U.S. President Donald Trump looks on, as he and Apple CEO Tim Cook (not pictured) present Apple's announcement of a $100 billion investment in U.S. manufacturing, in the Oval Office at the White House (REUTERS)
President Donald Trump recently turned heads after admitting that he sometimes doesn't actually know who he's pardoning when granting clemency requests.
CNN reported Monday on Trump's remark, which he made in an interview with Norah O'Donnell on CBS News' "60 Minutes" last weekend. When O'Donnell asked him about his recent pardon of Chinese-born cryptocurrency billionaire Changpeng Zhao (also known as C.Z., the former CEO of crypto exchange Binance). Zhao was sentenced in 2024 to four months in prison and was forced to pay $4.3 billion in penalties.
The CBS journalist pointed out that prior to the pardon, C.Z. "helped facilitate a $2 billion purchase" of a "stablecoin" (a cryptocurrency whose value is typically pegged to a real-world currency, like the dollar) created by his family's company, World Liberty Financial.
"How do you address the appearance of pay for play?" O'Donnell asked.
"Well, here's the thing, I know nothing about it because I'm too busy," Trump responded, before O'Donnell interjected by saying: "But he got a pardon."
"I have no idea who he is," Trump maintained. "I was told that he was a victim, just like I was and just like many other people — of a vicious, horrible group of people in the Biden administration."
CNN reporter Aaron Blake observed that Trump made a similar comment to Kaitlan Collins, who is the network's chief White House correspondent. When Collins asked Trump about his pardon of Zhao, Trump appeared to not know who he was until Collins refreshed his memory.
"I believe we’re talking about the same person, because I do pardon a lot of people," Trump said at the time, though Zhao was the only person he pardoned that week.
Trump's apparent lack of knowledge about Zhao despite pardoning him mirrors Republicans' critique of former President Joe Biden's pardons, which both Trump and the GOP have argued are invalid due to his use of the autopen. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) accused Biden of granting pardons without knowledge of "what the categories were apparently — much less the individual people that he pardoned."
Click here to read Blake's full analysis in CNN.
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