Trump Pardons Convicted Binance Founder
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Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the convicted founder of Binance, amid allegations of corruption and self-enrichment, sparking outrage and concerns about the abuse of presidential power.
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I am actually not sure that either the 'war on drugs' or a 'war on crypto' is a bad idea, but they do seem analogous.
He made a lot of money from the other criminal activity. That's what money laundering is: just because you're not directly trafficking children, for example, doesn't mean you have clean hands when you make significant profits from the people who are.
Crypto's problem is that when the law is updated to deal with these stunts, it's suddenly just a crappy version of the existing financial system.
It is both a reason not to buy drugs now (you're sponsoring all that other stuff) and a reason it's a ridiculous and immoral policy.
It is also on no way comparable to crypto.
The BSA is not a technicality and trying to reframe it as one is wild. It is to make sure that people that have a financial incentive to turn a blind eye to money laundering don't turn a blind eye to it. You don't need to be directly involved in the money laundering to be incentivized to let it happen.
It's certainly in a different category than speeding or jaywalking, but it's a lot closer to that than to the 150 years that Bernie Madoff got.
That also happened to a lot of big banks over and over again.
Three days ago one of the biggest was found guilty for helping Sudan’s government commit genocide by providing banking services that violated American sanctions [0]. Sounds worst.
Binance is a casino for millennial and gen Z and like casinos is used by criminal to launder money.
Should Changpeng Zhao be pardoned? I don't know, I don't care he is a small fish.
Should BNP CEO serves prison time? probably.
- [0] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bnp-paribas-shares-fall-us-17...
The use of whataboutism and the ‘calling out’ of whataboutisms are both mechanisms of narrative control.
Like the intolerance of intolerance there is discretion over what are acceptable intolerances. With whataboutism there is discretion over what are acceptable appeals to hypocrisy.
Whatsboutism is merely saying your appeal to hypocrisy is invalid. Which would hold more weight with me if the side saying it never made appeals to hypocrisy of their own. Otherwise they’re being hypocritical about making appeals to hypocrisy.
On the substance, I hate what Trump has done. I would not take the position that what Trump did is ok because of what Biden did.
The underlying failure of all of them, and why they are fallacies, is because the guilt of one side of an issue has nothing to do with the hypocrisy of the other. Thus, trying to pivot from the former to the latter is a distraction, rather than a genuine attempt to discuss the topic (which is the former).
> Which would hold more weight with me if the side saying it never made appeals to hypocrisy of their own.
"The side"? Dude, I'm a person, not a side, and you barely know anything about me, much less what I've done and do. The accusations of whataboutism weren't made by nebulous, ethereal concepts, they were made by people.
You can't pick and choose different behaviors of different people and lump them together as if they are the same person, then claim that the differing behaviors indicate some sort of hypocrisy or other conflict. What you're describing is diversity of thought among different people.
Even if you could, it's not even a good discussion, because then others could respond that your meta-criticism is itself hypocritical in the same way that you're responding to criticism by claiming that it is hypocritical. So you keep adding layers until the actual topic (the original criticism) is long forgotten. In fact, that is why whataboutism is used: its users don't want to focus on the original criticism.
My personal preference would be logical and factual discussions only but I accept that’s not the world we live in.
The deleterious effect of the additional layers is ameliorated by the nesting of information on HN, you don’t have to keep digging if you don’t want to.
Yes, whataboutism is both a rhetological fallacy and a form of "narrative control".
> A charge I made of both appeals to hypocrisy and appeals to whataboutism.
"Appeal to whataboutism" isn't a thing. It's just called "whataboutism", and since whataboutism and "appeal to hypocrisy" (seems synonymous with whataboutism) are both fallacies, pointing them out is just called "pointing out fallacies". Fallacies don't need any 'appeals' or arguments made against them, because they are already fallacious, that's why we call them fallacies.
And yes, pointing out fallacious arguments could be called "narrative control", too ;) So could be saying anything! After all, anyone saying anything is trying to "control the narrative" to include that thing. What a silly, needlessly conspiratorial neologism for a uselessly vague concept!
