In defending his Oct. 23 pardon of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, President Donald Trump claimed that Zhao was the victim of a Biden administration “witch hunt.” The billionaire executive known as “CZ” pleaded guilty to allowing money-laundering through his cryptocurrency company. He was fined $50 million and served a four-month sentence in a low-security prison and halfway house.

Trump’s comments came during a Nov. 2 interview on CBS News’ “60 Minutes.” Trump said, “I don’t know who he is” and “I know nothing about the guy,” though Zhao’s company assisted in business dealings that benefit World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture run by Trump’s sons, Eric and Donald Jr.

Former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao arrives at federal court in Seattle, Washington, on April 30, 2024. Photo by Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a Nov. 4 briefing that the president meant “he does not have a personal relationship with” Zhao. Leavitt also claimed that the judge who heard the case said the sentencing sought by the Biden administration was “egregious and went too far. And so the president is correcting that wrong.”

Prosecutors in the case had sought a three-year sentence for Zhao, while the defense asked for probation with no jail time. The judge agreed that Zhao’s action didn’t warrant a three-year term, but sentenced him to four months in prison. Trump’s pardon did not change the prison sentence, which ended in September 2024.

Experts have concerns about Trump’s pardon of Zhao and the appearance of a conflict of interest on the president’s part.

Here, we’ll look at the basis of the Zhao case, Trump’s claims about the Biden administration’s prosecution of Zhao and concerns about Trump’s pardon.

Guilty Pleas from Binance and Its CEO

During Trump’s “60 Minutes” interview, CBS News correspondent Norah O’Donnell asked why he pardoned Zhao.

Trump said, “Okay, are you ready? I don’t know who he is. I know he got a four-month sentence or something like that. And I heard it was a Biden witch hunt.” 

“But this man was treated really badly by the Biden administration,” Trump said. “And he was given a jail term. He’s highly respected. He’s a very successful guy. They sent him to jail and they really set him up. That’s my opinion. I was told about it. … I have no idea who he is. I was told that he was a victim, just like I was and just like many other people, of a vicious, horrible group of people in the Biden administration.”

Whether Zhao was “treated really badly,” as Trump claimed, is a matter of opinion. We’ll provide the facts surrounding his case and sentencing.

The government’s case against Zhao was widely covered in 2023, and the Department of Justice began investigating Binance’s activities in 2018, during Trump’s first term as president.

After the yearslong investigation and a settlement with the government, the Department of Justice announced in a press release on Nov. 21, 2023, that Binance Holdings Limited, “the entity that operates the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange,” pleaded guilty to “violations related to the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), failure to register as a money transmitting business, and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).”

The company agreed to pay more than $4.3 billion in penalties as a result of the investigation, “one of the largest corporate penalties in U.S. history,” then-Attorney General Merrick Garland said.

Zhao, a Canadian national born in China, pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program, in violation of the Bank Security Act, and was forced to resign as CEO of Binance.

In a Nov. 21, 2023, post on X, Zhao wrote: “Today, I stepped down as CEO of Binance. Admittedly, it was not easy to let go emotionally. But I know it is the right thing to do. I made mistakes, and I must take responsibility.”

“Because Changpeng Zhao knowingly operated a financial platform without basic anti-money laundering safeguards, the company caused illegal transactions between U.S. users and users in sanctioned jurisdictions such as Iran, Cuba, Syria, and Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine – transactions for which Binance profited with significant fees,” said Tessa Gorman, acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington. 

“Binance turned a blind eye to its legal obligations in the pursuit of profit. Its willful failures allowed money to flow to terrorists, cybercriminals, and child abusers through its platform,” Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen said.

The press release also said Binance’s employees recognized that the company “did not have protocols to flag or report transactions for money laundering risks, which employees recognized would attract criminals to the exchange.” A company employee wrote, “we need a banner ‘is washing drug money too hard these days — come to binance we got cake for you.’”

“Zhao told employees it was ‘better to ask for forgiveness than permission,’ and prioritized Binance’s growth over compliance with U.S. law,” the DOJ release also said.

Zhao’s Sentence and Treatment

Following Zhao’s guilty plea, he was allowed to travel throughout the U.S. and temporarily return to his family and home in Dubai.

In a court filing at Zhao’s sentencing five months after his plea, federal prosecutors wrote that he deserved a prison sentence of three years for violating U.S. laws “on an unprecedented scale.” Zhao and his company “put U.S. customers, the U.S. financial system, and U.S. national security at risk,” the prosecutors wrote.

