Open in TheBrain

Binance Crypto-c CZ

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isis hamas etc child porn site money launder

trump failsons don jr eric world liberty have created no fin apps promised, small # employees

SEE WORLD LIBERTY FINANCIAL DON JR WITCOFF JR


when trump says he knows nothing about X it means he knows everything and vice versa.


Trump's new defense of 'scandalous' pardon is 'worse' than his lying: analysis - Alternet.org

an 10 25

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no lnx

'He's not innocent': Republican denounces Trump's pardon of Chinese billionaire

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement regarding his administration's policies against cartels and human trafficking, from the State Dining Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 23, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

:{Carl GibsonOctober 23, 2025 |

President Donald Trump recently announced he was officially pardoning Changpeng Zhao, who is the former CEO of cryptocurrency company Binance. One member of his party is now publicly condemning the act.

Politico reported Thursday that after Trump pardoned Zhao — a Chinese-born Canadian resident who is ranked as the 21st richest person in the world with a net worth in excess of $87 billion — Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said it sent "a bad signal."

"I don’t like it,” said Tillis, who is not running for another term next year. "He was convicted. He’s not innocent."

Zhao pleaded guilty in November of 2023 to money laundering charges and agreed to pay $4 billion in penalties. Then-Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said after the plea deal that Binance "allowed money to flow to terrorists, cybercriminals, and child abusers through its platform." Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen said at the time that Zhao's company "gave sanctioned customers unfettered access to American capital and financial services."

However, Zhao also had personal ties to the Trump family. As the Wall Street Journal reported, Binance supported the Trump Organization's World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency venture headed by Donald Trump Jr., which has led to the president's personal net wealth spiking significantly since the start of his second term.

The Senate is currently discussing market structure legislation aimed at regulating the cryptocurrency industry. Some Democrats are arguing for provisions in the bill that would prevent the president and his family from profiting from its crypto business, though Republicans are likely to reject them.

“It’s absolutely corrupt what this president is doing, and none of us should be surprised,” Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) told Politico. “What we’re trying to do in market structure is to keep the Binances of the world outside of the United States market.”

Click here to read Politico's full report.

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an no lnx

'I don't know — he was recommended': Trump struggles to justify latest pardon

:{U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during an announcement regarding his administration's policies against cartels and human trafficking, from the State Dining Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 23, 2025.

REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst}:

David BadashOctober 23, 2025

Just after pardoning the founder of Binance, President Donald Trump struggled to explain his decision — appearing unfamiliar with both the recipient and the legal issues surrounding the case that led to his conviction.

“President Trump has pardoned Changpeng Zhao,” The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, “the convicted founder of the crypto exchange Binance, following months of efforts by Zhao to boost the Trump family’s own crypto company.”

Asked on Thursday why he chose to issue the pardon, and if it had anything to do with Zhao’s involvement with the Trump family’s crypto business, the President responded, “Who is that?”

READ MORE: ‘Amateur Historian’ Mike Johnson Hails Trump’s Ballroom as ‘Greatest’ White House Upgrade

“The founder of Binance,” the reporter replied.

“The recent one, yes,” Trump said. “I believe we’re talking about the same person, ’cause I do pardon a lot of people.”

“I don’t know — he was recommended by a lot of people,” Trump continued. “A lot of people say that — are you talking about the crypto person?”

“Yes.”

“A lot of people say that he wasn’t guilty of anything,” the President declared. “He served four months in jail, and they say that he was not guilty of anything, that what he did —” Trump said before the reporter interjected.

“Well,” Trump responded, “you don’t know much about crypto, you know nothing about, you know nothing about nothing. You’re fake news.”

READ MORE: ‘Racist on Its Face’: Top Democrat Blasts Trump’s ‘Truly Vile’ New Policy

“But let me just tell you that he was,” Trump said, “somebody that, as I was told, I don’t know him, I don’t believe I’ve ever met him. But I’ve been told, a lot of support. He had a lot of support, and they said that what he did is not even a crime.”

“It wasn’t a crime, that he was persecuted by the Biden administration, and so I gave him a pardon at the request of a lot of very good people.”

The Wall Street Journal also reported that a “pardon will likely pave the way for Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, to return to the U.S. after the company pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating U.S. anti-money-laundering requirements and was barred from operating in the country.”

