Zhao's Binance Aided Trump Family Crypto Venture Before Pardon

Posted2 months agoActive2 months ago

zerosizedweasle

61 points

13 comments

bloomberg.comOtherstory

controversialnegative

Debate

80/100

CryptocurrencyBinanceTrump Administration

Key topics

Cryptocurrency

Binance

Trump Administration

The article reports that Binance's founder, Zhao, aided a Trump family crypto venture before receiving a pardon, sparking controversy and criticism in the HN discussion.

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01Story posted
Oct 27, 2025 at 11:30 AM EDT
2 months ago
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Oct 30, 2025 at 2:12 AM EDT
2 months ago
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Discussion (13 comments)

Showing 13 comments

pwlm

2 months ago

5 replies

CZ pleaded guilty to violating US law by failing to run an appropriate anti-money laundering program.

The administration says CZ wasn't guilty and was persecuted by the previous administration. https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1981457002921677059

What really happened here?

pants2

2 months ago

1 reply

It's difficult to defend CZ/Binance from a guilty verdict. I'll go purely on exact quotes that the US investigation dug up from Binance internal comms:

> As one compliance employee wrote, “we need a banner ‘is washing drug money too hard these days - come to binance we got cake for you.’”

“our stance is [n]ot to openly do business with Iran due to sanctions. … I understand that we still support [I]ranian customers but that has to be done non-openly.”

“we are servicing [them] but non-public. … [the CEO of Binance] knows also. And allows it.”

Message from the CCO to the CEO: “we currently have users from sanction[ed] countries … if fincen or ofac has concrete evidence we have sanction[ed] users, they might try to investigate or blow it up big on worldstage.”

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/binance-and-ceo-plea...

pants2

2 months ago

1 reply

HOWEVER, if I had to steelman the "unfairly persecuted" argument, I'd say that the $4B fine + prison sentence was much harsher than what the DOJ did to traditional banks engaging in the same thing. HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered, JPMorgan, and others have all been found guilty of similar AML violations, possibly for more serious offences, and NOBODY went to prison, and the fines were much smaller.

So while the fines/jail were much harsher on Binance than other tradfi offenders, I think most would have rather seen someone from HSBC go to jail for laundering cartel money, vs CZ getting pardoned.

But if the 'ol "slap on the wrist" treated crypto similarly to tradfi, CZ would not have gone to jail - i.e. Binance was unfairly targeted by the previous administration.

SvenL

2 months ago

Interesting, do you have sources for the cases with the traditional banks?

Gigachad

2 months ago

Financial crime is legal in the US now as long as you share some with the president.

verdverm

2 months ago

Here's a video that goes through the sequence of events

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMEJTORMVN4

Yeul

2 months ago