President Donald Trump is a convicted white-collar criminal who likes to let other white-collar criminals off the hook. That statement is not a columnist’s vitriol but factually correct.
Last year, Trump was found guilty of falsifying business records, totaling 34 felonies. After winning the presidential election, he avoided prison time and fines. But the conviction remains on the books.
In the first week of Trump’s second presidency, he pardoned more than 1500 rioters who stormed the U. S. Capitol on January 6, 2021; Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road internet drug dealer, (whom Trump promised to free during the 2024 campaign), two police officers convicted in a fatal car chase, and 24 anti-abortion activists who interfered with the operation of women’s health clinics.
After that, he mostly used his authority to pardon criminals and commute sentences to assist his fellow white-collar criminals.
From February through the first week of December, Trump issued 61 pardons and commutations. Nearly half, 27, benefited white-collar criminals who had committed securities fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, tax evasion, and similar offenses. Two of these clemencies were granted to corporations, not individuals, an unprecedented act. An additional 14 were about political corruption. (Nine others were given to drug dealers and traffickers, some of whom I highlighted in a column last week.)
Among the white-collar criminals Trump has spared are Ponzi-type schemers David Gentile (sentenced to seven years for defrauding over 10,000 investors out of $1.6 billion) and Marian Morgan (who received a 35-year sentence for defrauding 87 people out of $28 million). Trump has also favored cryptocurrency executives from Binance and BitMEX who didn’t use legally necessary anti-money laundering protocols, creating platforms for criminal activity. BitMEX’s parent company received perhaps the only corporate pardon in history.
Trump’s clemencies are often seen as self-indulgence, rewarding friends and donors, and furthering fictional narratives of a “weaponized” Justice Department under the Joe Biden administration. But these individual acts of mercy should be viewed alongside Trump’s policies of radical financial deregulation and the ways the 47th president and his family are profiting from them.
Trump’s Justice Department completely shut down its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, which was established in the Biden administration. It effectively shuttered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), established by Barack Obama following the 2008 financial crisis.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) dropped several cryptocurrency cases. As noted by Americans for Financial Reform, some of the cases were aborted after suspects invested in the Trump family crypto business.
For example, in 2023, crypto billionaire Justin Sun was charged by the SEC with multiple counts of fraud. Shortly before the 2024 election, Trump and several family members co-founded the World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency company. After the election, Sun invested heavily in World Liberty Financial. Then, once Trump was inaugurated, the SEC shed interest in the Sun case and got it stayed by a judge.
Additionally, as reported by The New York Times, in December, World Liberty Financial bought $5 million in cryptocurrency from Ethena Labs. A few months later, one of Ethena’s investors—BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes—was pardoned by Trump.
The apparent quid pro quo lines Trump’s pockets, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us are unaffected. A radically deregulated financial industry driven by reckless crypto bros could lead to another financial meltdown.
This week, the Times reported that a form of cryptocurrency called stablecoins “exists largely beyond traditional financial oversight” and is funding an estimated $25 billion in illegal transactions worldwide. “As more Russian oligarchs, Islamic State leaders and others have begun using the cryptocurrency,” warned the Times, “the rise of these dollar-linked tokens threatens to undermine one of America’s most potent foreign policy tools: cutting adversaries off from the dollar and the global banking system.”
Trump signed into law a weak cryptocurrency regulation bill, the GENIUS Act, which (sadly) cleared Congress on a bipartisan vote. The bill did create regulations for stablecoins, but The Atlantic’s David Frum last month explained how the rules fall short:
The real advantage of stablecoins is that they allow asset holders to enter the U.S.-dollar system (99 percent of all stablecoins are U.S. dollar–pegged) while eluding normal U.S.-government rules, such as the “Know your customer” laws that expose bank depositors to intrusive questions about who they are and how they got their money. The GENIUS Act purports to apply such laws to stablecoin issuers, but only when a stablecoin is first issued in the United States. Once a stablecoin has been issued, however, tracking how it is swapped, and to whom, is difficult.
… Until now, the inherent dangers of stablecoins have deterred most investors and kept the market relatively modest: about $280 billion to $315 billion, smaller than the 12th-largest bank in the U.S. The entire stablecoin market could go bust tomorrow, and the U.S. financial system would wobble but recover. In light of the GENIUS Act, however, analysts at Citigroup project that the stablecoin market could grow as big as $4 trillion by 2030. A default in a market of that size could create shocks that reverberate through the global financial system.
Worse, one stablecoin company appears to have taken the federal government hostage. According to the Times:
Tether, which has over $180 billion worth of stablecoins in circulation, is based in El Salvador and would not be covered by the new rules. The company holds more than $112 billion in U.S. Treasuries, and any law enforcement action against Tether could potentially risk destabilizing important financial markets.
Still worse, the Trump administration has a massive conflict of interest with Tether:
The company has close connections to the family of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who is responsible for restricting exports of sensitive U.S. technology—restrictions that people can try to sidestep by making transactions with stablecoins like Tether.
These risks to the global economy don’t bother Trump, a white-collar criminal whose policies aid white-collar crime. He does not care that he is undoing years of his predecessors’ regulation of a financial industry that had gone off the rails and sparked a global economic meltdown. When the law ensnares his fellow white-collar criminals, he uses his pardon power to get them off the hook. Trump is driven by what will help himself and his ilk, not his country.
Trump’s clemency record is a classic tip of the iceberg, an above-the-water indication of a massive half-kleptocracy, half-kakistocracy government that sits below the surface, most of which we have yet to map.
