When President Donald Trump pardoned billionaire Changpeng Zhao on Oct. 21, controversy surrounding the cryptocurrency mogul’s ties with the Trump family had already been swirling for months.
Mr. Zhao, founder and former chief executive of Binance – the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange – had served four months in prison in 2024, after pleading guilty to violating U.S. regulations against money laundering. The Binance platform had “accommodated criminals across the world,” according to then-Attorney General Merrick Garland.
After serving his time, Mr. Zhao would still benefit from a pardon, because of ongoing legal constraints on his business activities.
Why We Wrote This
Upholding public trust has long been a central tenet of American democracy. But ethical norms have fallen under President Donald Trump even as the net worth of him and his family has grown. The White House denies conflicts of interest. Ethics experts disagree.
“No felon would mind a pardon,” he said in a March post on X, while also saying, “I have had no discussions of a Binance US deal” for a pardon.
But that same month, a different deal did happen: A sovereign wealth fund from the United Arab Emirates invested $2 billion in Binance, transferring the invested money in the form of a digital coin called USD1. It’s a product created and sold by the Trump family’s cryptocurrency firm, World Liberty Financial.
Coming in the early weeks of President Trump’s second term, the influx of money represented a huge vote of confidence in World Liberty and its fledgling coin. It also drew scrutiny from Mr. Trump’s critics. They saw the actions as efforts by Mr. Zhao, Binance, and the United Arab Emirates to influence the president to their advantage.
Since then, Mr. Zhao – who holds citizenship in Canada, France, and the United Arab Emirates – has received a pardon, and the UAE has won a deal for advanced computer chips. No evidence has emerged of a quid pro quo connection in all these actions. But the events are part of a larger pattern. Money is flowing to Trump family businesses and other Trump-related activities, often coming from entities that stand to benefit when Mr. Trump, as president, treats them favorably. The White House insists there are no conflicts of interest. Yet for watchdog groups and many in the general public, the appearances raise questions.
What is at stake, according to experts on ethics, are the nation’s long-standing norms and guidelines that elected officials and public servants are expected to follow.
“The Founders were very clear about the necessity for public officials to not be making profits on the side,” says Robert Maguire, research director at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW. Today, he says, there’s a violation of long-established expectations that the president should avoid the appearance of “acting in his own financial interest rather than the national interest.”
The issue is arising for at least two broad reasons. One is an unusually large tide of gifts toward projects such as Mr. Trump’s presidential library or his addition of a ballroom to the White House, now underway. The other is that his family remains active in global business activities that stand to benefit the president financially, even though he says he has recused himself from any direct management role.
Gifts are triggering alarm bells among some ethics experts who ask what donors might want in return for their contributions. The alarms get louder when the president himself and his family appear to benefit financially.
Over the past year, cryptocurrency has become much more lucrative as one of those family businesses.
A pardon, and red flags raised
On May 5, after the $2 billion Emirati investment deal occurred, two Democratic U.S. senators posted a letter to the acting director of the Office of Government Ethics, Jamieson Greer, outlining what they called a matter with “urgent ethics and national security implications,” involving “a crypto firm whose founder needs a pardon.”
“We write to request an urgent inquiry into a billion-dollar business deal involving the state-backed Emirati investment firm MGX, crypto exchange Binance, and World Liberty Financial (WLF) that is poised to enrich President Trump and his family, as well as the family of Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff,” said Sens. Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.
Some pieces of context: World Liberty Financial earns interest on the reserve assets that back customers’ holdings in the WLF stablecoin, USD1, so the Emirati fund’s investment in Binance also benefits the Trump family, as long as those assets are denominated in WLF’s coin. Mr. Witkoff’s son Zach is a manager at WLF alongside Mr. Trump’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric.
Weeks after that letter was sent, Mr. Trump announced that his administration had “agreed to create a path for UAE to buy some of the world’s most advanced AI semiconductors from American companies.”
And on Oct. 21, he pardoned Mr. Zhao.
In an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” that aired on Nov. 2, Mr. Trump played down any relationship with Mr. Zhao, saying he had “no idea” who the man was. Asked two days later about that statement at a White House briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the president meant that “he does not know him personally.”
“When it comes to pardons, the White House takes them with the utmost seriousness, and the president understands the responsibility that he has as president to issue clemency and issue pardons to individuals who are seeking that,” Ms. Leavitt continued, citing a “very thorough review process” for such requests.
