venture has generated more wealth since the election — some $4.5 billion — than any other part of the president’s business empire.
A major reason for the success is a partnership with an under-the-radar trading platform quietly administered by Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, whose founder is seeking a pardon from President Trump, according to people familiar with the matter. . . .
Zhao — considered the richest person in the crypto industry and worth over $70 billion, according to Forbes — recently hired Ches McDowell, a lobbyist and friend of Donald Trump Jr., to push for the pardon, a person familiar with the relationship said.
But hey, I’m certain the fact that Changpeng Zhao’s company is helping put billions into the Trump family coffers is completely unrelated to the fact that he just got a full pardon.
Remember, everybody, this administration stands for law and order!
ADDENDUM: It was one week ago that this newsletter noted that former famous climate activist-turned-anti-Israel activist Greta Thunberg claimed that Israeli guards physically abused her while she was detained.
That generated a typically snotty response from a has-been former Obama deputy press secretary, full of sneering but no particular refutation of any facts in the column. (To refute my claim that leftists use child spokesmen in order to accuse their opponents of attacking children when they make counterarguments, he accused me of attacking a child.) But more importantly, I ask you, dear readers: In the week since, have you heard another word about Thunberg and her accusations? Any press conferences from government officials? Any follow-up columns? Any additional news coverage at all?
Nothing, hm?
What does that tell you about how the rest of the world feels about Thunberg’s credibility when it comes to an accusation like this?
The fact that Thunberg’s accusations had a brief burst of coverage — almost no attention here in the United States, where news coverage that is critical of Israel is like catnip to a certain type of progressive — indicate that very, very few people are willing to stick their necks out based upon her word alone. (And just think, these people credulously cite “the Gaza Health Ministry” all the time, even though “the Gaza Health Ministry” is controlled by Hamas.)
I am reminded of the story of Cindy Sheehan. She was once an extremely prominent anti-Iraq-war activist and mother of a slain U.S. Army specialist, interviewed and cited seemingly everywhere, described as having “absolute moral authority” in the words of the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd.
And then in 2007, in frustration over Democrats not impeaching George W. Bush, Sheehan decided to run for Congress in San Francisco, challenging Nancy Pelosi. And Sheehan disappeared from the news cycle so fast, you would have thought she was abducted by aliens. As she wrote that year:
I have endured a lot of smear[s] and hatred since Casey was killed and especially since I became the so-called “Face” of the American anti-war movement. Especially since I renounced any tie I have remaining with the Democratic Party, I have been further trashed on such “liberal blogs” as the Democratic Underground. Being called an “attention whore” and being told “good riddance” are some of the more milder rebukes.
However, when I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the “left” started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used. I guess no one paid attention to me when I said that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of “right or left”, but “right and wrong.”
Lots of people on the left side of the spectrum loved Cindy Sheehan as long as she was useful to them. The moment she started challenging other people on the left, she became a problem, a liability, an uncomfortable reminder of how the Democratic Party’s elected officials didn’t always live up to their boldest rhetoric. And seemingly overnight, Sheehan became persona non grata.
It’s a good lesson for everybody across the political spectrum. (Hey, remember Joe the Plumber?) Twists of fate can make you a popular figure in a political movement, but the admiration of all those strangers and new friends is often entirely determined by whether you’re a useful messenger for the message du jour. When the message changes, or you’re no longer the human prop they’re looking for, you’ll get treated like a one-hit wonder in their 16th minute of fame.
Welcome to post-celebrity life, Greta Thunberg. Hope you have an easier time in the days ahead than all those other child stars.