Federal guidelines for Zhao’s crime called for a sentence of 12 to 18 months. Zhao’s lawyers sought probation and no jail time.

Judge Richard A. Jones, who heard the case in U.S. District Court in Seattle, told Zhao, “Your conduct does not warrant a 36-month sentence,” the New York Times reported. Jones sentenced Zhao to four months in prison and ordered him to pay a personal fine of $50 million. Zhao had an estimated personal worth of $33 billion to $43 billion at the time.

Zhao served his sentence in 2024 in a low-security prison in California and a halfway house in Long Beach “where, according to a prison official, he would have been able to make supervised excursions and even go to movies,” Fortune reported.

Though Zhao’s settlement with the Justice Department included his resignation from Binance, Trump’s pardon will likely allow him to return to the company, analysts said.

The Trump Family and Binance

The Trump family’s business interests have veered in recent years from real estate to the cryptocurrency industry, with Trump’s sons pursuing various crypto ventures under the company name World Liberty Financial, including business tied to Binance, which was founded by Zhao in 2017.

Bloomberg reported in July that Binance assisted in creating the initial code that enabled the issuance of USD1, a stablecoin offered for investment by World Liberty Financial. (A stablecoin is a type of digital currency pegged to a traditional currency, such as a U.S. dollar.) That enabled USD1 to be used by MGX, a United Arab Emirates firm, for a $2 billion investment in Binance in May. The investment could channel millions annually from interest-bearing assets to the Trump family, according to Bloomberg.

Days after Trump pardoned Zhao in October, Binance began promoting sales of USD1 on its U.S. site, making the digital coin more accessible to U.S. investors and more likely to increase in value, USA Today reported.

The Trump administration has said the president has no conflicts of interest in these dealings. Leavitt said in a statement: “Neither the president nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest.”

During the “60 Minutes” interview, Trump said, “My sons are involved in crypto much more than I — me. I — I know very little about it, other than one thing. It’s a huge industry.”

Trump’s Pardon of Zhao

In the “60 Minutes” interview, O’Donnell asked Trump if he was “concerned about the appearance of corruption” in pardoning Zhao.

Trump replied: “I can’t say, because — I can’t say — I’m not concerned. I don’t — I’d rather not have you ask the question. But I let you ask it.”

Some business and legal experts have expressed concerns.

Eswar Prasad, an economics professor at Cornell University and a crypto skeptic, told the New York Times, “There is little justification for this pardon and highlights how far this administration will go to promote the cryptocurrency industry.”

“It is not unusual for businesspeople to be among those who occasionally receive presidential grants of clemency,” Dan Kobil, a professor with expertise in executive clemency at Capital University Law School, told us in an email. “For example, President Biden at the end of his term commuted the sentence of convicted Illinois fraudster Eric Bloom who stole more than $665 million from investors. He was included among 1,500 commutations of non-violent federal prisoners who had been placed on home release during the COVID-19 epidemic. Biden’s commutation did not erase Bloom’s conviction or remove its collateral consequences, but it did reduce Bloom’s sentence by several years.”

“Still, there are several unusual aspects to Trump’s pardon of Zhao,” Kobil said. “First, it was a pardon, the most sweeping form of clemency which entirely erases the consequences of the conviction, almost as if the crime never occurred. Another unusual aspect of the pardon was its timing: the pardon was issued very shortly after Zhao had completed his prison sentence, and before he had established a significant record of ongoing lawful behavior.”

“The pardon also was unusual,” Kobil said, because it was issued after the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump family’s crypto venture was aided by “a partnership with an under-the-radar trading platform” called PancakeSwap that is administered by Binance. The ties between Binance and the Trump family make the pardon “look like a reward,” Kobil said. 

A group of seven senators wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi seeking information about Trump’s pardon of Zhao. “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,” they wrote.

A group of 28 Democratic House members also sent a letter to Bondi opposing Trump’s pardon of Zhao and highlighting concerns about “potential conflicts of interest.”

Addressing questions about Zhao’s pardon at the Nov. 4 White House briefing, Leavitt said, “There’s a whole team of qualified lawyers who look at every single pardon request that, ultimately, make their way up to the president of the United States. He’s the ultimate final decision-maker. And he was very clear when he came into office that he was most interested in looking at pardoning individuals who were abused, and used by the Biden Department of Justice, and were over-prosecuted by a weaponized DOJ.”

