Yes, yes, Bill Otis. Pardoning CZ surely smells like Trump financing terrorists — and taking an open, and notorious… bribe. From a partner in his still-emerging family crypto- empire. Damnation.
But these dipsh!ts voted for exactly this. They absolutely well knew that this was the essence — of his immutable nature. A… criminal nature. A career criminal’s… mind.
This is what Tangerine 1.0 looked like, quite clearly — as well.
Even so, it is nice that these doofuses now recognize they screwed their own patriotic principles with their 2016, and 2020 and 2024 votes:
…As the National Review put it, the President’s pardon last week of Changpeng Zhao, a Chinese-born crypto currency billionaire and founder of a crypto exchange called Binance, “is stunning in its shamelessness, recklessness, and moral inversion.”
Binance is under U.S. government monitoring because of its criminal violations of federal money-laundering laws. In 2023, Binance’s founder and now Trump business partner, Zhao, pleaded guilty to a felony money-laundering charge that put him in prison for four months. Zhao is just one of, as NR put it, “the darkly intriguing figures circling in and around the Trump family crypto venture.”
The pardon arrived (again as NR notes)(emphasis added):
…following months of efforts by Zhao to boost the Trump family’s own crypto company.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump had “exercised his constitutional authority by issuing a pardon for Mr. Zhao, who was prosecuted by the Biden Administration in their war on cryptocurrency.” She added: “The Biden Administration’s war on crypto is over.”
Yes, the pardon is within Trump’s authority, but to say one has the authority to do X is hardly to say that one should do X or is even vaguely justified in doing it, all of which depends on the merits of the particular case; and even if on the merits X should be done, that decision — if normal ethics count at all — should be made by someone without a colorable financial interest in the outcome.
Is there any adult who doesn’t know this?
The prosecutors who brought the charges and negotiated the plea deal would argue that they weren’t fighting a war on crypto, they were fighting a war on fraud and a company that…embraced a wildly lucrative role conducting financial transactions among criminals, terrorist groups, and hostile states.
This is what Binance was up to, among other things — a list so astonishing it makes you wonder how Zhao got away with just a four month sentence:
As a [money services business], Binance was required to report suspicious transactions to FinCEN through suspicious activity reports (SARs). FinCEN’s investigation revealed that Binance’s former Chief Compliance Officer told personnel that the CEO’s policy was to not report such activity, and Binance never filed a single SAR with FinCEN. Binance willfully failed to report well over 100,000 suspicious transactions that it processed as a result of its deficient controls, including transactions involving terrorist organizations, ransomware, child sexual exploitation material, frauds, and scams.
I know next to nothing about crypto currency, and it’s been years since I was in the US Attorney’s Office. Still, even back in my day, it was well known the crypto currency was the chosen means of exchange of swindlers of every sort….
Hmmm. Are you two — or five, including the Powerline boys — any less culpable, than Trump himself personally, is — simply because after you’ve all gotten what you voted for… only now, do you denounce his lawless nature?
I. Think. Not.
Out.
Powerline Lies... 