The Presidential Pay-to-Play: How Trump Made The White House Into A Criminal Clearinghouse

Swamp 2.0: Zhao, Binance And The Price of Presidential Pardons

There’s never been a swamp like the Trump White House. He imagines he’s like Ferdinand Marcos, Saddam Hussein, Putin, Louis XIV (the “Sun King”) or an Ottoman sultan. Remember, Trump talked about “the swamp” so much in his campaigns that he came to believe it and, now that he’s in power, he seems to have convinced himself he’s entitled to it, a perk of the victory. He sells pardons like souvenirs, handing them out to cronies and rich criminals alike. He fills top posts with family members, unqualified yes-men and convicted felons. He uses government agencies as tools for personal vendettas, weaponizing the Department of Justice and the IRS against enemies. He rigs contracts to enrich himself and his associates. He puts the screws to America’s oligarchs to benefit himself. He cashes in on foreign governments while pretending to serve American interests. He rewards loyalty over competence, corruption over honesty and chaos over order. In short, Trump, the ultimate kleptocrat, didn’t even think of draining the swamp as much as turning it into his private cesspool.

Let’s stick with selling pardons piece of this for now. Yesterday, Ken Vogel and David Yaffe-Bellany introduced NY Times readers to Binance founder and crypto billionaire, Changpeng Zhao (“worth” approximately $70 billion). He plead guilty to money-laundering violations in 2023, Binance having processed over 100,000 transactions moving funds to terrorist organizations, from Hamas and ISIS to al-Qaeda, as well as child exploitation and ransomeware operations. As part of the $4.3 billion settlement, Zhao agreed to pay a $50 million criminal fine and stepped down as CEO of Binance. Last year, he was sentenced to a mere four months in prison for his role in the violations despite the severity of the charges. His fancy lawyers argued that he previously had a clean record. In other words, he had never been caught before. Billionaires, though, don’t face firing squads or maximum security prisons. He served his time at the correctional facility in Long Beach, California, not Alligator Alcatraz.

Vogel and Yaffe-Bellany noted that “he fashioned a crash course for himself on clemency politics, reading books about business tycoons who had received pardons, including Marc Rich and Michael Milken.” He’s currently “mounting a pardon campaign of his own, backed by a sophisticated influence operation worthy of those high-profile predecessors.” He seems willing to pay Trump and his family whatever it takes to get a pardon and it’s just a matter of time before Trump feels he’s gotten enough to grant one. Aside from public flattery of Señor TACO, and hiring every lobbyist who is reputed to be a conduit for bribes to him, “Zhao and his team are deploying the full playbook of techniques that have helped deep-pocketed interests win preferential treatment from Trump… Binance has also cultivated a business relationship with the Trumps, striking a deal that benefited the family’s own crypto firm, World Liberty Financial… [I]n private conversations with other executives, advisers to Trump have floated the possibility of a pardon for Zhao and discussed the possible political fallout... Democrats are concerned that Trump will grant the pardons to reward Binance for steering business to World Liberty Financial, while paving the way for a more lucrative partnership.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal is keeping close tabs on the situation. “Pardoning Zhao and Binance would be a prime example of the sort of abuse that has plagued the nearly unfettered presidential clemency power. ‘It lets criminals off the hook to the personal profit of the president and his family and friends, and unleashes a convicted felon on a virtually unregulated crypto market.’... Zhao’s clemency campaign reflects the transactional approach that Trump has taken to both pardons and crypto. It has spawned a lucrative business in which crypto interests and white-collar felons have enlisted lobbyists and lawyers offering to use their connections to help clients gain access and redress. Trump has granted clemency to donors, allies and crypto entrepreneurs, including Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the Silk Road drug marketplace, and three co-founders of the BitMEX crypto exchange who had pleaded guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act. As he has doled out favors, Trump has blurred the line between his presidency and his family’s pursuit of lucrative crypto deals, announcing initiatives to stimulate the industry while backing away from enforcement efforts.”

Recently, on a podcast, Zhao claimed that, like Señor Trumpanzee, “he, too, was targeted for political reasons. And he echoed the president’s pledge ‘to help the U.S. to become the capital of crypto.’”

Zhao and Binance have paid crooked MAGA attorney Teresa Goody Guillén— who represents the Trump family’s crypto business and Zach Witkoff, Steve Witkoff’s son and bag-man— over $200,000 to press the White House for “executive relief.” They have also hired a slew of other lobbyists to make the case, including Ches McDowell, the crooked brother of crooked congressman Addison McDowell (R-NC).

A pardon for Zhao would be a major boost to Binance. After the guilty plea, a series of states revoked money-transmitter licenses from the company’s U.S. affiliate, Binance US. If Trump wiped away Zhao’s conviction, both Binance and Binance US would have an opening to apply for licenses and forge other commercial partnerships, according to legal experts.

A clean slate for Binance might also help improve the company’s reputation in the U.S. market, where some customers are instinctively skeptical of large foreign institutions.

“A lot of people just prefer U.S.-based companies when it comes to their private data,” said Dan Dolev, a financial technology analyst at Mizuho.

Privately, officials at some U.S. crypto firms have voiced frustration about the possibility of clemency for Zhao, noting that he is not American and that his company admitted to violating the law. If Binance breaks into the U.S. market, it would threaten the business of other exchanges.

“The substantive complaint they have made is this guy looked the other way on bad activity in a way that we did not, and it’s unfair to put us on an equal footing,” said Austin Campbell, the founder of a crypto consulting firm.

Last month, Zhao reposted an unsubstantiated claim on Twitter that Coinbase, the largest U.S. exchange and a major Binance competitor, was trying to “take down Binance.”

The Trump regime is the absolute definition of transactional corruption, a mercenary enterprise where everything is for sale and loyalty is just part of the price tag. Trump didn’t come to Washington to serve the people; he came to exploit power for personal gain, turning the highest office in the land into his family’s private cash register. His swamp isn’t some abstract political metaphor; it’s a thriving cesspool of pay-to-play schemes, where pardons are currency, and the rule of law is bartered away to the highest bidder.

The Binance saga lays bare the depth of this corruption. A crypto billionaire who enabled terror financing and ransomware attacks, who skirted the law with impunity until the hammer finally came down, tepidly, now seeks to buy his way back to respectability through Trump’s clemency racket. This isn’t an anomaly; it’s a Trump-branded system: crooked lawyers, bought-off lobbyists and an autocrat who sees the presidency not as a public trust but as a personal ATM.

This transactional swamp is a threat to American democracy and a direct attack on the rule of law and the safety of the public. When criminal billionaires can waltz through justice with a wink and a nod from the White House, ordinary Americans lose faith in the system. Worse, the toxic partnership between Trump’s family and these lawbreakers ensures that corruption is rewarded, not just tolerated. The question isn’t if Trump will grant Zhao a pardon; it’s how much he’ll get paid to do it, and how many other deals like this are already in the shadows. Regardless of his campaign rhetoric, Trump isn’t about draining swamps; his regimei is the swamp, festering and feeding on the very decay it promised to fight.