Trump Just Pardoned a Pretty Sketchy Character

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to the Last Post of the Week from the Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)

All you need to know about this story in The Wall Street Journal is wrapped up there right in the first sentence.

President Trump has pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the convicted founder of the crypto exchange Binance, following months of efforts by Zhao to boost the Trump family’s own crypto company.

They’re not even bothering to hide it well any more. (At least Tom Homan is accused of stashing the payoff in a paper bag.) Zhao is a perfect exemplar of why the entire crypto culture should be drowned in a lake of Red Bull. He was a thoroughgoing crook.

Zhao was sentenced to four months in prison after he reached a deal with the Justice Department to plead guilty to enabling money laundering at Binance, which he ran at the time. Thanks to the pardon, Zhao could retake direct control of Binance.

Ever ready to assume her duties as cruise director on the S.S. Utter Bullshit, Karoline Leavitt managed to work Joe Biden into her alibi for her boss’s egregious grifting.

“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,” Leavitt said. “In their desire to punish the cryptocurrency industry, the Biden Administration pursued Mr. Zhao despite no allegations of fraud or identifiable victims. ... These actions by the Biden Administration severely damaged the United States’ reputation as a global leader in technology and innovation. The Biden Administration’s war on crypto is over.”

Look, the guy copped to the charges, which almost certainly involved some kind of money laundering. His company agreed to pay $4 billion in fines, and Zhao himself agreed to a penalty of $50 million. I feel pretty safe in not calling him a victim, but you be you, okay?

At Thursday’s White House news briefing, press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked about potential conflicts of interest related to Zhao’s pardon. “The president and the White House have a very thorough examination of every pardon request that comes to the president’s desk,” she said.

“I spoke with our great White House counsel about the pardon after it happened,” Leavitt continued. “This was an overly prosecuted case by the Biden administration.”

Leavitt added that Trump wanted to “correct this overreach of the Biden administration’s misjustice, and he exercised his constitutional authority to do so.”

It seems that nobody is buying Leavitt’s crypto-truth. Jim Geraghty of the National Review made a meal of the pardon, tracing it all the way back to when the president and his family decided to get into the crypto game in the first place, and he provides a helpful explanation from the Department of the Treasury’s report on Zhao’s criminality.

As an [money services business], Binance was required to report suspicious transactions to FinCEN through suspicious activity reports (SARs). FinCEN’s investigation revealed that Binance’s former Chief Compliance Officer told personnel that the CEO’s policy was to not report such activity, and Binance never filed a single SAR with FinCEN. Binance willfully failed to report well over 100,000 suspicious transactions that it processed as a result of its deficient controls, including transactions involving terrorist organizations, ransomware, child sexual exploitation material, frauds, and scams. ... One Binance compliance employee said in a written communication that the company had an open door to people laundering drug money, according to the government. “Is washing drug money too hard these days,” the employee wrote. “Come to Binance we got cake for you.”

It’s all crooks, all the way down.

Letitia James pleaded not guilty on Friday on the Trumped-up mortgage-fraud charges brought by whatever prosecutors they could find who fit the kangaroo suits comfortably. From the BBC:

James’s legal team also said in court filings this week that they plan to challenge the appointment of U.S. attorney Lindsey Halligan to James’s case. Trump appointed Ms Halligan, his former personal attorney, to oversee the case after another US prosecutor, Erik Siebert, resigned. Siebert reportedly was ousted after he told the justice department he had not found sufficient evidence to charge James. James’s attorneys also are filing a motion to dismiss the case on the grounds that it is “vindictive.” She is one of several Trump critics who are under investigation or have faced criminal charges in recent weeks. The justice department charged Trump’s former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey with making false statements to Congress.

Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, is charged with sending and willfully retaining national defence information. Trump last month called on his social media site Truth Social for Attorney General Pam Bondi, to bring charges against his political opponents. “We can't delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” he wrote.

Weekly WWOZ Pick to Click

“Morgus the Magnificent” —Morgus and the Ghouls

Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit to the Pathé Archives

Here, from 1956, is a clip that even the Pathé people admit is bizarre. A bunch of Britishers get together every morning on an observation platform to watch people build a building. The Pathé people say this is a natural for Monty Python fans. But until I see the Amazing El Mystico and Janet in the background. I’m not buying it. History is so cool.

