Donald Trump said he did not know who Changpeng Zhao was, despite pardoning the billionaire founder of cryptocurrency exchange Binance in October.
In an interview broadcast on Sunday by 60 Minutes, the US president was asked why he pardoned Zhao, also known as “CZ”, for enabling money laundering when he had caused “significant harm to… national security”, according to federal prosecutors.
“OK, are you ready? I don’t know who he is,” Trump told CBS News 60 Minutes host Norah O’Donnell. Trump added that he did not remember meeting Zhao and had “no idea who he was” other than learning that the multi-billion dollar crypto boss had been the victim of a “witch hunt” by former President Joe Biden.
In 2023, Zhao pleaded guilty to charges that he broke rules intended to stop money laundering – after Binance allegedly failed to report suspicious transactions with organizations including Hamas and Al-Qaeda.
Zhao apologized, paid a $50 million fine and served nearly four months in prison before being pardoned by Trump, with the White House saying he was prosecuted because of Biden’s “war on cryptocurrency.”
Trump said he wanted the United States 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 crypto capital.”
Zhao retained his stake in Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, which had business dealings with World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency company owned by the Trump family.
Trump’s failure to recall his pardon for Zhao comes amid a broad Republican lawsuit against the previous Biden administration for allegedly covering up the former president’s mental and physical decline as well as its auto-open signatures — which come from a machine that replicates a person’s signature and makes it easier for someone to sign large quantities of documents.
On October 28, the Republican-led House Oversight Committee released a report focused on Biden and the automatic opening of signatures. Republican committee chairman James Comer of Kentucky further argued that the use of autopen was “one of the greatest political scandals in American history.” Some Republicans want the pardons signed by Autopen under Biden to be reversed.
It is unclear whether Trump’s pardon for Zhao was signed by autopen. Some of the people pardoned by Trump for their role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol following the 2020 White House election loss to Biden also claimed that Trump did not sign their pardons at all.
