Donald Trump has said that he doesn’t know who Changpeng Zhao is despite pardoning the billionaire founder of cryptocurrency exchange Binance in October.
The US president was asked in a 60 Minutes interview that aired on Sunday why he pardoned Zhao, who is also known as “CZ”, for enabling money laundering despite him causing “significant harm to … national security” according to federal prosecutors.
“OK, are you ready? I don’t know who he is,” Trump told Norah O’Donnell, the host of CBS News’ 60 Minutes. Trump added that he did not remember meeting Zhao, had “no idea who he is” other than being told that the multibillionaire crypto boss was a victim of a “witch-hunt” by former president Joe Biden.
In 2023, Zhao pleaded guilty to charges that he broke rules designed to stop money laundering – after Binance allegedly failed to report suspicious transactions with organizations including Hamas and al-Qaida.
Zhao apologized, paid a $50m fine and had served nearly four months in prison before being pardoned by Trump, with the White House saying he was prosecuted due to Biden’s “war on cryptocurrency”.
Trump has said he wants the US to be a leader in cryptocurrency and Zhao, in thanking the president for his pardon, promised on X to “do everything we can to help make America the Capital of Crypto”.
Zhao has kept his stake in Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, which has had business dealings with World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency company owned by Trump’s family.
Trump’s failure to recall his pardon for Zhao comes amid an extensive Republican pursuit of the prior Biden administration for allegedly covering up the former president’s mental and physical decline as well as for his autopen signatures – which come from a machine that replicates a person’s signature and allows someone to more easily sign large quantities of documents.
On 28 October, the Republican-led House oversight committee released a report centering on Biden and autopen signatures. The Republican committee chair, James Comer of Kentucky, furthermore maintained that the use of autopen was “one of the biggest political scandals in US history”. Some Republicans want pardons signed by autopen under Biden to be voided.
It is unclear whether Trump’s pardon for Zhao was signed by autopen. Some of those pardoned by Trump for their role in the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol after the lost the 2020 White House election to Biden have also claimed that Trump did not sign their pardons at all.
