Does Trump collecting $2 billion from the United Arab Emirates in exchange for lifting export controls on AI chips anger you?
No?
How about Trump extracting $230 million in taxpayer dollars to compensate himself for past Justice Department investigations?
No again?
All right then, how about him pardoning a guy whoās helping him get very rich off crypto?
Does that piss you off?
It certainly pisses me off.
āTrump Pardons Convicted Binance Founderā reads the Wall Street Journal headline.
-- A better headline would be:
āTrump Pardons Own Goddamned Business Associate.ā
āChangpeng Zhao bought himself a presidential pardon by doing everything he could to boost the fortunes of World Liberty Financial,
š„the crypto firm in which the Trump family owns a 38 percent stake, having previously owned stakes of 75 percent, 60 percent, and 40 percent.
We know that the Trump family cashed out much of its initial stake,
ā ļøbut we donāt know who bought it or whether the buyer paid a plausible market price for the shares.
Given that most of Trumpās corruption hides in plain sight, anything undisclosed makes me assume the worst.
We donāt know exactly how much the Trump family has earned from World Liberty Financial, but, as I explained last week (āThe Trump Familyās Ever-Expanding Portfolio of Corruptionā),
šWorld Liberty is the main reasonTrumpās net worth has risen from $2.6 billion in March 2024 to $7.1 billiontoday.
Just one crypto token, WLFI, earned the Trump family $5 billion when it was launched last month.
No previous financial venture of Trumpās has ever come close to generating the return on presidential politics.
Did I mention Trump doesnāt appear to have invested so much as a dime in World Liberty Financial?
Changpeng Zhao is the former chief executive of #Binance, which he founded in 2017.
He resigned in November 2023 after accepting a plea deal from the Justice Department in which
he admitted āfailing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering (AML) programā in violation of the Bank Security Act.
According to the indictment, Zhao had told his employees that it is ābetter to ask for forgiveness than for permission.ā At the time of the plea agreement, thenāTreasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that
āBinance turned a blind eye to its legal obligations in the pursuit of profit. Its willful failures allowed money to flow to terrorists, cybercriminals, and child abusers through its platform.ā
Binance paid $4.3 billion in fines, and Zhao served a four-month sentence in Lompoc, a minimum-security prison in Santa Barbara County.
Zhao agreed as part of his plea agreement never to resume an executive role at Binance.
-- But Binance remained Zhaoās company because he owned 90 percent of it. His stake makes him, according to Forbes, the twenty-first-richest person in the world, with a net worth of $85.6 billion.
After leaving prison, Zhao set about securing a presidential pardon so Binanceās owner could once again be Binanceās chief executive.
To achieve this, Zhao hired a friend of Don Jr.ās named š„Ches McDowell,
and alsoš„ Teresa Goody GuillĆ©n, who happens also to represent
š„Zach Witkoff, chief executive of World Liberty Financial and son to chief Mideast negotiator Steve Witkoff.
Meanwhile, Zhao and Binance made themselves useful to World Liberty Financial in multiple ways.
Most significantly, that $2 billion UAE payment to Trump (specifically, to World Liberty Financial, in which the Trump family then owned a majority stake) was used to purchase a #stablecoin, USD1, that in turn was invested in Binance.
Binance also supplied World Liberty Financial with a trading platform, a trading platform #PancakeSwap, that an August Wall Street Journal story called
āThe Recipe Behind the Trump Familyās Crypto Riches.ā
PancakeSwap doesnāt disclose its ownership, the Journal said, but former Binance employees told the Journal that Binance employees created PancakeSwap in-house and that it remained under Binance supervision.
World Liberty Financial used PancakeSwap to increase the use of USD1. According to Bloomberg, Binance did more than that;
it āwrote the basic code to power USD1.ā
Finally,
Binance invited members of the Trump family to āstrike a business deal ⦠as part of a plan to return the company to the U.S.,ā according to the Journal.
In March, the Journal reported that ārepresentatives of President Trumpās family have held talks to take a financial stake in the U.S. armā of Binance.
āIt is unclear,ā the Journal continued, āwhat form the Trump family stake would take if the deal comes together
or š„whether it would be contingent on a pardon.š„ā
https://newrepublic.com/article/202209/trump-pardon-changpeng-zhao-crypto