'No idea who he is', says Trump after pardoning crypto tycoon

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn7ek63e5xyo

by jmsflknr • 9 months ago

174 132 9 months ago

close04• 9 months ago

Trump added that he did not recall meeting Zhao and had "no idea who he is", only that he had been told that the businessman was a victim of a "witch hunt" by the administration of former US president Joe Biden.

This sums up this administration quite well. Too often no idea what they're doing but doing it out of spite nonetheless.

sholain4• 9 months ago

The US President and his family's newfound crypto fortune, worth billions, managed by himself, his sons and 'Steve Witkoff' (his business partner who is 'negotiating' deals in the Middle East and Russia, and whereupon 100's of Millions of $ is coming unto World Liberty backed coins) is called 'World Liberty Financial' ...

... and is hosted by Binance which is the crypto platform owned by Zhao.

Zhao was found guilty of ignoring oversight regulations allowing nefarious actors (ISIS, Cartels, sex traffickers) to transact on his platform.

There's no way in high heaven that the President could be unaware of the fact that Zhao is the CEO who of the platform that hosts almost all of Trump's wealth.

Moreover, this man is convicted specifically for ignoring the lighter oversight regulations, with operations in parts of the world that are out of reach of US investigators and justice system.

rob742• 9 months ago

In other cases that might be true, but in this case, I seriously doubt that Trump really has no idea who the founder of the platform that is deeply involved in his cryptocurrency dealings is. So, either he's lying, or everyone (including his family) is doing everything behind his back. Or his dementia is worse than everyone thinks...

On March 13th, it was reported that representatives of President Trump’s family were in talks to acquire a financial stake in Binance. Soon after, on March 25th, the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial (WLF), announced that it would launch a new stablecoin, USD1, and the former Binance CEO posted on X welcoming them to its platform.

(https://www.banking.senate.gov/newsroom/minority/forwarding-...)

actionfromafar4• 9 months ago

"How dare you!? That's just coincidence. Stop the witch hunt of our Leader Dear Trump!"

ejcho• 9 months ago

reminds me of https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/at-least-we-owned-the-li...

measurablefunc• 9 months ago

It looks like there is some kind of honor among thieves contrary to the old saying.

dandanua2• 9 months ago

No, it's calculus. Working together they can steal much much more.

spiderfarmer9• 9 months ago

I was discussing with some Dutch friends last night if we still considered the US a 'better' country than China.

The outcome of that discussion should worry Americans.

bluealienpie• 9 months ago

America has never been concerned about anything other than America. They literally couldn't care less that they have threaten to take over Canada... Potentially Greenland and Panama militarily.

actionfromafar4• 9 months ago

That's just blatantly false. American power derives not only from raw power, but from alliances. It will be apparent, that it's really hard to get things done when your former allies start slowrolling all your requests.

Unless you mean it like, "countries have no friends", but that's not a very interesting observation.

verisimi• 9 months ago

We all want to know the outcome! When will we get it?

Which country do those Dutch people think is the better one?

rob742• 9 months ago

I probably wouldn't consider China a "better" country than the US, but at least it's more consistent, and you can mostly rely on it not to cut off its nose to spite its face...

croon2• 9 months ago

I think the point is that an actual discussion having to take place is enough to worry about.

spiderfarmer9• 9 months ago

Neither.

Terr_• 9 months ago

Look for the big downward diagonal...

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-countries-with-the-b...

serf• 9 months ago

'Americans worry about this one little thing, click here to find out.'

this negative-space begs-the-question story-telling that is popular lately feels weird.

"And you know what he said Tommy?"

If you want to tell us about public sentiment towards Americans then just do it -- don't pawn the social liability off on your Dutch friends.

But let me take a guess : they really liked us and were in-tune with social policies and hopeful for the future. ...Right?

spiderfarmer9• 9 months ago

You sound worried. Good.

ggm• 9 months ago

In the context of trade, you might get a different answer to in the context of arts, life and culture. If you get to stay in the NL and its only visible impacts in your economy of trade, that's entirely different to "where do I want to live"

spiderfarmer9• 9 months ago

It's not about trade. We always have traded with the entire world, no matter the regimes, as long as they weren't outright hostile to us.

It's just that Americans act like they are the best country in the world, while they never top a single positive index. American life and culture are not attractive to Europeans and you have beautiful art all over the world.

jojobas4• 9 months ago

Assuming your friends even considered China being in the same league in terms of good and evil, they don't seem to lend this a lot of thought.

spiderfarmer9• 9 months ago

Does it matter if the whole world gives it as much thought as we did? Can you define 'perception' and why this should worry Americans?

