Binance co-founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao has pushed back at U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren after she claimed he “pleaded guilty to a criminal money-laundering charge.”
In a Friday post on X, Zhao criticized Warren’s statement, saying she “can’t get her facts right.” Warren had stated that he “pleaded guilty to a criminal money laundering charge and was sentenced to prison.”
“There were NO money laundering [charges],“ CZ clarified.
In reality, Zhao pleaded guilty to a single felony count of violating the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act for failing to maintain an effective Anti-Money Laundering (AML) program at Binance. This resulted in a four-month sentence in April 2024.
Zhao received a presidential pardon on Wednesday, which Binance confirmed to Cointelegraph in a statement.
One X user accused Zhao of “playing semantics,” claiming the plea still amounted to “a money-laundering conviction.” Zhao countered, saying he had accepted responsibility for compliance failures but had not laundered money himself.
Warren also criticized former President Trump, alleging that Zhao “financed President Donald Trump’s stablecoin and lobbied for a pardon.” This follows Zhao’s own remarks at the end of 2024, when he said he “wouldn’t mind a pardon” from Trump.
“If Congress does not stop this kind of corruption, it owns it.“
Back in mid-July, Zhao threatened to sue Bloomberg over a report linking him to the Trump-backed USD1 stablecoin. The article, which remains online, claims that Binance wrote the basic code for USD1 and cites critics who argue that the situation creates potential conflicts of interest for Trump.
Warren is not the only lawmaker expressing outrage. U.S. Representative Maxine Waters, a senior Democrat on the House Committee on Financial Services, also criticized the pardon. In a statement released Friday, she said, “Trump is doing massive favors for crypto criminals who have helped line his pockets.”
“Trump’s pardon of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao—who pleaded guilty to enabling money laundering and facilitating suspicious transactions with child abusers, drug dealers, and terrorists—is an appalling but unsurprising reflection of his presidency,” Waters added.
The accusations of corruption come amid reports that Trump’s second term has coincided with a remarkable increase in his personal wealth, reportedly generating over $1 billion in pre-tax profit over the past year. The Trump family has openly acknowledged this; Eric Trump even suggested that their actual profits were “probably more.”
