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Boosted by kornel ("Kornel"):
molly0xfff@hachyderm.io ("Molly White") wrote:

Binance pleaded guilty to Iran (and other) sanctions violations in 2023. Trump pardoned its founder. Binance took a $2B investment paid in the Trump family’s stablecoin. Now DOJ is investigating Binance for... Iran sanctions violations, under a US attorney who used to be Trump's lawyer.

#crypto #cryptocurrency #USpol #USpolitics #CitationNeededNewsletter

Binance Binance has dropped its March defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal over the outlet’s reports that the Department of Justice was investigating Binance for violating sanctions against Iran [I102].18 The request to dismiss the lawsuit came the day after Bloomberg confirmed that the Manhattan US Attorney’s Office is indeed probing Binance’s compliance program to determine whether the company knew that customers were using its platform to circumvent the sanctions.19 I’ll be interested to see how that investigation plays out. The Southern District of New York is currently headed by Jamie McDonald, a former Trump personal lawyer. While in private practice, he represented Coinbase in its lawsuit from the SEC, and has also represented Polymarket and other crypto-adjacent firms.
Binance has been a lucrative partner to Trump, accepting a $2 billion investment from the United Arab Emirates’ MGX investment fund denominated in the USD1 stablecoin [I83]. That $2 billion is a substantial chunk of USD1’s reserves, and helped to generate $8.3 million in income for Trump in 2025. Binance has also provided software to the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial, listed USD1 for trading, and offered incredibly generous promotions to incentivize traders to buy the Trump family’s stablecoin [Quid pro quo]. The benefits have gone both ways for Binance. A 2023 enforcement action by the SEC, which accused Binance of fraud and operating as an unregistered securities exchange (and included a quote from Binance’s Chief Compliance Officer that “we are operating as a fking unlicensed securities exchange in the USA bro”), was dismissed with prejudice in May 2025 [I85]. Later that year, Trump pardoned the company’s former CEO, Changpeng Zhao, who was convicted of violating anti-money laundering and sanctions laws [I95].