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READ MORE: ‘Pay to Play’: Trump Ballroom Donors List Draws Concern and Condemnation

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GMAIL LEFT HOOK 10 25

...When you have power and don’t plan on giving it up anytime soon, you can behave like a supervillain without any shame or subtlety.

I was planning on talking to Adam about the numerous scandals that are engulfing the Trump Administration, which reveal the corrupt, grifting nature of this white nationalist regime. The universe told us to hold our memecoin as we received breaking news that Trump pardoned Changpen Zhao, founder of crypto exchange Binance, who pleaded guilty to money laundering in 2023.The same Administration, however, is boasting of cracking down on an alleged gambling ring featuring high-profile NBA stars and coaches.

It’s all projection all the time with MAGA. As Trump and Stephen Miller dehumanize the majority as terrorists and criminals, the regime is perfectly fine pardoning criminals like Zhao and Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, who created digital havens for drug and sex trafficking.

While ICE terrorizes US cities, shoots at unarmed priests, and assaults innocent Americans, Trump pardons Republicans convicted of fraud and theft, such as George Santos and Michael Grimm. Trump is also fine with releasing violent criminals, such as the insurrectionists who stormed the US Capitol on his behalf on January 6th. However, Republicans still won’t release the Epstein Files. Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s associate, is receiving great perks at a minimum security camp in Texas, but Rep. Grijalva has yet to be sworn in by Speaker Mike Johnson. Meanwhile, Christopher Moynihan, one of the pardoned insurrectionists, was charged last week for attempting to assassinate Rep. Hakeem Jeffries.

It’s all upside down because a plurality of Americans decided to elect a cruel, selfish, compromised criminal and send him back to the White House, which he is currently destroying - literally. The entire East Wing of the White House has been demolished as Trump continues to build his $300 million ballroom.

It is the most perfect metaphor for Trump, and, tragically, all of it could have been avoided.

...

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https://www.msnbc.com/11th-hour/watch/conflicted-new-report-exposes-trump-s-crypto-connections-243308613599

trump fam made more money on crypto than in whole hist of co in real estate?!

memecoin 2 bit players www hustlers, got hacked; liberty financial 500m$ 400m real money in trump pocket; had no product

BINANCE CZ 1/2 hse paid 4B$ fine money launder

stablecoin USD1 world lib fin; backed 1:1 with real US dollars, used by drug traffic; bill does nothing on laundering; anon wallet

jamie dimond JPM 20k empl on compliance; tether has 150 ppl TOTAL

140m$ war chest sherrod b 40m$ , num 1 more than oil/gas see politico

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AN 9 25

In the midst of the Trump regime’s shameful attempt to attack any and all organizations and institutions that oppose it, we must not and will not back down from holding Trump accountable for his corruption and lawlessness.

Yesterday, the New York Times — which Trump just sued for $15 billion for allegedly defaming him —reported that Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, apparently made a multi-billion dollar deal with Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the ultrarich ruling family of the United Arab Emirates who controls $1.5 trillion of the Emiratis’ sovereign wealth.

In return for Sheikh Tahnoon’s investment firm depositing $2 billion into World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency start-up founded by the Witkoffs and Trumps, the White House agreed to give the U.A.E. — in particular, a sprawling technology firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon —access to hundreds of thousands of the world’s most advanced and scarce computer chips, despite national security concerns that the chips could be shared with China.

This is just the top of the iceberg of Trump’s crypto corruption.

To understand the full extent of it, you need to go back to four days before early voting started in 2024. That’s when Trump and his sons launched the crypto firm, World Liberty Financial.

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As soon as Trump won, money started pouring in.

Then, just days before returning to office, Trump launched a separate crypto scheme, selling TRUMP and MELANIA memecoins. Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency based on an image or online joke.

Within his first six weeks in office, Trump called for a “Crypto Strategic Reserve”— a government backed stockpile of crypto assets, sort of like our oil reserve, but completely pointless. That announcement made crypto prices soar.

So far, the Trump family has made about $3 billion from crypto — with many purchases by foreign buyers. Forbes now estimates that over halfof Trump’s entire net worth is crypto-based.

With Trump acting as both the President of the United States and as his own crypto brand ambassador, it’s hard to tell which job he’s doing at any given moment.

One US company said it explicitly purchased $2 millionof Trump’s meme coins to influence trade policy.

The corruption goes further.