In a Fox News interview on Nov. 7, Mr. Zhao denied having ties to the Trump family and said he had never met Mr. Trump. Binance’s current CEO, Richard Teng, denies that the company promoted a Trump-linked cryptocurrency before Mr. Zhao’s pardon. Five days after the pardon, Binance announced an expanded partnership with World Liberty Financial.
Throughout U.S. history, presidents have had their share of ethical scrutiny and scandals. What’s remarkable now is a confluence of unusual factors. Mr. Trump is serving as president even as his family remains highly active in a range of U.S. and global businesses. The president repeatedly disregards established norms (an issue that emerged early in Mr. Trump’s first term, prompting the director of the Office of Government Ethics to resign at the time). His party, over which he has great sway, controls both houses of Congress. He has dismantled some traditional modes of ethics oversight.
Together, these circumstances create what some observers see as an unprecedented opening for potential or actual corruption – combined with a projected air of normality around whatever actions Mr. Trump takes.
The result, as critics see it, is an open door to a pay-to-play presidency. Much of the question-raising activity is happening in plain sight.
“That is part of the genius of what he does,” says Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert on government ethics. “By doing it out in the open, many people think it can’t possibly be corrupt.”
Yet, in her view, Professor Clark says in an email, the president “has effectuated a hostile takeover of the federal government, establishing a corrupt, personalist regime where government action is determined not by the law, but by what pleases him.”
Wealth rising with a return to political power
Forbes magazine now estimates Mr. Trump’s net worth at about $6.3 billion, more than double where it stood in early 2024 – largely a result of the growth in the family’s crypto ventures. (Meanwhile, as in his first term, Mr. Trump has said he’s again not taking his presidential salary of $400,000 a year.)
Crypto isn’t the only arena in which public concerns have surfaced about conflicts of interest within the Trump administration. Researchers on the issue say it is often hard to know whether flows of money have resulted in improper influence on U.S. policy. Influences might exist without any overt quid pro quo deal, and thus can be hard to trace or prove.
Some examples that hint at both the risks and the blurry lines:
Trump memecoins. In May, the president held a gala dinner for the biggest buyers of a Trump-branded niche cryptocurrency: memecoins. The highest high roller, billionaire Justin Sun, bought more than $40 million in $Trump coins. Before and shortly after the 2024 election, Mr. Sun invested $75 million in the Trump family’s crypto business, WLF. In February, shortly after Mr. Trump retook office, the Securities and Exchange Commission paused an investigation into Mr. Sun and his companies over allegations of market manipulation.
The White House ballroom. Construction of a 90,000-square-foot, $300 million event space has begun, with last month’s razing of the East Wing. Mr. Trump has long sought such an addition and pledged no public money would go toward the project. That has opened the door to private donors – from major corporations to wealthy individuals to unnamed entities (individuals and companies) – who can potentially benefit by currying favor with the president. The White House promised transparency over the ballroom’s funding and released a list of donors, though not their donation amounts. But the identities of several donors remain off the record, including some with business before the administration, according to The New York Times. Mr. Trump also hosted a “thank you” dinner in the White House – with some media access – for high-dollar supporters.
Golden gifts from Switzerland. On Nov. 14, the Trump administration announced a deal to lower U.S. tariffs against Swiss imports from 39% to 15%. That followed a visit from Swiss business executives on Nov. 4 bearing gifts for the president, including a Rolex desk clock and a 1-kilogram personalized gold bar, according to news reports. The gifts will go to Mr. Trump’s presidential library, White House officials say.
Boeing 747 gift from Qatar. The White House said in May that the luxury jet was a donation to the Department of Defense and will be transferred to Mr. Trump’s presidential library after he leaves office. Democrats argue that the gift violates the foreign emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits federal office holders from accepting gifts from foreign states. Senate Democrats have tried unsuccessfully to prevent the administration from spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to transform the jet into a new Air Force One. They say it’s a hugely wasteful effort, if the plane is to be retired from federal service in 2029.
An overture from Serbia. On Nov. 7, the Serbian government passed a special law smoothing the way for a roughly $500 million Trump hotel project in Belgrade – under a development company run by Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law. In a June interview with BBC, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić voiced support for the proposed hotel, and added ”We are ready to build better relations with the U.S. I think that is terribly important for this country.” But Mr. Vučić’s government has faced its own controversy – public protests against alleged corruption and outcries against this deal in particular, which involves building a hotel on a historic site.
