Press Releases
Corruption Watch: Trump Pardons Binance Founder Amid $2B Trump Family-Binance Crypto Partnership
Washington D.C. – President Donald Trump has reportedly pardoned Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, founder of the world’s largest crypto exchange Binance and who recently spent time in prison for felony money laundering. Government watchdog Accountable.US predicted this exact move in May when the Trump SEC announced it had voluntarily dismissed its lawsuit against Binance for allegedly misleading investors about trading controls, among other accusations on the heels of a $2 billion business partnership between Binance and Trump family crypto venture World Liberty Financial (WLFI).
TIMELINE OF CORRUPTION:
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On March 13th, 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported “Representatives of President Trump’s family have held talks to take a financial stake in the U.S. arm of crypto exchange Binance … a move that would put Trump in business with the firm that pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating anti-money-laundering requirements. At the same time, Binance’s billionaire founder, Changpeng Zhao—who served four months in prison after pleading guilty to a related charge—has been pushing for the Trump administration to grant him a pardon, people familiar with the matter said. Zhao, widely known as CZ, remains Binance’s largest shareholder.”
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On March 13th, CZ categorically denied the WSJ’s “report of Trump investment, pardon campaign.”
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On May 1, 2025, Zach Witkoff, a WLFI co-founder and son of Trump Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff, announced that Emirati state-backed investment fund MGX would make a $2 billion business deal with Binance using WLFI’s cryptocurrency coins, potentially generating “tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue for the Trump family and its partners at World Liberty.”
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On May 22, Trump’s WLFl “announced that its USD1 stablecoin, a cryptocurrency whose value is pegged to the U.S. dollar, started trading on Binance.” – and which “would be used to facilitate [the] $2 billion investment from Abu Dhabi-backed MGX into Binance.”
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On October 22nd, 2025, Trump pardons CZ.
“Donald Trump granting the Binance founder the pardon he’s been begging for now clears the path for the crypto exchange’s return to the U.S., which would open more avenues for the Trump family to profit off its ballooning crypto grift operations,” said Accountable.US Executive Director Tony Carrk. “For any other U.S. President this would be an impeachable abuse of power, but for Donald Trump, it’s just another Thursday. Whether it’s pushing the Justice Department to hand him a $230 million check from the taxpayers, pledging U.S. military support to Qatar where his family has a golf course, or using a foreign leader summit as a platform to assist his son’s condo development ventures in Indonesia, or using the promise of a White House meeting to solicit billions of dollars in purchases of his crypto meme coin — there is no bottom to Donald Trump’s pay-to-play schemes. Donald Trump proudly wears corruption on his sleeve and dares his allies who control Congress to do anything about it other than make pathetic excuses. Meanwhile, American working people and seniors are expected to accept that while there’s plenty of taxpayer money to pay off Trump family debts, let money launderers off the hook, and give Trump donors a giant tax break — but they somehow can’t find the money to keep millions of Americans from losing their health care and food assistance.”
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