And hey, I grew up in a culture that loved the USA. There are lots of countries where that's the opposite.

clort• 9 months ago

So, the guy is convicted of fraud - but fraud is business as usual for Trump, so it counts as a witch hunt.

mschuster913• 9 months ago

The usual dementia jokes aside... of all the things surrounding this administration, this is amongst the most harmless.

It may be a "presidential" power to pardon on paper, but the reality is that unless the President (or in other countries with powers of clemency to the head of state, whoever wields that power) intervenes personally for whatever reason, petitions for clemency pass through layers of bureaucracy, reviews and meetings. And sometimes, that also includes that candidates get inserted into the process by influential aides - something that has been the case for a lot of Presidents on either side of the aisle.

Of course, the issue gets a bit more spicy given Trump's derogatory nickname of "Autopen" Biden, but leaving that aside it's no surprise to me that a US President isn't involved in dealing with clemency petitions all that much.

watwut• 9 months ago

Considering Trump getting rich of crypto grifting and Trump making sure crypto is as unregulated as possible, this particular pardon is perfectly consistent with Trump policies.

sholain4• 9 months ago

To the contrary, this is possibly an extremely dangerous and corrupt action (I'm saying 'possible' here).

Zhao manages Binance upon which Trump's nefarious crypto operation - World Liberty Financial is hosted.

Zhao is guilty of wilfully ignoring a lot of very bad and illegal activity by all sorts of bad actors.

World Liberty Financial is receiving $100's of millions inbound, coincident with 'deals' made by US and Middle East actors etc..

WLF is co-managed by Steve Witkoff, the 'real estate magnate' who has been charged with Middle Easter nand Russia negotiations (who by the ay has absolutely no diplomatic background, historical context or understanding of this situations and is deeply unqualified) and who notably has been entering into negotiations and discussion with foreign parties without any US State Dept personnel. Sometimes not even translators.

Subsequent to those 'deals' with Qatar etc. which the Administration indicated there would be up to $1T invested in the US ... Qatar and other regimes have been flushing massive amounts of noney into WLF, hosted on Binance, overseen by Zhao.

The potentiality fore corruption is hard to overstate.

lloeki2• 9 months ago

of all the things surrounding this administration, this is amongst the most harmless
this is possibly an extremely dangerous and corrupt action

Sadly it appears we live in that insane timeline where both sentences can be true.

mschuster913• 9 months ago

World Liberty Financial is receiving $100's of millions inbound, coincident with 'deals' made by US and Middle East actors etc..

The thing is, in the corruption surrounding the President, that's still small fish. $TRUMP alone was worth 13 billion dollars, $MELANIA was at 1.7 billion dollars. And that's just these two meme coins, not going into all the other shenanigans - he and his family are expected to have made 3 billion dollars since the election [1] in personal wealth gain.

[1] https://qz.com/donald-trump-net-worth-presidency-business-co...

cbsmith2• 9 months ago

There are lots of layers on pardons before they get to Presidents, but Presidents have traditionally taken a hard look at pardons before providing them. There's been a couple of "mass pardons" where maybe you wouldn't expect them to know each person; otherwise, you'd expect it, if for not other reason than that they don't get caught flat footed like this.

mschuster913• 9 months ago

if for not other reason than that they don't get caught flat footed like this

The Trump administration doesn't care any more if they get caught red handed. They don't need to. Most of the media has been bought off in Orban style and subsequently silenced (e.g. WaPo) or subjected to lawfare (see the recent broadcast TV scandals), and the hardcore voter base doesn't care about anything any more, as long as "their side" is perceived as "winning".

arjie• 9 months ago

I think, in general, it's possible to get a view of how an Executive Order is signed by looking at the example of the H-1B $100k fee signing (which we now understand to be far more constrained than it first appeared). Here's a video https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1969157504211808579 where President Trump's "we need more workers" is contrasted with his aides' statements.

It would appear the these things are less an act of the President as a fully informed person making decisions and more of the final rubber stamp on something that staff that he's picked have decided on.

Given that, I wouldn't expect him to personally know what he is signing. If, as I suspect, these pardons are pay-to-play deals, it's someone else managing the operation under his guidance and he's just the guy with the pen so to speak.

ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6• 9 months ago

You wouldn’t expect Trump specifically to know what he is signing or any competent President in the same situation?

lawn• 9 months ago

That was already clear from his last term, and he's much less lucid this time around.

sholain4• 9 months ago

Trump's personal, newfound multi-billion dollar crypto fortune is hosted by Zhao.

I don't mean to be breaking any etiquette her by re-indicating this, but it's I think it's unreasonable to suggest that Trump could not know who this person is.

