Flattery, lobbyists and a business deal: Crypto’s richest man campaigns for a pardon
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
By Kenneth P. Vogel and David Yaffe-Bellany
In 2023, as Changpeng Zhao, the founder of giant cryptocurrency exchange Binance, prepared to plead guilty to U.S. money-laundering violations, he fashioned a crash course for himself on clemency politics, reading books about business tycoons who had received pardons, including Marc Rich and Michael Milken.
Two years later, Zhao, a Chinese-born billionaire, is out of prison and mounting a pardon campaign of his own, backed by a sophisticated influence operation worthy of those high-profile predecessors.
Even at a time when many pardon-seekers are paying hefty fees to lobbyists and lawyers with connections to President Donald Trump, Zhao’s push stands out. The stakes could be enormous for the crypto industry, and Zhao and his team are deploying the full playbook of techniques that have helped deep-pocketed interests win preferential treatment from Trump.
Publicly, Zhao, in podcast interviews, has praised the president’s crypto policies. Behind the scenes, his team has hired lobbyists with ties to Trump’s orbit. Binance has also cultivated a business relationship with the Trumps, striking a deal that benefited the family’s own crypto firm, World Liberty Financial.
Zhao and Binance pleaded guilty to serious crimes in 2023, acknowledging that a flawed compliance system had allowed bad actors to move money on the platform. But the Trump administration appears to be considering the possibility of granting clemency.
The White House has received pardon applications from Zhao and Binance, according to two people briefed on the applications, one of whom said the White House indicated that they were being reviewed. And in private conversations with other executives, advisers to Trump have floated the possibility of a pardon for Zhao and discussed the possible political fallout, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive discussions.
Democrats are concerned that Trump will grant the pardons to reward Binance for steering business to World Liberty Financial, while paving the way for a more lucrative partnership.
“It provides a gold-plated path to additional deals,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said in an interview. He has requested information from the White House and World Liberty about the company’s dealings, including with Binance, and the pardon push, and he previously introduced legislation to require more disclosure around clemency.
On social media, Zhao has responded dismissively to claims that Binance’s dealings with World Liberty are related to his pardon push. In May, he acknowledged that a venture capital firm used a digital coin developed by World Liberty to invest in Binance but argued that the currency deployed in such transactions is “mostly at the choice of the payer.”
Representatives for Binance and Zhao did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Pardoning Zhao and Binance would be a prime example of the sort of abuse that has plagued the nearly unfettered presidential clemency power, Blumenthal said. “It lets criminals off the hook to the personal profit of the president and his family and friends, and unleashes a convicted felon on a virtually unregulated crypto market.”
A transactional approach
Presidents have often drawn criticism for how they wield their clemency powers.
Rich, whose ex-wife was a big Democratic donor, was a fugitive from justice when President Bill Clinton pardoned him on his last day in office. President Joe Biden pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, after promising he would not. Trump’s pardoning of Milken, a financier once known as the “junk bond king,” during his first term came after a campaign by numerous people in the president’s circle, including his personal lawyer at the time, Rudy Giuliani.
Zhao’s clemency campaign reflects the transactional approach that Trump has taken to pardons and crypto. It has spawned a lucrative business in which crypto interests and white-collar felons have enlisted lobbyists and lawyers offering to use their connections to help clients gain access and redress.
Trump has granted clemency to donors, allies and crypto entrepreneurs, including Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the Silk Road drug marketplace, and three co-founders of the BitMEX crypto exchange who had pleaded guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act.
As he has doled out favors, Trump has blurred the line between his presidency and his family’s pursuit of lucrative crypto deals, announcing initiatives to stimulate the industry while backing away from enforcement efforts.
Binance has been a beneficiary of that new approach. Separate from the criminal case, the Securities and Exchange Commission had sued Binance and Zhao two years ago — a case that was pending until May, when the agency dropped it.
A pardon for Zhao could give Binance another significant boost by removing an obstacle to obtaining regulatory licenses in the U.S. market, where the company has been inactive since the guilty pleas.
Planning a reemergence
Founded in 2017, Binance quickly became the largest crypto trading platform in the world, processing as much as two-thirds of all transactions. Zhao, a Canadian citizen who goes by CZ, became the richest man in the industry — he is now worth an estimated $70 billion — and built a vast social media following of crypto investors who hung on his every word.
But he and Binance got to that position partly by breaking the law, U.S. authorities say.
In November 2023, amid a Biden administration crackdown on crypto, Binance and Zhao pleaded guilty to charges related to money laundering that allowed customers in countries under sanctions and terrorist groups like Hamas to gain access to the exchange. Binance agreed to pay $4.3 billion in fines and to adopt provisions to ensure it was complying with U.S. sanctions and exiting the U.S. market.
Zhao paid a $50 million fine and stepped down as Binance’s CEO. He was sentenced to four months in federal prison but was allowed to keep his shares in the company, which account for much of his personal wealth.
Even as he prepared to report to prison last year, Zhao was planning his reemergence. He read “quite a lot of books about people getting pardoned,” treating them like textbooks, he recalled on the crypto podcast released last month.
On the podcast, he also engaged in the type of flattery that appeals to Trump. Zhao applauded the administration for its approach to crypto. Like the president, he claimed that he, too, was targeted for political reasons. And he echoed the president’s pledge “to help the U.S. to become the capital of crypto.”
“No felon would mind a pardon,” Zhao wrote on social platform X in March.
Spearheading the efforts in Washington for Zhao and Binance is Teresa Goody Guillén, a former SEC lawyer who is now a partner at international law firm BakerHostetler.
Since February, according to lobbying filings, her firm has been paid at least $220,000 by Binance and Zhao to press the White House for “executive relief” and to lobby Congress, the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for the company on “issues relating to digital assets and cryptocurrency.”
Guillén also represents World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto business, and its co-founder Zach Witkoff, the son of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s longtime friend and peace envoy.
A threat to rivals
A pardon for Zhao would be a major boost to Binance. After the guilty plea, a series of states revoked money-transmitter licenses from the company’s U.S. affiliate, Binance.US. If Trump wiped away Zhao’s conviction, Binance and Binance.US would have an opening to apply for licenses and forge other commercial partnerships, according to legal experts.
A clean slate for Binance might also help improve the company’s reputation in the U.S. market, where some customers are instinctively skeptical of large foreign institutions.
“A lot of people just prefer U.S.-based companies when it comes to their private data,” said Dan Dolev, a financial technology analyst at Mizuho.
Privately, officials at some U.S. crypto firms have voiced frustration about the possibility of clemency for Zhao, noting that he is not American and that his company admitted to violating the law. If Binance breaks into the U.S. market, it would threaten the business of other exchanges.
“The substantive complaint they have made is this guy looked the other way on bad activity in a way that we did not, and it’s unfair to put us on an equal footing,” said Austin Campbell, the founder of a crypto consulting firm.
Last month, Zhao reposted an unsubstantiated claim on X that Coinbase, the largest U.S. exchange and a major Binance competitor, was trying to “take down Binance.”
Paul Grewal, a top Coinbase executive and a former federal judge, called that “pure misinformation” and said that his firm, which has its own well-funded lobbying operation, does not attack industry rivals.
Comments