The introduction of whataboutism into the lexicon was to counter Russian appeals to hypocrisy. This was linked to Trump in an effort to discredit both. Those of us who have long memories do remember a time when pointing out the hypocrisy of the West was considered a valid thing to do. See the work of Noam Chomsky as an example.
Friends of ”I thought there would be no fact checking ”
Saying "so and so did it too and nothing happened" may be correct, but doesn't address the topic. If you're saying that, how does it apply to the topic (the Binance founder)?
Are you saying that you're ok with the other people getting away with it, and thus you're ok with this guy also getting away with it via this purchased pardon?
Or are you saying those other people should have been punished, and thus this pardon was wrong to sell?
I hate the whole fallacy callout stuff in general. God didn’t create them, half barely work, none work in every situation, and they’re just abused to death by people to shut down conversation in a shallow way.
In that scenario, are you saying that you're ok with the other people getting away with it, and thus you're ok with this guy also getting away with it via this purchased pardon?
Or are you saying those other people should have been punished, and thus this pardon was wrong to sell?
Without tying it back to the topic like that, the reply is only tangentially related, like replying "I go to a bank" to any topic that mentions or involves banks. Like, ok, great, at least it's not insulting posters, but not super constructive in discussing the topic (the Binance founder's crimes and pardon).
Regardless of what you think of the circumstances of the pardon, the prosecution was not related to fraud and was an unusual case by a DOJ that was recently embarrassed by FTX and was arguably symbolic in intent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMEJTORMVN4
(this video has a nice timeline of the related events, including the GPU for crypto "deal")
Did he already pay the $4.3 billion? That's a lot of money, even for the federal government.
The status of each isn’t something I can readily find.
Puts an even grosser spin on this incineration of the rule of law.
Penalties within plea deals likely have different rules but given a pardon is a higher rung of absolution I am horrified to wonder if he could clawback any personal financial penalties he has paid or even seek compensation.
Years ago people would have thought you were talking about the DRC, Haiti or Uzbekistan. Today's it's the USA.
Political corruption was not invented by Trump. We know. But that's really not the point at all.
Is that so? Please list the ways in which former presidents have violated the Emolument clause, profited directly from their office (i.e., issuing their own cryptocoin), and increased their family's net worth by billions while in office.
Either put up the facts, or stop with the "whataboutism" nonsense.
That is not even close to true. What other Presidents were "just as corrupt" and how?
What actions that have been taken could actually be prosecuted? For example, I would have to assume that the ballroom demolition and build-out is illegal, there were $0 appropriated from Congress for this, and it doesn't seem like direct donations would be legal either. They are donations to the government and Congress has to appropriate that money too.
NOTHING is going to happen while the Republicans control congress, period. What could be done when the next administration comes in? Not just about the ballroom, but the various other things like this pardon. What of these actions are prosecutable?
"Well, when the president does it ... that means that it is not illegal" -- SCOTUS (2024)
That leaves impeachment as the only legal remedy, which you've correctly identified as not a possibility with the current congress.
Many are. This one is not. The President has sweeping pardon powers.
The solution is to strike the final phrase in Article 2, Section 2, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution: “and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” [1].
There isn’t a place for one-man pardons in a republic. If the courts overreach, address it through legislation. (Even the imperium-obsessed Romans didn’t give their dictators, much less consuls, automatic pardon power. Caesar had to get special legislation to overrule the law.)
With Presidents of both parties having so recently abused pardons, we may be in a place where a wave could pass a Constitutional amendment at the federal level, allowing it to be punted to the states.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_Stat...
We need a way to vote for popular ideas via referendum at the federal level. That might get it through.
“The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution” [1].
No President. No courts. Partisanship may work to our advantage in a divided government. What you would need, however, to reach two thirds is some members of the President’s party signing on. That could happen if the President is taking a dump in the polls, and the opposition looks likely (but isn’t yet assured) to gain the Presidency next term.
> We need a way to vote for popular ideas via referendum at the federal level
We need a plebiscite institution. But that can be done at state level for Constitutonal amendment approval. What we don’t want is direct democracy proposing amendments. California is a modern example of why republics are more stable than pure democracies, for anyone who forgot about Athens.
speak for yourself. the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as evidenced by the current political climate in the US.
We're not a direct democracy. You can't find proof of a pudding in a taco bowl.
