Several Senate Democrats launched a probe into President Donald Trump’s controversial pardon of crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao, a major Trump ally who was convicted in 2023 for money laundering and sentenced to four months in prison.
Zhao, the 21st-richest person on Earth, was found to have failed to implement basic anti-money-laundering security measures for Binance – his cryptocurrency exchange platform – and was found to have facilitated billions of dollars' worth of transactions tied to child-sex-abuse material and drug trafficking. However, his business helped enrich the Trump family, raising concerns among critics that his pardon gave the appearance of fraud.
“The pardon – which signals to cryptocurrency executives and other white collar criminals that they can commit crimes with impunity, so long as they enrich President Trump enough – seems likely to encourage, rather than discourage, criminal activity,” wrote several Democratic senators in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, obtained and reported Tuesday on by Semafor.
The letter was signed by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Mazie Hirono (D-HI) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and is expected to be filed in the Senate Tuesday for a vote of unanimous consent.
“If Senate Republicans don’t let us fix this, then [they] own this lawlessness,” Warren said, according to Semafor.
Zhao’s pardon has drawn scrutiny even from prominent conservatives, including pro-Trump billionaire Joe Lonsdale, who said last week that Trump had been “terribly advised on this.”
Binance was a key supporter of World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency business with ties to the Trump family, which has earned more than $1 billion in profit through cryptocurrency ventures, according to a report from The Financial Times.
The White House has defended Trump’s pardon of Zhao, labelling the cryptocurrency billionaire as a victim of the Biden administration, with White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt saying Zhao had been “prosecuted” under the Biden administration as part of its “war on cryptocurrency.”