- A lawyer for Changpeng Zhao said the Binance founder had not paid to secure his October pardon.
- “That’s not who he is,” Teresa Goody Guillen said in a podcast appearance on Friday.
- She called media reports suggesting otherwise “a pile up of a lot of false statements.
A lawyer for Binance founder Changpeng Zhao has denied that Zhao paid to secure his October pardon from US President Donald Trump.
“I just know that that would never happen, that’s not who he is,” Zhao’s lawyer, Teresa Goody Guillen, said Friday on the Pomp Podcast, hosted by crypto investor Anthony Pompliano.
Pompliano had asked whether the president controlled a “secret Bitcoin wallet” that Zhao or Binance had paid in exchange for his pardon.
“We would see that tracked,” Goody Guillen added, referring to the transparency of blockchain ledgers. Blockchain transactions are public, though they only reveal the alphanumeric addresses of wallets that send and receive crypto, rather than the identities of the wallets’ owners.
Binance has developed close ties with the Trump family since the president won reelection last November, according to news reports.
At the same time, Zhao, who served a four-month prison sentence in 2024, requested and received a presidential pardon, raising questions about a potential quid-pro-quo.
Trump’s opponents have pounced on Binance’s ties to the Trump family and on Zhao’s pardon.
“If Congress does not stop this kind of corruption, it owns it,” US Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said in October.
In 2023, Zhao pleaded guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act when he led Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange.
Specifically, he admitted Binance had failed to prevent criminals, sanctioned entities, and other bad actors from laundering billions of dollars in dirty money under his leadership.
In addition to his guilty plea, Zhao agreed to resign as CEO and pay a $50 million fine. Binance pleaded guilty to similar charges and agreed to pay $4.3 billion in penalties.
Trump-Binance ties
Since the election, Binance has become enmeshed with World Liberty Financial, a crypto company part-owned by the president and other members of his family.
Trump family company DT Marks DEFI LLC once held a 75% stake in World Liberty. Today, the World Liberty website states DT Marks holds a 38% stake in the company. DT Marks and certain members of the Trump family also hold 22.5 billion World Liberty tokens, and DT Marks receives 75% of the proceeds from the sale of those tokens.
Binance wrote the code for the smart contract that powers the World Liberty stablecoin, USD1, Bloomberg reported in July. Zhao denied the report and threatened to sue the publication.
In March, United Arab Emirates-backed investment firm MGX said it would take a $2 billion stake in Binance. In May, the firm said it would use USD1 to complete the transaction.
Binance later ran a promotional campaign to boost USD1 trading volume on PancakeSwap, a decentralised exchange it created in 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported. PancakeSwap runs on BNB Chain, a blockchain created by Binance.
Separately, representatives of the Trump family have discussed taking a stake in Binance’s US arm, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
“I have had no discussions of a Binance US deal with … well, anyone,” the billionaire wrote on X after the report was published.
“No felon would mind a pardon, especially being the only one in US history who was ever sentenced to prison for a single [Bank Secrecy Act] charge,” he added.
Binance has been functionally barred from the US market since it pleaded guilty in 2023. Zhao’s pardon could make it easier for the company to reenter the US, according to news reports.
‘False statements’
In her appearance on the Pomp Podcast, Goody Guillen called the reporting on the World Liberty-Binance relationship “a pile up of a lot of false statements, misstatements.”
“There’s no basis for it other than ‘sources that are close to somebody,’ which is code for ‘not a strong source,’” she said.
The attorney also dismissed criticism tied to the MGX deal.
“That’s similar to saying, ‘You buy wheat from me, and you pay in a Swiss franc, and therefore I’m investing in Swiss francs, and I’m paying to play with the politicians in Switzerland,’” said Goody Guillen, who also represents World Liberty.
The attorney said Zhao’s pardon was a matter of fairness, calling the crime to which he pleaded guilty a mere “regulatory infraction.”
“Name your big financial institution — it has most likely been charged with either these same violations or more egregious ones, and we don’t see their executives being prosecuted,” she said.
“There’s still a lot of damage that was done to Binance and to CZ both. But a big loser in this is the US. Binane still isn’t here.”
Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.