Direct democracies fail in self-reinforcing factionalism. "When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government...enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens." This has consistently happened across history, even in small direct democracies, it's one of the essential takeaways from the Athenian experiment [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Socrates
California is one state among 50. People using it as an example of some sort of government being bad are objectively in bad faith.
Please inform me how my state's citizen referendums are bad? We are about to have a vote on voter ID laws, which I do not approve of, but what's important is that the people who care are able to have their will made manifest, and it will actually go up for a vote.
Meanwhile nordic countries have vastly more direct democracies and don't have the problems you insist.
If you cannot make your argument without california, you do not have an argument, because california's shitty government predates democrat control, because it was always built as this crazy world where rich and connected people had control. California's government is built wrong, not because of democracy, but against it.
Straw man. Nobody claimed this.
> nordic countries have vastly more direct democracies and don't have the problems you insist
What are you referring to? “Finland has traditionally relied on the representative form of government, with very limited experience of the deployment of the referendum in national decision-making” [1]. And while Sweden and Norway have referenda, neither has binding referenda on demand or even a requirement for referendum to amend the constitution [2].
> if you cannot make your argument without california, you do not have an argument
California features the largest and most powerful direct-democratic institution, its referenda, in America. It’s going to come up when we discuss direct democracy.
That said, I have no idea how you reach my comment and conclude that California is not only the only argument I make against direct democracy, but even essential to it.
> california's shitty government predates democrat control
Are you mixing up direct democracy and rule by Democrats, the party?
[1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-24796-7_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_by_country
I think the opposite. That is exactly what we need. A lot of the problem we have come from the fact that the constitution speaks almost entirely in terms of what various government bodies do and provides no way for the people to directly override government actions they disagree with. This has led us to our current situation which is based on politicians exploiting loopholes (e.g., gerrymandering, stacking various judicial/administrative posts, manipulating voting laws, etc.) in order to preserve their position against potential electoral response.
In some cases these problems have been overcome or mitigated at the state level. . . via ballot measures. In California, for instance.
> California is a modern example of why republics are more stable than pure democracies, for anyone who forgot about Athens.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but from where I'm standing California looks a lot more sane and stable than the US as a whole.
This is total crap. Tale of Two Cities is set against the backdrop of Britain’s reforms, in contrast to the French Revolution. America has peacefully seen through Teddy Roosevelt’s trust busting, FDR’s New Deal and the Civil Rights Era, each peaceful restructurings of how our government works.
Revolutions transfer and consolidate power. Reforms broaden them. Those who miss this lesson of history and fall for glorified fictions of peasants’ revolts earn a consistent fate across millennia of human history.
Side note: strongly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6E4_Bcmscg&t=14s
Gerrymandering is only relevant for congressional house elections, it can't protect the senate and doesn't influence the presidency. Usually one party will take control of all three branches in a huge swing in power, the house is the just the first to flip usually because it is re-elected every 2 years.
Constitutional Convention is the abort button. It means giving a group of people basically limitless power to amend our Constitution, which in practice, means to do anything to the law. If we called one today, with most states in Republican hands [1], we’d be essentially handing complete control of our government—over and above the Constitution—to the GOP.
[1] https://www.ncsl.org/about-state-legislatures/state-partisan...
No, it doesn’t.
It gives a group of people basically limitless power to propose Amendments to the Constitution.
Any Amendments so proposed still require 3/4 of states to ratify them, either by votes of their legislature or by ratification conventions called in the states (at the option of Congress when calling the Convention at the request of states.)
Unless by "group of people" you mean not just the people in the national convention, but the people in the state legislatures or conventions, as well. But, at that point, you might as well say that by including an amendment process, the Constitution itself “gives a group of people basically limitless power to amend our Constitution”.
Sorry, I actually missed this. Thank you for clarifying. (I mixed it up with the New York State process, where the Convention's proposals go straight to popular ratification.)
The pardon system in particular really pisses me off. The argument that one rando at the top of the pyramid somehow magically knows better than the entire judicial system is such a load of horsecrap. For any injustice that the pardon system might be able to correct, it can and does just as easily introduce more injustices.