Trump’s pro-crypto SEC chair, Paul Atkins is heavily invested in crypto himself. He’s been lifting financial guardrails in ways that will make it easier for crypto firms (like the Trumps’) to spread into new markets, and going easy on crypto fraud.

Chinese billionaire Justin Sun had been charged with crypto-related fraud before Trump was elected. After Trump’s election, Sun invested more than $115 million into various Trump crypto products. What happened next? Trump’s SEC suddenly stopped prosecuting Sun.

Trump’s SEC also abandoned a lawsuit against Binance, a crypto exchange that had previously pled guilty to money laundering.

This happened just days after Binance started listing a Trump cryptocurrency on its marketplace.

The corruption goes even further.

Trump’s Justice Department even scrapped the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, giving a green-light to all kinds of crypto crime, even though Americans lost $9.3 billion in crypto scams in 2024.

The crypto industry spent big on House and Senate races, on both Republicans and Democrats. Why? So the Senate would pass the so-called GENIUS Act — a regulatory bill that the crypto industry lobbied for. Eighteen Democrats joined with nearly all Republicans to vote yes.

The bill gives a stamp of legitimacy to so-called “stablecoins,” a type of currency that Trump’s World Liberty Financial makes and sells.

Stablecoins claim to be more stable because they’re supposedly tied to the value of other assets that are held as collateral — like the dollar or Treasury securities. But we already saw one collapse just a couple years ago, wiping out some investors’ life savings.

While the bill appropriately bans members of Congress and their families from profiting off stablecoins,it places no such restrictions on the president.

The most dangerous part of the GENIUS Act is how it allows crypto to reach into mainstream financial systems.

All this corruption is bad enough. Worse, it could tank the economy.

The GENIUS Act opens the door to institutions investing more heavily in crypto. It would even let banks and big corporations, like Walmart, Amazon, or Facebook, launch their own digital currencies — potentially thousands of them — all with little oversight.

Trump has also opened the door to letting retirement plan administrators invest 401(k) funds in crypto. That could put your savings at risk even if you never buy any cryptocurrencies.

As we saw during the 2008 financial meltdown, the more the economy becomes entwined with volatile and speculative investments, like crypto, the greater the risk to all of us. The failure of risky bets can have a domino effect.

If a single cryptocurrency began to tank — as crypto has done in the past — investors would likely rush to sell off crypto to get their real money back. This could lead to massive bank runs.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has predicted that under the GENIUS Act, crypto firms could end up holding more than $2 trillion in U.S. treasury bills as collateral. If they had to suddenly liquidate those assets to cover a bank run, the value of U.S. securities could plummet, triggering a global financial crisis.

Crypto has shown no redeeming social value and it poses huge dangers to our economy. Yet Trump is enabling it to worm into the economy because he’s taken huge crypto payoffs that have made him and his family billions of dollars.

NOW READ:'Lucky Loser': Trump's 'psychotic' NYT lawsuit ridiculed by legal experts

*Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

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an 8 25


an 525

Donald Trump has raised nearly a billion dollars from his various cryptocurrency schemes, says researcher Molly White. “He is really allowing for bribery and the types of corruption that we’ve never seen in the American presidency,” White says. She lays out how the Trump family profits from cryptocurrency while directly influencing policy and regulations, encouraging the transfer of wealth to the industry despite its “enormous risk of fraud and collapse.”democracynow.org

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AMY GOODMAN: Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jeff Merkley are calling for a federal investigation into the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture, after a fund backed by Abu Dhabi announced it would make a $2 billion investment in crypto exchange Binance using a Trump-branded cryptocoin. The deal could generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the Trump family.

In their letter, Senators Warren and Merkley wrote, quote, “The deal, if completed, would represent a staggering conflict of interest, one that may violate the Constitution and open our government to a startling degree of foreign influence and the potential for a quid pro quo that could endanger national security,” unquote.

Senator Warren also released this video last week blasting the deal.

SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN: The United States is getting ready to bless Donald Trump’s latest grift. A shady Abu Dhabi investment firm just announced it’s going to make a $2 billion business deal with a foreign crypto company called Binance. So, here’s the kicker: Binance and the foreign investment firm are going to use Donald Trump’s stablecoin to finance their transaction, essentially giving Trump a cut of that $2 billion deal. Boy, looks like corruption, smells like corruption. So, yeah, the Senate is going to put a stop to it, right? Wrong. Right now the Senate is getting ready to greenlight the grift by passing the so-called GENIUS Act next week. This is a bill that would make it even easier for the president and his family to profit off their own stablecoin and oversee their own financial company.

