‘There were no money-laundering charges’: CZ claps back at Senator Warren

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Binance founder Changpeng Zhao says Elizabeth Warren “can’t get her facts right” after she claimed he pled guilty to a money laundering charge.

Binance co-founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao has fired back at US Senator Elizabeth Warren after she claimed he “pleaded guilty to a criminal money-laundering charge.”

In a Friday X post, Zhao wrote that Warren “can’t get her facts right” since, in her public statement, she claimed that he “pleaded guilty to a criminal money laundering charge and was sentenced to prison.”

“There were NO money laundering [charges],“ CZ responded.

What Zhao pleaded guilty to is a single felony count of violating the US Bank Secrecy Act by failing to maintain an effective Anti-Money Laundering (AML) program at Binance. This led to him receiving a four-month sentence in April 2024.

CZ’s pardon was signed on Wednesday, and Binance confirmed the presidential order to Cointelegraph in a statement.

One X user accused Zhao of “playing semantics,” arguing that the plea was still “very much a money-laundering conviction.” Zhao responded that he had accepted responsibility for compliance failures but not for laundering money himself.

Warren accuses Trump of corruption

In her post, Warren went on to say that Zhao “financed President Donald Trump’s stablecoin and lobbied for a pardon.” This follows the Binance co-founder and former CEO saying that he “wouldn’t mind a pardon” from Trump at the end of 2024. Warren said:

“If Congress does not stop this kind of corruption, it owns it.“

Back in mid-July, Zhao also threatened to sue Bloomberg over a report linking him to the Trump-backed USD1 stablecoin. The report in question, which remains live, claims that Binance wrote the basic code to power USD1, citing critics saying the situation leads to conflicts of interest for Trump.

Not the only outraged lawmaker

Warren’s comments follow similar remarks by US Representative and top Democrat on the House Committee on Financial Services, Maxine Waters. In a statement released on Friday, she said that “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 said.

The accusations of corruption follow reports finding that Trump’s second term in office has coincided with an extraordinary increase in his personal wealth, reportedly generating over $1 billion in pre-tax profit over the past year. Trump’s family does not hide this fact. Trump’s son, Eric Trump, even said the family’s actual profits were “probably more.”

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