“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” —Sir Walter Scott

Last fall, in a move that seemingly came out of the blue, President Donald Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao. Back in 2023, Zhao, a Chinese-born Canadian billionaire, pled guilty to laundering money while CEO of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt explained, “President Trump exercised his constitutional authority by issuing a pardon for Mr. Zhao, who was prosecuted by the Biden Administration in their war on cryptocurrency.” Trump is a fan of crypto, so that’s perhaps understandable.

When asked about the pardon, Trump responded dismissively, “I don’t know, he was recommended by a lot of people. A lot of people say that he wasn’t guilty of anything. And so I gave him a pardon at the request of a lot of very good people.”

While it’s unclear whether Trump personally knew Zhao, his son, Eric Trump, would certainly have known him.

Mere weeks before Trump won his reelection in 2024, he and his long-time friend and golfing buddy, Steve Witkoff, launched a cryptocurrency company, World Liberty Financial (WLF). Prior to taking office, Trump and Witkoff signed over ownership of the venture to their sons, Eric Trump and Zach Witkoff, respectively — thereby, on paper, divesting from WLF.

Interestingly, just four days before Trump’s inauguration, the United Arab Emirates quietly invested more than $2.5 billion in WLF, which had, up to that point, produced very little.

Why would the UAE be interested in dumping a ton of cash into a little-known and newly formed cryptocurrency company? The apparent inference is Trump, or more specifically, access to Trump. With Trump heading back to the White House, the UAE saw an opportunity to secure a deal for access to top-grade American chips, an effort that had been blocked by the Biden administration. The oil-rich nation has been seeking to diversify its means of wealth generation and wants to become the world’s crypto capital.

One key figure was Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan, the number two in the UAE’s leadership and the country’s national security advisor.

It is Tahnoon, through his company Group 42 Holdings, who was blocked by the Biden administration from acquiring American chips because of his ties to Beijing-tied companies and China’s military. And it is also Tahnoon, who, through another of his companies, MGX, has engaged Zhao to build an AI infrastructure. And it is Tahnoon who has become a key investor and player in WLF.

In short, Tahnoon is connected to Trump through his son Eric Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as well as his friend Witkoff. Trump named Witkoff his Middle East envoy. Oh, and last May, the UAE secured that American AI chip deal that the Biden administration had blocked.

Trump’s pardoning of Zhao plays into this by freeing him to work with the UAE and the U.S, specifically helping WLF develop its stablecoin.

All of this has the smell of a pay-to-play scheme, the same type of scheme for which congressional Republicans spent years investigating the Biden family. The Clintons ran the same sort of thing through the Clinton Foundation while Hillary was secretary of state.

Politically, Trump is likely in the clear if Republicans maintain control of Congress. However, with polling favoring Democrats in the midterms, should they regain control of the House, we expect this issue to heat up in a big way. They will look for any excuse to raise an impeachment inquiry, and this one could be ripe for the picking.