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump is headed to the Gulf next week.

In related news, last night, on Monday, President Trump spoke at a crypto and AI innovators’ dinner to raise money for a pro-Trump super PAC. Tickets were one-and-a-half million dollars a plate. The event was held at the president’s golf club in Virginia. The co-host of the dinner was David Sacks, the White House AI and crypto czar. Sacks is a South African-born tech investor who was part of the so-called PayPal Mafia, founding PayPal with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.

On May 22nd, Trump is also hosting a private gala dinner for the top 220 investors in his meme coin. The dinner will also be held at the Trump National Golf Club. The promotion also offers an ultra-exclusive VIP reception with the president and a tour of the White House for the top 25 $TRUMP meme coin investors. The anti-corruption group CREW, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, called the promotion, quote, “one of the most blatant and appalling instances of selling access to the presidency we’ve ever seen,” they said.

We’re joined now by Molly White, an independent cryptocurrency researcher who runs the Citation Needed newsletter. She recently wrote an article headlined “Trump’s newest grift: Building a cryptocurrency empire while destroying its regulators.”

Molly, welcome to Democracy Now! If you can start off, for folks who aren’t following cryptocurrency that carefully, explain what cryptocurrency is.

MOLLY WHITE: Cryptocurrency is a digital asset. So, it’s an entirely digital form of speculation, essentially, that allows people to speculate on the value of tokens that are, you know, things like bitcoin or Ethereum, and it’s entirely digital. There is no physical representation. There is no physical asset or service backing the tokens.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And in your recent piece, Molly, you wrote that “The scope of the Trump family’s cryptocurrency conflicts illustrates a degree of corruption that makes the emoluments concerns of Trump’s first term seem quaint by comparison.” Could you explain?

MOLLY WHITE: Yeah. So, Trump’s crypto ventures are growing, seemingly by the week. It seems like every week something new is announced, whether it’s his World Liberty Financial crypto platform or his $TRUMP meme coin or rumors of a new crypto game that his backers are working on. And so, he is really allowing for bribery and the types of corruption that we’ve never seen in the American presidency. You know, he’s allowing people to send him money. He is profiting directly from the cryptocurrency industry, while he is simultaneous influencing policy, legislation, calling off regulators who previously oversaw the crypto industry, in ways that are benefiting him and his family very directly.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And given the fact that cryptocurrency has become sort of the favored money-laundering method of criminals, drug dealers, anybody who wants to hide their money, what is the impact of the growing size of the crypto industry in terms of the financial system?

MOLLY WHITE: Well, it’s definitely concerning. I mean, there is this major potential for criminal activity using cryptocurrencies. We’ve seen it dramatically increase for use in money laundering, as you mention, terrorist financing. Ransomware is primarily these days done with cryptocurrency. And there’s very little in the way of regulations or laws that crack down on that type of activity.

And under the Trump administration, we’ve actually seen what few regulations were in place be pared back. The Securities and Exchange Commission, which previously was, essentially, the primary regulator of the cryptocurrency industry, has been called off the beat. We’ve seen cases against cryptocurrency companies dismissed with prejudice, investigations of crypto companies dropped. We’ve seen the cryptocurrency investigations teams at the SEC and the Department of Justice dismantled. And so, under the Trump administration, I think we are seeing dramatic expansion of the potential for criminal activity within cryptocurrency, as well as the, you know, complete reduction in consumer protections that would allow those who choose to get involved with cryptocurrency to do so without the fear that they are going to be scammed or taken advantage of.

AMY GOODMAN: Molly, how exactly does Trump and his family profit from these crypto ventures? How much money are we talking about? And explain. Trump has a crypto coin. Melania has one. Explain how this works.

MOLLY WHITE: Well, Trump has multiple crypto ventures that are directly enriching him. So, you mentioned there’s the $TRUMP meme coin, which is the token that is themed after him, essentially, and is being currently used as a ticket to this private dinner at his golf course. Melania has a token of her own. And the Trumps make money off of those tokens, both in terms of the trading that’s happening, as well as facilitating the liquidity for those types of tokens.

