Do the Crime But Not the Time...If You Pledge Allegiance
Trump Abuses Pardon Power to send a message.
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By now we all know that Donald Trump will do anything. After all, he took food out of the mouths of hungry people and threw our air travel system into chaos to win a shutdown fight with Democrats who are letting him jack-up health insurance costs for millions. This ruthless style is now routine for a man who will do anything in the exercise of power.
Amid the budget crisis, Trump’s other grotesque flex -- the use of commutation and pardon power -- has mostly escaped notice. In the majority of cases, he has favored those who committed crimes (or been charged with them) that benefitted him politically. But in one he used this unique power to reward someone who has helped make his family $2 billion richer.
The case involves a super wealthy man named Changpeng Zhao, known as “ CZ”, who co-owns a crypto currency venture called Binance. “Crypto” is a form of digital money valued in dollars that exists only as computer code stored in servers all over the world, beyond the reach of regulators. Binance is the planet’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. CZ headed it until 2023 when he pleaded guilty to enabling money laundering through the platform.
Are you with me? Good. Because this is where it gets interesting. After Trump pardoned CZ, he told CBS News he didn’t know who he is and that he understood his predecessor Joe Biden had persecuted him. That was it. But of course, with Trump things are never so simple. Quick aside, the Trump Administration is making the ridiculous argument that Biden’s pardons are null and void because “he didn’t know what he was doing.” Weirddddd
As it turned out, the Trump family has been working with Binance (and therefore CZ) on its own cryptocurrency schemes. Their total profits from the crypto business has been estimated in excess of $2 billion. Much of this has come with Binance’s help, which makes CZ a friend of the family. With his pardon his record has been wiped clean and he’s now free of many of the limits his conviction placed on his work.
The pardon follows the President’s concerted effort to make life better for crypto billionaires, including his clan. He wants to create a domestic crypto reserve (sort of like the gold reserve at Fort Knox) and he wants to make it easier for people to invest their retirement savings in these coins. The result will be to drive up demand and thus increase the value of the various currencies. The man who once said the business was based on “thin air” now wants everyone to invest in the gas.
Before rewarding CZ, Trump began his presidency with the mass pardon of well over 1,000 people who had been convicted of crimes related to the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Some of these people were convicted of seditious conspiracy. Others had been found guilty of assaulting police officers.
Why did Trump clean the records of the Capitol Hill mob members? The answer is both personal, and political. On the one hand, he wanted to signal to his followers that he too found the rioters to be sympathetic figures who had been justified in their actions. On the other, he granted clemency to marauders because they had committed crime in his name. Remember, Trump had addressed the rally before they attacked, imploring them to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell” because, in some alternate universe, the election had been “stolen” from him.
Most recently Trump cleared more than 70 people who could be charged with crimes related to election interference after Joe Biden won in 2020. The list is a rogues gallery of those who either incited the crowd to attack the Capitol or tried to subvert Congress’s certification of the vote. The group includes former Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powel, Trump’s 2020 Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, advisor Boris Epshteyn, attorney John Eastman, and dozens of people who schemed at the state level to falsify Electoral College results.
As with so many of his actions, Trump’s clemency decisions reward his team. They also send a message to those who commit future crimes on his behalf: go ahead and do it because the king will let you off in the end. It makes one wonder, if maybe they really do understand that next term, justice will be served.