This is Trump's new 'personal banker' , who doesn't have to play be the constrained rules of $USD denominated financial regulations.

fabian2k• 9 months ago

All of the possible explanations for this are bad and arguably disqualifying for the presidency:

- Trump is lying so that he doesn't have to explain a quid-pro-quo pardon

- Trump is dement and already forgot about the pardon

- Trump wasn't the one actually pardoning him and his administration just did it

The last one would be particularly ironic given the obsession with Joe Biden's Autopen.

newfriend• 9 months ago

And the only plausible explanation:

The President is dealing with hundreds of issues per day, including pardoning many people via recommendation. Someone came to him and said "we should pardon this guy who got a bum rap from Biden". Trump said, sure why not, and signed his pardon.

No ridiculous conspiracy necessary.

ehnto2• 9 months ago

He should know though shouldn't he, as acting president of the US he should aim to learn and know these things as part of his service to the country.

Like when he's unaware of certain bills or important procedings, maybe he legitimately doesn't know, but he should. It's part of his job to know.

Of course the ignorance could be a lie, which is worse, but neither option is good. So in some ways it doesn't really matter, it's already a bad outcome.

chronci38302• 9 months ago

Of course the ignorance could be a lie, which is worse, but neither option is good.

Why would it be worse?

If he knows, at least he has a plan, whether that plan is good or bad.

If he doesn’t know at all, then literally even more random shit can occur than what’s already happening.

Jyaif• 9 months ago

Mathematically speaking, random actions can't be worse than actively bad actions.

ehnto2• 9 months ago

Just worse in regards to intent, you're right that it's probably not indicative of how bad the outcomes are going to be.

Gigachad• 9 months ago

Are we still pretending to take any of this seriously? Any criminal can just buy a pardon now.

krapp2• 9 months ago

Any criminal could always buy a pardon.

I loathe Orange Man but the power to arbitrarily pardon any federal crimes for any reason is one of the powers of his office and Americans haven't ever seen fit to limit it. Trump is flagrantly corrupt and tries to flout the law at every turn, but he's also exposing the degree to which the American system has always just run on gentlemans' agreements and pinky swears.

dns_snek• 9 months ago

Could be a lie? When are we going to stop pretending?

ceejayoz2• 9 months ago

Honestly, I think both are plausible. I think they put things in front of him, and he signs it (and there's video footage of this; https://x.com/ArtCandee/status/1882531252735242622); all this stuff about Biden's autopen running the show is projection. I think they've given him the ballroom project to keep him occupied.

cosmicgadget6• 9 months ago

Consider the possibility he ran only because the alternative was a conviction for the DC case or the documents case. And that he is only interested in enriching himself, paying back the Stephen Millers and Russell Voughts who got him back in office, and playing golf.

It doesn't make it better or worse, it just means the policies aren't his but the agenda of various puppetteers.

phito3• 9 months ago

If you watch any video of politicians being confronted to something bad they did, they will almost always say "I don't know anything about it". It's a bad faith strategy but it works if they're never held accountable of anything.

Craighead• 9 months ago

Please stop doing: "They all do this it's normal"

No, they don't "all do this". No, it's not normal.

ASalazarMX2• 9 months ago

This could have been an honest mistake. Surely he'll revoke the pardon and let Changpeng Zhao face a regular trial, so there's no misunderstanding, right?

He always knew, it's shameful how politicians behave like spoiled children instead of well-adjusted adults in a position of great responsibility. Why does this kind of people keep rising to the top?

croon2• 9 months ago

Because every principled politician steps down over a mistake, so the only remaining ones are unprincipled (or the elusive spotless) politicians.

csomar• 9 months ago

The dude is far from being behind Binance. He is behind many of the largest exchanges (ie: ByBit, Okx, Coinex, etc.). Maybe dozens (hundreds?) of them. If you used any of these exchanges, you'll notice they have roughly the same layout, front-end and probably back-end. They are all, also, run by Chinese. Some of them (like Coinex) require no KYC whatsoever and enable P2P trading.

Not that all of this matter, anyway, since trading now is moving to DEX where KYC is not really a thing. You still need to on/off-ramp crypto but it seems like the US is about to allow that no questions asked.

tomaytotomato• 9 months ago

"Funds are safu"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DelF6zEHXpE

comrade1234• 9 months ago

"Trump also discussed his support for cryptocurrencies and said that the US had to make sure it was a leader in the industry or risk China and its rivals gaining an advantage in the emerging technology."

China is anti-crypto and has no interest being a leader in it. It's very painful reading any sort of interview with trump.

karlkloss• 9 months ago

From the person who claims that Biden is so senile, that he didn't even know what his autopen signed.

Yizahi• 9 months ago

What a trash tier human he is. He is basically saying that he can do whatever to the reporters and no one can or want to do anything with him. He can take any any bribes, corrupt whole branches of government and it is business as usual. Pathetic really.

johneth• 9 months ago

He either doesn't know who he is, in which case why is he pardoning him, or he does know who he is, in which case he's brazenly lying.