I understand it's debatably possible to prosecute the public corruption that motivated a pardon, even though the pardon act itself is unreviewable. I.e., the DoJ attempted a criminal bribery investigation of Bill Clinton's pardon of the donor Marc Rich,
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/us/us-is-beginning-crimin... ("U.S. is beginning criminal inquiry in pardon of Rich" (2001))
> "Some lawyers have said that proving such a case could be exceedingly difficult because bribery cases usually required the cooperation of one of the parties. Moreover, contributions to political parties or to Mr. Clinton's library foundation are legal, and the president's pardon authority is unreviewable."
I assume similar logic might apply to World Liberty Financial and Trump's CZ pardon.
The best opportunity for a major restructuring of the legal environment would bea Constitutional Convention, but because Republicans have pursued this as a strategic goal for a while, Democrats invested all their relevant energies in being against it rather than developing any kind of strategy of their own, guaranteeing that they would get rolled if one actually took place because they went in with wholly defensive mindset and no plan to win. The fundamental flaw of the modern Democratic party is that it sees itself as a vehicle for competent management of the status quo, not a force for implementation of its voters' political aspirations. Thus is pays lip service of what its supporters want but operates to dampen and delay those same supporters whenever it gets into office in the name of continuity and responsibility. It operates on a combination of political rent seeking and fundamental conflict aversion.
This is why I find myself increasingly impatient with self-styled moderates. Wanting to talk things out and compromise is good, but it only works when there is mutuality between counterparties. When the political opposition is indifferent to questions of truthfulness or corruption, moderation degrades into appeasement; moderates will sell out their own supporters in the name of peace and quiet, while giving away the strategic initiative over and over. The previous Trump administration engineered a mob overrunning Congress in an attempt to stay in power, and only failed because the Vice President declined to aid the scheme; a mistake the current one surely doesn't intend to repeat. The incoming administration spent a great deal of energy prosecuting every footsoldier they could find who set foot inside the Capitol, but shied away from going after the people who actually organized it. The results speak for themselves.
We need a reset.
I’m curious if any of the involved personell will ever be tried for that.
So my guess is that whatever Trump is doing now, he'll later argue was done as a president.
Second, should be convicted of anything, the best shot is if it's a state law violation. I'm going to bet everything I own that Trump will either pardon himself, all his cronies, and/or when the time comes, step down and have Vance pardon him. So with that all federal crimes become pardoned.
The supreme court has been very frank about this: The only, and I do mean the only mechanism is a successful impeachment. And even if Trump by some miracle is successfully impeached, we have no way of knowing how that will play out. The current supreme court majority are seemingly true believers of the unitary executive theory, so I'm guessing that with time - we'll just see Trump get more and more unchecked power. And since it's going to be done via the shadow docket, it'll likely be valid for Trump only.
I think for all intents and purposes - and I don't mean to sound defeatist when I'm saying this - people should just accept the fact that Trump will be untouchable for the rest of his life.
The President must first be impeached by both parts of Congress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_in_the_United_Stat...
The Senate runs a trial for the "high crimes" with the supreme court justice presiding. They can sentence a sitting president IIRC (or just remove him from office in which the DOJ can then prosecute normally).
Maybe it's funded by the $230M he's demanding from the Department of Justice?
For anyone interested, for the past 30 years, Republicans dominated for 22 years in total, while Democrats only 8.
- Trump’s most recent financial disclosure report reveals he made more than $57 million last year from World Liberty Financial
It's a vehicle to sell "access". The greed is only half of it.
The worst part is that they're selling access to foreign interests who pay them off. These people can't exactly show up with bags of gold to bribe King Sh*t Gibbon (yet), crypto is the next best thing.
> "Since Trump’s election, Binance has also been a key supporter of his family’s World Liberty Financial crypto venture, a business that has driven a huge leap in the president’s personal wealth."
"Huge leap" meaning $5 billion,
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-wlfi-world-liberty-financ... ("New crypto token boosts Trump family's wealth by $5 billion")
May I never live to see such a thing happen in the US, but it doesn't feel unlikely.
Is it just media nostalgia? Trump was on the TV shows they liked and so they trust him more?
I agree with you on the personality side, but I also think his overall fame from TV, real estate, etc. is just as big a factor to his political success.
