President Trump took another step into the muck last week, said Jim Geraghty in National Review, with an act “stunning in its shamelessness, recklessness, and moral inversion”: he officially pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of the global crypto exchange Binance.
There aren’t many financial institutions “willing to do work with al-Qa’eda, Isis, Hamas, ransomware hackers, and kiddie-porn enthusiasts”, but Zhao’s Binance answered the call. Two years ago, however, the Chinese-born Canadian pleaded guilty to money laundering: his company agreed to pay $4.3 billion to the US authorities, and he himself paid a $50 million fine, was banned from running Binance and was sentenced to four months in jail.
