Eleven days ago, president Donald Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, whose crypto exchange facilitated a multibillion-dollar deal involving the Trump family’s own World Liberty Financial.
Just hours later, he told a reporter that he didn’t know why the White House had decided to pardon Zhao, highlighting what MSNBC is calling a “brazenly corrupt pardon.”
“I don’t know,” he said bluntly at the time. “He was recommended by a lot of people.”
During a Sunday interview with CBS News, Trump once again professed ignorance about the man he had pardoned just over a week ago, a move that requires his personal signature.
“I don’t know who he is,” he said. “I know he got a four-month sentence or something like that. And I heard it was a Biden witch hunt.”
The timing of the pardon is certainly eyebrow-raising, to say the very least. Binance oversaw a $2 billion purchase by an Emirati state investor of a dollar-pegged stablecoin dubbed USD1. The coin was launched in March by World Liberty Financial, which was founded by Trump and is being managed by his sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.
Talks surrounding the deal started around the time of last year’s presidential election, according to the Wall Street Journal. Binance “deployed a team of over a dozen engineers to build the technology behind the currency,” catapulting its market cap from $127 million to over $2.1 billion this spring — a deal that directly enriched the Trumps.
Did Zhao make these arrangements to curry favor with the Trump family and ensure his pardon? Is Trump having issues with his memory — or is he sloppily denying a major instance of corruption?
The incident once again highlights the president’s extremely cozy relationship with the crypto community — his family has made more than $800 million from the sale of crypto assets in just the first half of 2025 — making his claims of not knowing who Zhao is all the more baffling.
Zhao stepped down as Binance CEO in 2023 after the firm pleaded guilty to failing to effectively maintain an anti-money laundering program, agreeing to pay a penalty of $4.3 billion. He spent four months in jail in early 2024. Despite spending time in prison, Zhao has kept his stake in Binance.
Trump’s repeated attempts to distance himself from the pardon come amid Republican criticism of former president Joe Biden making use of an “autopen,” a machine that can mimic a person’s signature to sign many documents in a short amount of time.
Last week, representative and house speaker Mike Johnson blasted the Biden administration for making use of such tech, calling it “one of the biggest political scandals in US history.”
When CNN chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju confronted Johnson today, asking him if he’s “concerned” about being “very critical of Biden’s use of the autopen,” but also have Trump admit to “not knowing he pardoned a crypto billionaire who pleaded guilty to money laundering,” Johnson had a peculiar answer.
“I don’t know anything about that,” he told Raju. “I didn’t see it. I’m not sure.”
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