Thanks to Donald Trump, 2025 was a good year … for white-collar criminals | Donald Trump
When Islamic State needed to move and disguise its money, it turned, US prosecutors said in 2023, to the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange: Binance. So too did al-Qaida, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, which used the platform to help bankroll its operations in the years leading up to the 7 October attack in Israel. Binance was not accused of directly financing these groups, but prosecutors found that it knowingly allowed its exchange to function as a conduit – enabling extremist organisations to shift funds, evade scrutiny and frustrate investigations.
At the centre of it all was Binance’s founder and chief executive, Changpeng Zhao. By 2024, the self-styled “king” of crypto had fallen from grace, pleading guilty to money laundering charges and entering prison, while Binance agreed to pay a record $4.3bn penalty for its role in facilitating terrorist financing. The case was hailed as a rare victory for regulators willing to take on the industry’s biggest players – and for victims of the violence linked to those financial flows. Among them were the families of US citizens killed on 7 October, who are now suing Binance in a class-action lawsuit accusing the company of “pitching itself to terrorist organisations”.
But in late October, Donald Trump announced that he was pardoning Zhao. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, framed the decision as a corrective to what she called the Biden administration’s “war on cryptocurrency”, insisting that Zhao’s crimes had produced no “identifiable victims”.
It was a familiar refrain, dressed up for a new audience: that corruption is somehow a “victimless crime”. The claim is absurd. Terrorist organisations do not exist in a vacuum. They depend on white-collar criminals capable of building and maintaining secretive financial pipelines. The victims of bombings, shootings and mass casualty attacks are, all too often, also the victims of bankers, executives and financiers who made that violence possible.
Zhao’s pardon sent a clear signal about who stands to gain most from a Trump presidency. As those concerned with environmental collapse, economic instability and the spread of authoritarianism find themselves increasingly sidelined, white-collar criminals – Zhao among them, and Trump himself – are enjoying a political moment unlike any they have known before.
For this coterie of fraudsters and tax evaders, the past year has been a cresting wave of successes: the abandonment of seeming slam-dunk prosecutions, presidential pardons for even the most egregious crimes, and a steady hollowing out of the agencies tasked with holding them to account. Trump’s not wrong when he rails about a surge in crime. But “the crime wave,” as journalist Jacob Silverman wrote earlier this year, “is white collar”.
But why would the Trump administration choose to set aside consequences from criminals whose actions threaten the stability of the broader American economy?
The pardon president
Trump’s preferred tool for aiding white-collar criminals is simple: the pardon. Where previous presidents deployed that power sparingly, often at the end of their terms, Trump has wielded it promiscuously – issuing clemency even when it results in something completely anathema to his administration’s stated goals.
Take Trump’s supposed focus on combating narco-traffickers. Trump has been explicit about wanting to control the influx of narcotics and fentanyl into the US from South America – and is close to waging war on Venezuela despite the fact that it is not among the primary direct traffickers of cocaine to the US. At the same time, Trump has pardoned Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former Honduran president.
Hernandez may not appear as a typical white-collar criminal, given that he was a head of state. But just look at what he was accused of, and who he used his legal, financial and political power to aid. In 2024, Hernández was convicted by a US jury of an extraordinary catalogue of crimes, including conspiring to import roughly 400 tonnes of cocaine into the United States. As the US attorney general said at the time, Hernández stood “at the centre of one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world”, entwining his finances with the cartels and transforming Honduras into a key transit hub for narcotics bound for American streets and, in the process, one of the most dangerous countries on Earth.
His guilty verdict and 45-year sentence were among the most spectacular blows against these drug-smuggling networks over the past decade and a far more meaningful interception against narco-trafficking rings than anything Trump could hope to gain from war in Venezuela. It was also a stark illustration of how white-collar crime is anything but victimless: a mechanism through which narco-states are built, violence is normalised and entire societies are destabilised.
Then, as with Zhao, it unravelled. Trump announced in early December that Hernandez was “treated very harshly and unfairly” and would walk free. Hernandez spent months lobbying Trump acolytes and conservative media personalities, pitching himself as a pro-Trump “ally on migration and security” and casting himself as a victim of political revenge by the Biden administration that he said had also been used to target Trump. The play worked. And it would not be the last time.
