Bitmex Pardon Corp
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raw story
Criminal corporations are not people — but Trump just pardoned one anyway - Raw Story
In what could be a U.S. first, President Donald Trump last week pardoned a criminal corporation, a move that largely flew under the proverbial radar amid his pardon spree for white-collar criminals including at least one of his supporters.
On March 28, Trump pardoned HDR Global Trading, the owner and operator of the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX; company co-founders Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo, and Samuel Reed; and former business development chief Gregory Dwyer.
The company and the four men hads each pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Bank Secrecy Act "by willfully failing to establish, implement, and maintain an adequate" anti-money laundering program, as required by law. In January, the U.S. Department of Justice sentenced BitMEX to a fine of $100 million, while the executives were sentenced to criminal probation and ordered to pay civil fines.
While experts noted that Trump acted within his rights to pardon the corporation, there is no known precedent for a president taking such action.
Noting the U.S. Supreme Court's highly controversial 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling—which affirmed corporate personhood and the dubious notion that unlimited outside spending on political campaigns is free speech—Stanford Law School professor Bernadette Meyler toldThe Intercept that "while we have seen the rise of a trend of treating corporations as persons in other areas of law, we haven't seen that so far in the area of pardoning."
Kimberly Wehle, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law and preeminent pardons expert, wrote for The Hill on Tuesday that the BitMEX pardons send the message that "companies involved in financial crimes don't have to worry about accountability under this president, as least when it comes to crypto, for reasons that he has no incentive to ever make known."
"BitMEX can continue its prior criminal practices with federal impunity, and maybe even rely on the pardon to thwart future investigations into related conduct by federal lawmakers or state prosecutors," Wehle added. "The biggest losers in this deal are, once again, the American people, including the more than 77 million who might finally be realizing that they voted for lawlessness last November."
"The biggest losers in this deal are, once again, the American people."
Brandon Garrett, a Duke University law professor specializing in corporate crime and punishment, told The Interceptthat the BitMEX pardons are part of a wider pattern of impunity under Trump, who "now seems to be systematically pardoning corporate malefactors left and right without respect, really, to any real serious consideration about the merits of the cases [or] the larger policy implications of issuing these pardons."
As the consumer advocacy watchdog Public Citizen recently noted, "The Trump administration has dropped, withdrawn, or halted investigations and enforcement actions against over 100 corporations in its first two months in office."
Beneficiaries include companies owned or led by Trump donors or allies, including private prison giant GEO Group; Zelle network banks JPMorgan and Bank of America; crypto firms Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken, OpenSea, Ripple, and Robinhood; and Elon Musk's SpaceX.
"Trump's corporate pardons show the president's true base is the billionaire executives and corporate elites lining up to indulge their greed at the trough of Trump's corruption," Public Citizen research director Rick Claypool said last week. "Trump's soft-on-corporate crime approach invites a corporate crime spree and potentially catastrophic abuses for America's consumers, workers, and communities."
Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman added that the Trump administration's "effective no-enforcement policy against corporations virtually guarantees more financial scams, more workplace discrimination, more poisoning of the air and water, more food contamination, more fraud, more disease, and more preventable death."
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axios
President Trump on Friday granted clemency to startup founders convicted of investor fraud and three crypto exchange co-founders who had plead guilty to violating anti-money laundering laws.
Why it matters:There's never been a better time to be a white-collar crook.
1.Trevor Milton, co-founder and CEO of bankrupt electric truckmaker Nikola Motors, received a pardon.
- His most egregious act may have been sharing a video that purported to show a fully functional prototype, whereas the truck actually was rolling down a small hill. And then there was the lying about billions of dollars in orders.
- Milton was sentenced to four years in prison for both securities and wire fraud, and ordered to pay nearly $700 million in restitution. He had been free on appeal, during which time he donated bigly to Trump-related groups. Oh, and his lawyer was the brother of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi.
2. Carlos Watson, co-founder and CEO of defunct Ozy Media, had his prison sentence commuted.
- You may remember Ozy Media for a phone call during which Watson's co-founder, who plead guilty and cooperated with prosecutors, pretended to be a YouTube executive while on a reference call with prospective investor Goldman Sachs. Plus, lots of lying about company financials and proposed deals.
- Watson was literally on a plane to prison when the news arrived. In a statement, he reiterated his argument that the prosecution was "driven by a malicious campaign orchestrated by a jealous competitor at a rival media company" — an absurd claim based on the phone call first being reported by then-NY Times reporter Ben Smith, whose former company once held takeover talks with Ozy.