Yeah, but I could do that. It’s pretty easy to, but I’m certain I wouldn’t be able to amass a cult of personality around myself.
Yet if I try, I’m pretty much universally considered an asshole, even from those who agree with me. There’s got to be more than just “he’s not afraid to say what we think”
That said, in his domain, Trump leads; he generates the headlines and everyone else follows them.
Is JD Vance generating headlines? Barely. Is anyone else generating headlines? Lets consider a few:
- Tim Walz: mainstream media tries to meme Walz into being a headline generator, but he isn't, and poses no serious contention
- Mumar Gaddafi, Sadam Hussein, Hitler, Mussolini, etc: i'm not sure there has been a dictator that did not generate headlines.
- Steve Jobs: strong headline generator, such that he could have run for president and likely won
- pewdiepie: for a spell he was generating headlines, but mainstream media had no solid editorial narrative for the guy (and his hundreds of millions of followers) which posed a social risk. The more they discussed him, the more risk of society penduluming in some unpredictable way either by martyring him or amplifying his politics, so they chose the "ignore him and let whither" as a strategy which seemed to work, as he has drifted into Japan and been off-the-radar
- Luigi Mangione: a nonzero number of liberal voters would decry Trump in one breath and cast a vote for Mangione to be a politician despite evidence he is a cold-blooded murderer. This probably won't change much after conviction.
In conclusion, intelligent people are forced to lament the state of humanity in which leadership is game-ified so easily and yet so difficult to achieve. "How does one consistently generate headlines" is a difficult question to answer and seems to be one of the core essence of humanity. And, as described above, the origin of people's feelings of why a given person is successful.
It's a cult of personality that has taken over people's lives.
If you look at a slew of the recent pardons, the beneficiaries had already pleaded guilty. In those cases, the pardons should be ineligible. I think the most a President could do - should be - give defendants the ability to appeal the case to a new judge or jury. It's wrong and should be corrected! Added it to my todo list
Financially and personally, it's what they do to pressure you into submission. It happens from criminal cases all the way down to fucking family court. It's absurd and it's broken.
I truly believe that almost every single attorney should have to lose sleep at night over how their actions impact others.
Judges and juries are at least superficially removed from that sort of corrupt incentive system.
It is clear that they don't only do that, as that has not been their principal (or even a common) use for most of the history of the pardon power.
It is equally clear, however, that they do allow that; the check on that, like on most discretionary Presidential powers, is the Congressional power of impeachment; obviously, that is not a meaningful constraint when the Congress and the President are aligned on abuses, but the entire point of having separately elected bodies is to make it less likely that things that the public would see as abuses are supported by both political branches simultaneously. (Obviously, the fact that one whole house of Congress and 1/3 of the other are elected at the same time as the President, and that the weighting of the electoral college for the President are a blend of the apportionment to the House and Senate makes those elections less independent than one might want, even before considering the way the electoral structure contributors to partisan duopoly, though.)
Won’t somebody please think of the ~~children~~ turkeys?!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Thanksgiving_Turkey_P...
Joking aside, Wikipedia does have a history of it. It goes way back, way before the USA was even a thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_pardons_in_the_United_...
Because of the impossibility of law written in advance perfectly covering all cases and to provide a mechanism for correction of overpunishment that cannot be effectively anticipated in crafting general law. (That's more the reason why the traditional power of chief executives seen in state governments and the British government they were all more or less modeled on was retained when a federal executive was created; the US Constitution was very much not create ex nihilo in a historical vaccuum.)
> Besides corruption, bias, or self-interest, nothing else can come out of it.
Every viewpoint is "bias" relative to every other viewpoint, so that piece is a nullity, but it is certain;y not the case that corruption and self-interest are the only impacts or motivations for applying the pardon power.
Which isn't to say that there aren't arguments for putting more guardrails around the application of the power by the executive (or perhaps just radically changing the nature of the federal executive, to improve the application of its powers generally and not just the pardon power).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMEJTORMVN4
QZ: <https://qz.com/trump-pardon-binance-changpeng-zhao>
Reuters: <https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-pardons-convicted-bin...>
The Guardian: <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/23/binance-t...>
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