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Over the course of the six-week shutdown — which may be ending soon — President Donald Trump has repeatedly made the false claim that Democrats “want $1.5 trillion for health care for illegal aliens.”

The $1.5 trillion is the total estimated cost over 10 years of the spending bill that Democrats had put forward at the beginning of the shutdown. As we’ve written before, Democrats have sought an extension of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies and a repeal of some health care measures concerning Medicaid in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, among other funding.

Democrats also want to restore health care for “lawfully present” immigrants affected by the OBBBA.

Lawmakers are closing in on a deal to end the government shutdown, with the Senate passing a procedural vote on Nov. 9. The shutdown began on Oct. 1.

Trump has made the claim about the $1.5 trillion many times. For example, Trump said in an Oct. 19 interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, “They want $1.5 trillion for health care for illegal aliens that come into our country.” In his Nov. 2 “60 Minutes” interview, the president said the money would go to “prisoners and drug dealers” and people “that came into our country from mental institutions.” On Nov. 7, he again said, “We’re not going to give $1.5 trillion to people that came into our country illegally.”

That claim is “totally false,” Leonardo Cuello, a research professor at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy’s Center for Children and Families, told us in a phone interview.

“The legislation being advocated by Democrats as requisite to reopen government would be around $1.5 trillion over 10 years but the large majority of that is not due to immigration, especially ‘illegal aliens,'” Kent Smetters, faculty director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model, told us in an email.

“In fact,” he said, “the current spending on undocumented workers every year is less than $5 billion, mostly due to emergency-only care that is not reimbursed and, therefore, absorbed by Medicaid. These services cover labor and delivery, trauma, and other urgent conditions.”

Under federal law, hospitals are required to provide emergency medical care to people regardless of their immigration status.

Before Trump started making the false claim in mid-October that Democrats wanted to spend $1.5 trillion on health care for “illegal aliens,” the White House had released a memo claiming that the Democrats’ proposal “would result in nearly $200 billion spent on healthcare for illegal immigrants and other non-citizens over the next decade.”

That’s misleading, but the reference to “non-citizens” is defensible.

That claim is mostly based on the Democratic proposal to repeal portions of the OBBBA — recently rebranded by the Trump administration as the Working Families Tax Cut Act. Some of those provisions pertain to immigrants who are “lawfully present.” The term refers to noncitizens with “qualified” immigration status that makes them eligible for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, as the health policy organization KFF explains. This includes lawful permanent residents, refugees, parolees, and individuals granted asylum, among others.

Julia Gelatt, associate director of U.S. immigration policy at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, told us for an earlier article that the term “lawfully present” is “not a category fully defined in immigration law” and is “a politically contested categorization.”

The OBBBA changed the criteria for Medicaid enrollment to exclude those granted asylum and parolees. 

But those provisions don’t affect access for people illegally in the country, Cuello told us. Immigrants living in the country illegally are prohibited by law from receiving federally funded comprehensive coverage.

Whether the health care changes in the OBBBA are repealed or not, “it makes no change to coverage of undocumented immigrants,” Cuello said.

The OBBBA also limited the federal matching funds used to reimburse hospitals that provide emergency care to immigrants. Democrats proposed repealing that. This provision “is at least related to undocumented immigrants, but it does not actually impact coverage,” Cuello explained in an Oct. 2 blog post. “[H]ospitals must still provide the health care, and states must still pay them for the health care, it’s just that the federal government will pay a smaller share of the cost.”

When we asked the White House for evidence to support the president’s claim, spokeswoman Abigail Jackson first sent links to the memo tallying almost $200 billion — $193 billion — for “healthcare for illegal immigrants and other non-citizens.”

When asked about the president’s claim of $1.5 trillion, though, Jackson said, “President Trump is right — rather than support the bipartisan CR they supported 13 times during the Biden Administration, Democrats proposed a $1.5 trillion CR to provide free health care to illegal aliens. This absurdly partisan ploy is why Americans are now missing out on paychecks and benefits. Democrats should reopen the government immediately.”

But, as we said, the $1.5 trillion is the 10-year total of the entire funding bill.

“The original [White House] value of $193 billion is certainly reasonable as it applies to legal immigration,” Smetters said. “The $1.5 trillion is incorrect as applied to any type of immigration, legal or not.”

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