One by one, white-collar criminals have marched to the White House, bleating their fealty to Trump – and watching their prison sentences evaporate as a result.
There was Charles Scott, a Virginia businessman sentenced earlier this year for manipulating stock values and defrauding investors at a lighting company – and who Trump later freed. A pair of reality television stars, Julie and Todd Chrisley, were caught out evading taxes, sentenced to three years in prison as a result – before Trump decided to pardon them. David Gentile was a former private equity head, convicted last year for conspiring to defraud investors (along with his partner) to the tune of some $1.6bn, receiving a seven-year sentence as a result. But just days into his prison term, Trump announced Gentile’s sentence would be commuted, and that he could walk free.
The latter decision was remarkably galling. Gentile and his colleague had defrauded a staggering 10,000 different victims: parents and grandparents with little to their names, some of whom saw their entire life savings wiped out. “I’m totally disgusted, because it wasn’t only myself,” one of Gentile’s victims said after Trump’s move. “It was my elder mother in her nineties and my sister as well… We all got defrauded.”
Nor were Trump’s pardons confined to financial crime alone. In the political realm, he used them to dismantle the already-fragile idea of public accountability, turning American public squares into carnivals of bribery and fraud.
He pardoned Alexander Sittenfeld, a former member of the Cincinnati city council, convicted by a jury on both bribery and extortion charges, John Rowland, a former Connecticut governor, caught out in multiple corruption cases and Jeremy Hutchinson, a former Arkansas state legislator and scion of one of Arkansas’s most prominent political families. In 2023, Hutchinson pleaded guilty to accepting over $150,000 worth of bribes, receiving a four-year sentence as a result – a sentence that Trump wiped away earlier this year.
Just this month Trump announced the pardon of Henry Cuellar, a Texas representative and the first member of Congress in US history formally accused of acting as a foreign agent, allegedly overseeing multiple bribery schemes from Mexico to Azerbaijan. Cuellar had allegedly become an Azeri mole, working for a regime known for its kleptocratic brutality, routinely jailing dissidents, journalists and political opposition figures. Cuellar allegedly served as an Azeri agent while the regime was engaged in ethnic cleansing against Armenians, constituting, as Freedom House detailed, “war crimes and crimes against humanity”.
None of that mattered. Cuellar was pardoned anyway, permitted to remain in Congress and transformed into a potential political ally. The message to lawmakers was unmistakable: loyalty to Trump now offers protection from consequences. The message to foreign strongmen was equally clear. The United States, once again, is open for business.
‘Gutting enforcement against corporate lawbreakers’
Yet pardons are only one part of the arsenal Trump has deployed to help white-collar criminals escape justice. Pardons are generally used only for those already convicted of crimes. It’s far easier to simply drop any and all investigations into potential malfeasance, before any convictions ever come.
Public Citizen, the nonprofit consumer rights group, has been keeping a record of the enforcement actions – that is, either prosecutions or investigations – against corporate defendants that have now been paused or scuttled outright, all as a direct result of Trump’s decisions. Out of 480 corporations targeted in previous enforcement actions, the Trump administration has already thwarted approximately one third of them. As Public Citizen summarized, “President Trump talks tough on crime, but his administration is gutting enforcement against corporate lawbreakers.”
The examples are sprawling. After years of deadly crashes linked to systemic negligence at Boeing, the Department of Justice launched a felony case, charging the company with conspiracy to defraud the United States, and tying its conduct to the deaths of hundreds of people. Boeing initially agreed to plead guilty and pay nearly $700m in fines. But after donating about $1m to Trump’s inauguration fund, the agreement collapsed. The prosecution was dropped. Lawyers for victims’ families called the decision “unprecedented” and “obviously wrong for the deadliest corporate crime in US history”. A judge last month noted that the agreement “fails to secure the necessary accountability to ensure the safety of the flying public”.
