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I have written repeatedly about how what Donald Trump and his family are doing with crypto currency — getting rich by leveraging his power and influence as president — is corruption hiding in plain sight.
On the day its crypto trading operation began to be publicly traded last month, the family made $5 billion — yes, BILLION — dollars, according to the Wall Street Journal.
And today, the Journal is out with a story on how the founder of Binance, a massive crypto exchange, helped make the Trump crypto operation money — and secured himself a presidential pardon.
Even to my cynical eyes, it’s truly eye-popping stuff.
Around the time of the election, [Binance founder ChangPeng] Zhao’s representatives began discussions with allies of Trump, saying they wanted to find a solution to Binance’s legal troubles in the U.S. and offering a deal with a Trump family business, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Once Trump won, Binance formed a high-level task force to strike a deal with the Trumps’ nascent cryptocurrency venture, World Liberty Financial, that Binance could leverage into clemency for Zhao, other people familiar with the matter said.
This spring, Binance took steps that catapulted the Trump family venture’s new stablecoin product, enhancing its credibility and pushing its market capitalization up from $127 million to over $2.1 billion.
Trump granted Zhao a presidential pardon last week, likely paving the way for the world’s largest crypto-trading platform to return to the U.S., from where it was banned after the company pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating anti-money-laundering rules. At the time, the government said Zhao had caused “significant harm to U.S. national security” by allowing sanctioned Iranian crypto exchanges, Russian drug-traffickers, Hamas militants and other criminal groups to move billions of dollars through the exchange.
The pardon marks the most distinct instance yet of Trump using the powers of his office to benefit someone at the center of deals that have enriched his family.
That last sentence may be the understatement of the century.
What happened is pretty simple:
Zhao wanted a pardon and for Binance to be able to do business in the U.S. again
His people decided the best way to make that happen was to work to make the Trump family rich
They sent their engineers to World Liberty Financial, the Trump crypto
schemeoperation, and helped them build the backend using the expertise they’d gained with BinanceWhen an Emirati state investor wanted to buy a piece of Binance, Zhao said it had to be done with $2 billion of USD1, which is the stablecoin of World Liberty Financial
Those twin moves established World Liberty Financial as a credible player in the crypto world
The Trumps got (even more) rich
Donald Trump pardoned Zhao last week after a 2023 conviction for money-laundering
Pretty simple! You make me and mine rich. I give you a presidential pardon. [Hand shake]
Folks, I am not naive enough to think the relatives of past presidents have not used their family name and connections to make money. I mean, Hunter Biden absolutely did it; he was selling his paintings to people for hundreds of thousands of dollars!
But I don’t think we have seen just straight-up pay-to-play stuff like this ever before from a president and his family. They aren’t even pretending or trying to hide it.
If Democrats win back the House in 2026, I would suspect one of their first targets for oversight will be what the Trump family has done with World Liberty Financial. It’s astounding stuff.
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