- He also claimed that Ozy "was on the brink of becoming Silicon Valley's first Black-owned publicly traded company before these wrongful actions derailed our progress." Ozy had never filed paperwork to go public, nor were there any such conversations ever reported. Instead, it was trying to raise new VC funding.
Finally, Watson thanked Alice Marie Johnson, who was famously granted clemency by President Trump after public support from Kim Kardashian.
3.Co-founders and a former employee of BitMEX received pardons after pleading guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to implement AML and KYC procedures. The exchange itself also pleaded guilty to similar charges.
The bottom line:Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Charlie Javice should be sitting by the phone.
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duck 5 25
Reuters
Trump pardons BitMEX co-founders, White House official says
Mar 28, 2025Trump pardons BitMEX co-founders, White House official says. By Reuters. March 31, 2025 3:41 PM UTC Updated ago U.S. President Donald Trump gestures, before boarding Air Force One as he departs ...
- coindesk.com
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CoinDesk
President Trump Pardons Arthur Hayes, 3 Other BitMEX Co ... - CoinDesk
Mar 28, 2025President Trump Pardons Arthur Hayes, BitMEX and 3 Other Co-Founders and Employee Arthur Hayes, the former CEO of BitMEX, pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Bank Secrecy Act and was ...
- axios.com
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Axios
https://www.axios.com › 2025 › 03 › 31 › trump-pardons-bitmex-crypto-fraud
Trump pardons a bunch of white-collar crooks - Axios
Mar 31, 2025President Trump on Friday granted clemency to startup founders convicted of investor fraud and three crypto exchange co-founders who had plead guilty to violating anti-money laundering laws.. Why it matters: There's never been a better time to be a white-collar crook. 1. Trevor Milton, co-founder and CEO of bankrupt electric truckmaker Nikola Motors, received a pardon.
- msn.com
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MSN
Trump pardons three BitMEX crypto exchange co-founders, and ex ... - MSN
Trump issued the pardons on Thursday, more than three months after BitMEX was sentenced to pay a fine of $100 million for violating the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to establish and maintain anti ...
- en.wikipedia.org
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Wikipedia
List of people granted executive clemency in the second presidency of ...
On January 23, 2025, Trump granted pardons to 24 anti-abortion protestors. Among the 24 pardoned were Lauren Handy and 9 of her co-defendants, ... In 2022, Hayes, Delo, and Reed, co-founders of the BitMEX global cryptocurrency exchange, and Dwyer, their head of business development, had each pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Bank ...
- msn.com
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MSN
Trump Pardons BitMEX Crypto Exchange Co-Founder Arthur Hayes - MSN
President Donald Trump has pardoned Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo and Samuel Reed, the three co-founders of the storied crypto exchange BitMex, according to a person familiar with the matter who ...
- thestreet.com
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TheStreet
Trump reportedly pardons BitMEX co-founders convicted of money ...
Mar 28, 2025President Donald Trump has reportedly granted pardons to co-founders of the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX — Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo, and Samuel Reed — according to CNBC.. HDR Global ...
- yahoo.com
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Yahoo
https://www.yahoo.com › news › trump-pardons-3-bitmex-co-005646361.html
Trump Pardons 3 BitMEX Co-Founders Following Guilty Pleas in ... - Yahoo
Mar 31, 2025On March 28, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump pardoned three co-founders of the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX—Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo, and Samuel Reed.
- cointelegraph.com
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Cointelegraph
https://cointelegraph.com › news › donald-trump-pardon-bitmex-founders
Trump pardons 3 BitMEX co-founders — Report - Cointelegraph
Mar 28, 2025US President Donald Trump reportedly granted pardons to three BitMEX co-founders and a former executive on March 27. ... The reasons for Trump's pardon were unclear at the time of publication ...
- cryptopolitan.com
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Cryptopolitan
https://www.cryptopolitan.com › trump-pardons-bitmex-founders-arthur-hayes
Trump pardons BitMEX founders Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo and Samuel ...
Mar 28, 2025Trump has pardoned Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo, and Samuel Reed, wiping out their federal convictions tied to operating BitMEX without any real anti-money-laundering compliance, according to CNBC. All three had already pleaded guilty and were sentenced, but on Thursday, the White House confirmed the full pardons, just over three months after ...
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