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.”
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 months-long lobbying campaign for a pardon for Zhao, who goes by CZ.
The pardon, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, could open the door for Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, to operate in the US once again.
Trump, a former crypto skeptic who did a 180 on the alternative financial assets while running for a second term, has pledged to make the US the “crypto capital of the planet.” In launching a multi-faceted crypto empire, the Trump family has also established direct financial links to Binance over the past year.
The Trump family’s crypto firm, World Liberty Financial – on which their wealth is increasingly dependent – is hosted on Binance. The exchange has also helped popularise World Liberty Financial’s proprietary tokens, the sale of which has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in fees for the Trump family.
Earlier this year, MGX, an Emirati-backed investment firm, agreed to use World Liberty’s dollar-backed stablecoin, USD1, for a US$2 billion ($3.07 billion) investment in Binance. The deal was a huge win for World Liberty Financial, which effectively received a US$2 billion bank deposit. At the time, Binance was actively lobbying for Zhao’s pardon.
Asked at Thursday’s White House press briefing about Democratic criticisms of the pardon as corrupt, Leavitt said the White House has “a very thorough examination of every pardon request that comes to the president’s desk.”
She told reporters that she spoke directly with the White House counsel about the pardon, and that the administration believes Zhao’s case was “overly prosecuted” under the Biden administration, which she claimed was “very hostile to the cryptocurrency industry.”
Zhao isn’t the only crypto mogul to win a reprieve from Trump since his return to the White House.
Shortly after returning to office, Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, a cause celebre of the Libertarian crypto world, who had been serving a life sentence for creating the Silk Road marketplace, which the Justice Department had described as “the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the Internet today.”
Justin Sun, the Chinese crypto billionaire who poured tens of millions of dollars into World Liberty Financial soon after it launched, had been facing civil fraud charges in the United States under the Biden administration.