Then there’s the World Liberty Financial platform, which is a yet-to-be-released crypto platform that is nevertheless selling these World Liberty Financial tokens to interested buyers. Trump makes 75% of the protocol revenues from that project, and he owns a 60% stake in the company. He and his family sort of maintained the illusion that there was an arm’s-length relationship between the project, despite it being entirely themed after Trump, prior to his election and inauguration, but after he was inaugurated, they sort of gave up that facade and obtained a majority stake in the company.

And then, Trump has sort of an endless list of additional crypto ventures. He has his NFT projects. He has sold crypto-themed sneakers. You know, there has been reporting that he is working on a crypto game. His Trump Media & Technology Group, which is the company that is behind the Truth Social platform that he controls, is also getting into crypto with a partnership with Crypto.com to launch crypto ETFs, exchange-traded funds. And there’s also reporting that they are considering launching their own token. So, the list really goes on.

And so far, I think he has raised close to a billion dollars, or he has profited in close to a billion dollars from his combined ventures. That number is only continuing to increase, as there are deals like this stablecoin being used by the United Arab Emirates Investment Fund, and as, you know, multiple new ventures are being launched as we go on.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, of course, the Trump administration has claimed that all of Trump’s investments are in a blind trust, that basically his sons run the company, not him.

MOLLY WHITE: Right, that is the claim, although he’s made varying claims. He’s even claimed not to profit from crypto at all, which is plainly untrue. But I think that, you know, frankly, it is not fair to say that he is divested from crypto ventures when it is controlled by his sons. His sons are profiting, and ultimately he is profiting. You know, he should not be making policy decisions or influencing policy in ways that benefit his family quite, quite plainly. And I don’t think that the claims that he has divested are accurate whatsoever.

AMY GOODMAN: Molly White, can you talk about the latest push by the Senate Democrats? Tell us more about the legislation that they want to change on cryptocurrency pending in Congress. What did the so-called GENIUS Act, a bill backed by the crypto industry, call for?

MOLLY WHITE: So, the GENIUS Act is primarily intended to regulate stablecoins, which are a category of crypto assets that are intended to maintain a peg to some other form of asset. So, we often see dollar stablecoins, which are crypto tokens that are intended to be worth $1 a piece. Those are assets like USDC or Trump’s USD1 stablecoin, which was recently launched. And the GENIUS Act, you know, seeks to install some amount of legislation that would regulate those types of assets.

And this is something that we’ve seen the crypto industry pushing for for quite some time, even prior to the Trump administration. But Trump’s own crypto ventures, including launching his own stablecoin, have recently stalled that legislation, with a number of Senate Democrats speaking up to oppose this bill, as well as those in the House, signaling that, you know, the Trump family financial interests are a major concern for them. The crypto industry has also pushed for a number of changes to this bill that would benefit the industry. And we’re now starting to see Democrats in Congress saying that this bill does not go far enough to prevent national security concerns or even terrorist financing using these stablecoins, which have been used to transfer massive amounts of funds. They are sort of the bedrock of the crypto industry, almost like the poker chips at the casino. Stablecoins are a major venue through which value is transferred in the crypto world. And so, this type of legislation is extremely important to get right.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Do we have any sense of who in the United States does this investing in crypto coins? How widespread is it? Or is there a profile of typical people who are buying the coins?

MOLLY WHITE: Well, there are everyday people who are involved in crypto speculation, but we also see major venture capital firms and investment firms getting involved in the crypto world, as well, including a number that have a significant presence in Washington. Andreessen Horowitz, for example, is one of the largest technology venture capital firms. They have significant investments in the cryptocurrency world, and a number of Andreessen Horowitz employees have been installed in various positions at the White House. Marc Andreessen himself was involved in selecting members of the Trump administration, and they were very heavily involved in political campaigning. Then there are figures like David Sacks, who is the AI and crypto czar at the White House. He runs an investment firm that also has crypto investments, some of which he’s not divested from.

So, there are multiple profiles of crypto investors, many of them institutional, but also everyday people who have bought the story that cryptocurrency is a way to get ahead financially, that crypto investments can potentially provide high returns and are worth the enormous risk and volatility that crypto brings with it, and, you know, now the enormous risk of fraud and collapse throughout the crypto industry, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Molly White, we want to thank you so much for being with us, software engineer, independent cryptocurrency researcher, running the Citation Needed newsletter. We’ll link to your recent piece, “Trump’s newest grift: Building a cryptocurrency empire while destroying its regulators.”

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