Back when President Donald J. Trump’s second inauguration rolled around, his personal finances were not looking good. The state of New York had declared him a fraud, and fined him $364 million dollars, and the interest was compounding by the minute. There was even talk of Trump Tower getting seized and turned into the Letitia James Center For Kicking Trump Hard In The Nuts!
But what a difference 10 months makes. The president and his family have now made more than $4.5 BILLION dollars since January, thanks to shilling their branded crypto products on an online trading platform called PancakeSwap, administered by the exchange platform Binance.
Step Right Up, Suckers! Trump’s Got A Fourth Crypto-Grifto!
And what do you know, Trump has just pardoned Binance’s majority owner and founder, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao!
Zhao had pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating the Bank Secrecy Act, for not complying with US anti-money-laundering transaction-reporting requirements. Binance’s safeguards were so lax that countries under sanctions and terrorist groups like Hamas, Al Qaeda, and the Islamic State were able to move money on the platform.
For that, Zhao served four months in federal prison, agreed to pay one of the largest fines in history ($4.3 billion), and was barred from doing business in the US. And Zhao stepped down as CEO of Binance, though he retained his majority ownership, and is now still worth more than $85 billion.
But then Trump got elected, and Zhao hired lobbyist Ches McDowell, a 35-year-old from North Carolina who’d never worked for Congress, the White House, or any other Washington institution. But in 2016 he won an auction to go on a bear hunt with Don Junior, and the two have been friends ever since!
And LOL, the elder Trump got real flustered when Kaitlin Collins asked him about Zhao’s pardon. Trump has no idea who that guy is! Something something Biden autopen.
“A lot of people say he was not guilty of anything!” Well, one person said he was guilty, Zhao himself. When he pleaded guilty! “He was recommended to me by some people.” Hey, is this illegal? This feels illegal.
The family Binance ties run deep. Zach Witkoff, the son of Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, Russia and wherever, Steve Witkoff, is also involved with the Trump-branded World Liberty Financial token that the Trump family gets 60 percent of. Back in March, Zach partnered with Eric Trump to create a stablecoin called USD1, which the Trumps and Witkoffs profit off of every time it trades. And those coins were used for a $2 billion deal between MGX, the Abu Dhabi-state backed investment company, to take a stake in Binance.
Trump Just Gave Away The AI Store To His Sheikh Friends But Don’t Worry, He’s Making A Killing
But Hunter Biden! And Trump gifted the Middle East a giant data center full of AI chips, too.
Zhao is one of a passel of crypto-scammers Trump has pardoned since he got himself back in office, starting out with the daddy of them all, Ross Ulbricht, former owner and operator of Silk Road, the largest online drug market of all time.
Trump’s Pardoned Favorite Drug Dealer Ross Ulbricht, Wonksplained
So much for the death penalty for drug dealers! At least the government did not give Ulbricht back his $18 billion worth of seized Bitcoins, and as far as anyone knows they’re still sitting in the Federal Reserve. Maybe Trump should pay down the national debt with them!
Here Comes The Old Republican Bitcoin Pump And Dump!
And then in March, the president pardoned three co-founders of the crypto exchange BitMEX, Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo, and Samuel Reed, who had also previously pleaded guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act.
And then there’s one of WLF’s biggest investors, Chinese-born crypto entrepreneur Yuchen “Justin” Sun, AKA that guy who bought that $6.2 million duct-taped banana object d’art. He had been indicted for fraud, for manipulating the secondary market with wash trading, and for making backdoor deals with celebrities like Lindsay Lohan and Jake Paul to Tweet endorsements of his electric magic beans without disclosing they’d been paid to do that.
Seems like Lindsay Lohan comes up around here a lot in all kinds of assorted contexts, it’s sort of weird.
ANYWAY, after Sun invested in the Trumps’ scammy token, the DOJ graciously dropped his charges. Other partners in WLF are similarly shady, including Zachary Folkman, who used to run a company Date Hotter Girls LLC, that posted seminars on YouTube on how to pick up women called “Date Hotter Girls: Better, Faster & Easier,” and Chase Herro, who appeared at paid seminars with Jordan Belfort, that penny-stock scammer who was played by Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street.
Step Right Up, Suckers, Trump’s Got A Crypto-Something!
Trump Just Got $18 Million From A Chinese Crypto Scammer, But LOOK, BANANA!!
It’s almost like the Trump family really needs a team of dodgy individuals to help them launder some money!
And crypto is good for more than just money laundering. Like profiting off of chaos.
And crypto is good for pumping and dumping! As it happens, the engineers of $MELANIA coin, executives of the Meteora cryptocurrency exchange platform, are now being sued and accused of that very thing, a rug pull, the ol’ Hawk Tua. (Melania, of course, says she knew nothing about it.)
The Securities and Exchange Commission and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau exist to try to prevent investors from getting scammed with just such things. But Republicans and cryptobros have long been intent on continuing to regulate crypto like a commodity, instead of an investment or currency. Which is to say, not regulate it much at all. And soon after the family stablecoin was launched, Trump signed the Guiding and Establishing Innovation for US Stablecoins Act (GENIUS, duh) requiring stablecoins be backed by US dollars or equivalent liquid assets. Which immediately grew the market for the Witkoff/Trump stablecoin, holy conflict of interest elevendy ways to Sunday! The Act even lets tech companies mint their own stablecoins, and lets companies issue their coins from offshore, so they do not have to comply with US laws around terrorist financing and money laundering.
MEMECOINS AND TOKENS EXPLAINER!:
If You’re Not Buying Memecoins Of Droopy Balls, Are You Even Alive?
Crypto wallets’ owners are anonymous, though their trades are public. So we will probably never know, for instance, who made $27 million right before Trump’s China tariff meltdown the other week! And we’ll never find out who may be bribing Trump and the boys.
And we will probably never find out the full extent of the grifting that goes on under this administration. Though we can safely say, grift at a scope and scale the likes of which the world has never seen.
[Wall Street Journal gift link: “The Recipe Behind the Trump Family’s Crypto Riches: PancakeSwap” / Wall Street Journal gift link: “Trump Family Has Held Deal Talks With Binance Following Crypto Exchange’s Guilty Plea” / Wall Street Journal gift link, “Inside Binance’s Guilty Plea and the Biggest Fine in Crypto History” / The Times (UK)]
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