Trump’s Pardon of His Crypto Pal Is a New Height of Corruption

After leaving prison, Zhao set about securing a presidential pardon so Binance’s owner could once again be Binance’s chief executive. To achieve this, Zhao hired a friend of Don Jr.’s named Ches McDowell, and also Teresa Goody Guillén, who happens also to represent Zach Witkoff, chief executive of World Liberty Financial and son to chief Mideast negotiator Steve Witkoff.

Meanwhile, Zhao and Binance made themselves useful to World Liberty Financial in multiple ways. Most significantly, that $2 billion UAE payment to Trump (specifically, to World Liberty Financial, in which the Trump family then owned a majority stake) was used to purchase a stablecoin, USD1, that in turn was invested in Binance.

Binance also supplied World Liberty Financial with a trading platform, PancakeSwap, that an August Wall Street Journal story called “The Recipe Behind the Trump Family’s Crypto Riches.” PancakeSwap doesn’t disclose its ownership, the Journal said, but former Binance employees told the Journal that Binance employees created PancakeSwap in-house and that it remained under Binance supervision. World Liberty Financial used PancakeSwap to increase the use of USD1. According to Bloomberg, Binance did more than that; it “wrote the basic code to power USD1.”