Or he's so dementia ridden that he did know who he was, but no longer, in which case why is he in office?

lovetox• 9 months ago

He says it in the video, because good people recommended it. I can very much believe that this is how it works.

mandeepj• 9 months ago

because good people recommended it.

So doesn’t that mean he should know him now?

czottmann• 9 months ago

Contradictions and a lack of shame (about anything) are not lapses, they're integral part of the authoritarian playbook.

To be clear, I'm not "Just saying" – I'm actually saying.

Eddy_Viscosity22• 9 months ago

Being openly hypocritical and doing the very things you criticize (and/or punish) others for doing is show of dominance. It's also a outcome of Wilhoit's law.

ghtbircshotbe• 9 months ago

I'm sure it's a complete accident that binance was involved in setting up Trump's current crypto scam https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/technology/trump-pardons-...

Corruption is basically the operating principle of this administration, as on pretty clear display with the meeting with the president of Indonesia https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8nCxSBA4JsI

npteljes9• 9 months ago

I don't see why this is newsworthy. The guy has a 26,000-word Wikipedia article just about his lies only. I don't see why every one of his insane utterances must dominate the front page of every English-speaking news site. His detractors, and his supporters all agree that this is the way he is. Did any trend change, compared to his past? If not, then let's move on.

IAmBroom2• 9 months ago

Because there exists a real, nonzero chance that this is the piece of evidence that will convince some of his followers to finally admit he is either insane, shockingly stupid, or incompetent due to dementia.

npteljes9• 9 months ago

I would personally trade that hypothetical chance to not have to look at this piece of news, and especially for everyone else not having to look at it too. I think this would be a net positive for the short term, and I think that it wouldn't affect the long term either, so it's an overall good choice.

Main reason is that reality doesn't seem to concern the voter base of these people like Trump. If it did, we wouldn't be in this situation in the first place. And I'm not just meaning Trump here, but all the other populist leaders in the world as well.

I think if these kinds of articles were effective in that regard, we wouldn't be in this situation in the first place. So, if the goal is to change the minds of people for the better, instead of banging on about the trivial, we should be looking at how to communicate better. "Told you so" doesn't work.

UncleMeat• 9 months ago

Failing to cover Trump's bad behavior because he has always been bad is how we get "both sides are the same" trash.

Pardons are also particularly newsworthy because the Trump DoJ is exploring whether Biden's pardons can be invalidated via the claim that he wasn't aware of what he was doing (the autopen conspiracy).

rkomorn• 9 months ago

I think OP was talking about "newsworthy" in the HN sense.

I kind of agree, because it's quite likely to devolve into pot-stirring flame bait comment threads.

disqard• 9 months ago

he wasn't aware of what he was doing

Every accusation is a confession. Exhibit #5871

"No idea who he is"

dandanua2• 9 months ago

Is it newsworthy when cancer spreads from the liver to the brain in a patient? It is what cancer does, after all, and everyone knows that. So, why pay attention to it?

npteljes9• 9 months ago

I bet that would attract the attention of the patient and their loved ones! But, patients are also sick of their own ailments too.

And I also bet that relentless cancer coverage would affect a cancer patient more negatively than positively.

zikduruqe• 9 months ago

Silence is compliance.

thisisit• 9 months ago

The same reason China and human rights stories, which btw has more upvotes than this story, is newsworthy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45796907

Can we say that China and human rights abuse has a big word count Wikipedia page so lets move on?

States and head of states need to be held to higher standard.

npteljes9• 9 months ago

States and head of states need to be held to higher standard.

I agree completely. We don't see in the article what Xi has said about it though.

rsanek• 9 months ago

Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.

More guidelines available at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

npteljes9• 9 months ago

Thanks for the reminder. I was so heated that I in fact forgot that I can flag the thread.

thrance• 9 months ago

I am yet to hear of a single republican even just acknowledging that Trump ever lied. They're that deep in the cult. So yes, I think it's still important to speak about these things publicly, even just as a litmus test, if not anything else.

apexalpha• 9 months ago

It's so obvious they're selling pardons. It's so corrupt.

burnt-resistor• 9 months ago

Yep. Former New York City Mayor and former mob prosecutor Rudy Giuliani allegedly (via leaving the room and an aide making the ask) offered one for sale to John Kiriakou for $2 million ($1 million to Trump and $1 million to Giuliani) in 2019. I'm guessing with inflation, it's probably around $3 million in 2025 money.

UniverseHacker• 9 months ago

Of course Trump knows exactly who he is, but has to deny it, he’s the criminal he has contracted to run his cryptocurrency system that allows him to accept bribes in exchange for political favors. He didn’t just buy a pardon, but actually runs Trumps online payment system for purchasing pardons.

'No idea who he is', says Trump after pardoning crypto tycoon

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