In all, ethics watchdog CREW counts 23 Trump-branded real estate projects outside the U.S. that are underway during Mr. Trump’s current term.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington
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Jacob Turcotte/Staff
“As a result, the president’s namesake private company, which he still owns and profits from, is free to do business in foreign countries while Trump is in office,” a CREW report says. The report argues that this results in “massive conflicts” between his personal interests and those of the nation he leads.
How Trump has reduced ethics guardrails
Democrats are not immune from the appearance of “pay to play.” During Joe Biden’s presidency, his son Hunter Biden and his brothers, Frank and James Biden, all came under legal scrutiny for allegedly leveraging the family name for financial gain, dating back to Joe Biden’s days as vice president. Last year, the GOP-run House Oversight Committee concluded that Biden family members and associates had received more than $27 million from foreign sources as part of a conspiracy to monetize Mr. Biden’s “office of public trust.”
After the Oversight Committee released its report, the Biden White House issued a statement rejecting the report’s conclusions, calling the impeachment inquiry a “failed stunt.” Media fact-check articles on the probe found Republicans made false and misleading claims.
Regardless, trackers such as Mr. Maguire say the amounts of money flowing currently are unprecedented, compared with past administrations of either party.
In January, before Mr. Trump’s second inauguration, the family business – the Trump Organization – announced that his children would handle daily management of the president’s businesses. His investments and assets would remain in a trust, also managed by his children. (Finance experts say that putting his personal assets in a blind trust, as a number of presidents have done in recent decades, would be difficult for Mr. Trump, because his real estate assets would need to be sold to accomplish that.)
“President Trump is the most transparent President of all time and follows all applicable federal and ethics laws, and there are no conflicts of interest,” Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, told the Monitor in a written statement on Nov. 7.
Watchdog groups beg to differ.
“From a government ethics point of view, [Mr. Trump] has taken us back over 50 years to the Watergate era, where there is distrust that officials at the highest level of government are truly making decisions for the public good, as opposed to their own personal profits,” says Kedric Payne, senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center in Washington.
Unlike past modern-era presidencies, including his own first term in the White House, Mr. Trump declined to issue an ethics pledge for his second term. Nor was there an ethics pledge for the transition process that launched when he was elected again last November. After retaking office in January, Mr. Trump also rescinded the ethics rules put in place by Mr. Biden when he was president.
Another big shift in the legal landscape: Last year’s Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity shields U.S. chief executives from prosecution for “official” acts, which can be defined broadly. Where the justices will draw the boundaries remains to be seen. But the ruling clearly reduces legal checks on presidential powers.
Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP/File
Other ethical and legal guardrails are also gone. At various federal agencies, 29 of 38 inspector general positions are vacant as of Oct. 21, including the 17 left empty after firings by Mr. Trump in January.
In February, the president also fired the Biden-era director of the Office of Government Ethics, a five-year position established in 1978, post-Watergate. The role is meant to prevent conflicts of interest within the executive branch, though the president is largely exempt from OGE oversight. A series of acting OGE directors have been filling the post.
What safeguards exist?
During Mr. Trump’s first term, ethics watchdogs reported that foreign governments and others purchased services from Trump businesses (including hotels, restaurants, and golf courses), arguing that this violated the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause, which bars officials from accepting gifts from foreign governments. After Mr. Trump left office in 2021, the Supreme Court vacated lower court rulings as moot.
According to a 2023 analysis by CREW, the president made up to $160 million from foreign countries during his first term. And now, with no emoluments cases pending, it remains unclear when or if the public will find out whether such income is legal, says Mr. Maguire, the CREW research director.
It’s also unclear how or whether the other ways Mr. Trump is making money while serving as president might be checked, including sales of things such as Trump-branded Bibles, sneakers, and cologne.
At this point, what, if anything, can serve as a brake on what some legal scholars see as unethical presidential behavior? Beyond a president’s own moral compass and the tone he or she sets, the two biggest checks are public opinion and Congress, say ethics experts. While voters will always have a mix of issues on their minds, ethics is one of them, as polls attest. Midterm elections for control of Congress are a year away.
