Op-Ed
The Pardon and the Payout: How a Binance Deal and a Presidential Mercy Collided
Trump pardoned the Binance founder whose exchange helped pump the family's stablecoin and a $2 billion Gulf deal — the most naked conflict of the year.
By Curtis Hale, Editor at Large
Published
Of all the Trump family's 2025-2026 business entanglements, one stands above the rest for sheer brazenness: the president pardoned a convicted crypto mogul whose company had been busy boosting the president's family fortune.
In October 2025, Trump pardoned Changpeng "CZ" Zhao, the founder of Binance who had pleaded guilty to enabling money laundering as part of a $4.3 billion settlement with the Justice Department. Per NPR, the pardon went to a man whose exchange had actively supported the Trump family's crypto business. Read that sentence slowly. It contains the whole rot.
Follow the money that makes it damning. World Liberty Financial — the Trump family venture that routes 75% of token proceeds to a Trump entity — launched a stablecoin called USD1. Then, per The Block, an Abu Dhabi state-backed fund, MGX, announced it would use $2 billion of that very stablecoin to close a record investment into Binance. ABC News confirmed the Trump family crypto venture was tapped for the $2 billion Emirati-backed deal. So the family's coin got a $2 billion vote of confidence from a Gulf sovereign fund, routed through Binance — and months later, the man who built Binance walked free by presidential decree.
The defenders' script is predictable and has already been read aloud. Binance's leadership denied that the firm boosted the venture to grease a pardon. And Trump himself, per CNBC, told 60 Minutes he didn't even know CZ — a remarkable claim about a man he had just pardoned. But denials don't dissolve the timeline. Forbes documented how MGX's choice of the brand-new USD1 for a $2 billion deal defied normal caution, elevating an untested Trump-family token onto the world stage.
Line the events up: a foreign fund pumps $2 billion through the family stablecoin into Binance; Binance elevates that stablecoin's trading status; the president pardons Binance's founder. Even if no one ever wrote "quid pro quo" in an email, this is what the appearance of corruption looks like in its purest form — and appearances are precisely what pardon power was never supposed to serve.
Senator Elizabeth Warren called the pardon exactly what it looks like: corruption. She's not wrong to reach for the word. A pardon is the most personal, least reviewable power a president holds. Using it — or appearing to use it — to reward a business partner of your own family converts a constitutional act of mercy into a favor bank.
This is the story that ties every other Trump-family venture together. It's not just that the family profits. It's that the machinery of the state — pardons, regulators, diplomacy with the Gulf — keeps bending in the direction of the family's balance sheet. CZ got his freedom. The family got its $2 billion validation. And the American public got a case study in how a presidency can be run like a settlement negotiation, with the pardon pen as the closing signature.
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