Unregistered brokers trading unregulated securities. Pharmaceutical price-fixing conspiracies. Corporations operating factories that presented “imminent and substantial endangerment to public health”. Case after case evaporated – often following political donations or business arrangements benefiting Trump, his family or his allies.
No sector better encapsulates this dynamic than cryptocurrency. Major crypto players like Crypto.com and Coinbase saw investigations quietly shelved. Binance and Zhao, mentioned above, stood at the center of one of this corrupt carousel.
Months before Trump pardoned Zhao, Binance had begun helping Trump’s personal crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, craft its own stablecoin – a coin that a separate firm controlled by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) later used to bankroll a $2bn investment back into Binance. (For good measure, the UAE then received access to high-end American chips – despite all the rampant national security worries.)
All of it generated potentially tens of millions of dollars for the Trumps in the process – and ended up resulting in Zhao walking free. It was a single, sordid web of crypto pay-offs, presidential profiteering and white-collar convictions undone, with rising national security concerns thrown in for good measure. Unsurprisingly, these crypto organizations, and the broader crypto industry as a whole, have become perhaps Trump’s biggest corporate boosters – and that there are now spiraling worries that this unregulated industry will be at the center of America’s next economic collapse.
Letting the world’s criminals know: the US is open for business
At one level, Trump’s dismissive approach to financial crime is easy to explain: it pays. But his widespread support of white-collar criminals seems to be about more than just his bottom line. Why is it that the Trump administration wants to help people who risk the destabilization of the American economy writ large?
Part of it is grievance. It’s no secret that Trump has viewed himself as a victim of the Biden administration’s apparently overweening focus on financial crime – and on the supposed “weaponization” of the justice system.
Part of it is about amassing further power – beating back democratic forces in places like Honduras, or ensuring support from those that owe Trump their freedom. If Trump, for example, attempts to retain office beyond constitutional limits, he will not do so alone. He will be backed by the men he freed, the corporations he shielded, and the regimes he reassured – all with a shared incentive to keep him in place. A future administration could, after all, put them back behind bars.
Part of it is ideological, part of a broader suite of Republican-led policy decisions to dismantle the so-called “administrative state”. Any notion of independence at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has effectively collapsed. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is starved of authority and funding, with the Trump administration openly questioning its legality. The Environmental Protection Bureau has a name that is now effectively an oxymoron, with the administration rolling back everything from limits on pollution to obliterating restrictions on things like formaldehyde. And the Department of Justice has become the personal plaything for Trump, which he’s used to target his enemies and aid his allies.
And these are only the topline developments. The US’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act – which previously prevented American corporations from bribing crooked foreign officials, entrenching dictatorships around the world – is being effectively neutered. The new shell company registry – which would have ended the US’s role as the greatest home for dirty money around the world – is now, for all intents and purposes, dead. Autocrats and oligarchs, narco-traffickers and arms dealers, anyone relying on criminal proceeds to finance their malign activities – they’re all now realizing that they can rely on the US to act as their wallet, and to help them make the world safe for dictatorship once more.
All of this makes not just the poisoning and desecration of American landscapes far likelier, but accelerates the likelihood of corporate failure, and even economic collapse. If these same dynamics – rolling back regulations, foregoing investigations, allowing corporate fraud to flourish – led to everything from ecological devastation to the Great Recession over the past few decades, there’s every reason to think it will happen again.
Authoritarian systems do not emerge spontaneously. They are financed, lubricated and sustained by precisely these kinds of quid-pro-quo arrangements. The end point is not merely corruption, but entrenchment: a political order in which crime is rewarded, enforcement is optional and loyalty is currency.
This dynamic not only rewards crime but incentivizes it. How stupid a corporate leader do you have to be to continue complying with rules and regulations that are no longer even enforced?
It’s a race to the bottom for corporate crime, all of which will – one way or the other – blow up in our faces, through ecological catastrophe, a redux of the Great Recession, or a terrorist attack on American soil. Whatever it is, it will be something that puts paid to the idea that this kind of corruption or white-collar criminality was ever a “victimless” crime – because, by that point, all of us will be victims as well.
Spot illustrations by Igor Bastidas
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