On the social media, Professor Garrett Epps reminds us that tomorrow is the Feast of St. Crispin. Crispin and Crispinian were shoemakers in Gaul who preached Christianity and were beheaded for their trouble by Emperor Diocletian some time at the end of the third century AD. They are the patron saints of cobblers, glove makers, tanners, and assorted other crafts. Of course Crispin, at least, got a big push by William Shakespeare when his feast became the jumping-off point for the first great recorded pep talk in English. As for Crispinian, I guess he’ll have to settle for being the patron saint of breakfast cereals.

There was an interesting moment in a federal court on Friday. At issue was an appeal filed on behalf of scholar and scientist Ali al-Timimi, who was convicted of encouraging young men to go to Afghanistan to fight against a post-9/11 American invasion. (Al-Timimi already has had some of those convictions overturned.) Federal judge Stephanie Thacker posed an interesting question to the prosecutors. From Politico:

“What if a large group of people, angry at Congress, gathered on the Washington Mall, some of whom have firearms, and are known to have firearms, and a leader stood in front of them, here, right in front of them, not in another country, and said, ‘Go down the street and fight like hell. I’ll be there with you?’ ”

Yeah, what if? Nah, that could never happen.

Discovery Corner

Hey, look what we found! From Smithsonian:

According to a statement from Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, the fortress was discovered during recent excavations at the Tell el-Kharouba archaeological site in the northern Sinai Desert.

“Taking into account storerooms, courtyards and other facilities, we estimate that the garrison likely ranged between 400 and 700 soldiers, with a reasonable average of around 500 soldiers,” excavation leader Hesham Hussein, the undersecretary for Lower Egypt and Sinai archaeology at the ministry, tells Live Science’s Owen Jarus. Spanning about two acres, the newly discovered site features a southern wall that’s nearly 350 feet long and 8 feet thick. Excavations also revealed the remains of 11 defensive towers and a zigzagging wall on the western side of the structure measuring nearly 250 feet long. The zigzag pattern was likely designed to help the fortress endure harsh desert climates. This style “helped reinforce the wall’s stability and reduce the impact of wind and sand erosion,” Hussein adds.

Chow call!

The wall also acted as a division between the rest of the fort and a residential area where ancient Egyptian soldiers may have lived. On the outskirts of the residential area, researchers found small ovens likely used “for daily domestic activities inside the fortress,” Hussein tells Live Science. Nearby, the team discovered fossilized dough.

Mmmm, fossilized dough!

Hey, NPR. Is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

Once he got closer, Tsogtbaatar—who now works at North Carolina State University—knew exactly what it was. A dome-shaped skull. It turned out that Tsogtbaatar had just discovered a new species of pachycephalosaur, a unique group of dinosaurs defined by their thick, bony, hemispherical skulls but about which little else is known. In that moment, “we just stopped breathing,” he says. “This is the first definitive pachycephalosaur that’s ever been found in the early Cretaceous,” says Lindsay Zanno, also a paleontologist at North Carolina State University in addition to serving as the head of paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. “It just pops out of the fossil record with a fully developed dome, and bells and whistles on its head.”

As it should, befitting a breathtaking dino who has made people happy now.

I’ll be back on Monday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and the New One. In your spare time, spare a thought for the victims of the unspeakable violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and for everyone touched by the mass shootings in Michigan, North Carolina, Colorado, Minneapolis, N.Y.C., and Reno, the victims of the Manchester synagogue attack, and everyone recovering from the flooding in Charleston, and in the Roanoke Valley, and in Wisconsin, and in Texas, and in North Carolina, and by earthquakes in Myanmar and Thailand, and in Turkey and Russia, and by the tornadoes throughout the Southeast, and for everyone touched by floods in Kentucky and in West Virginia, and Nigeria, and by the crash in Washington, and by the measles outbreak in the Southwest, and in the wildfire zone around Dallas, and in the fire zones in Napa, and in Las Vegas, Nashville, and Queens, who who were visited by the Crazy before the year had hardly begun, and the folks in Dallas and Tallahassee, who were visited by the Crazy this week. And the people in drought-stricken north Alabama. And the victims of Tropical Storm Melissa in Haiti. And the folks caught in floods and tornadoes in Nebraska, and in Missouri. And the folks caught in “historic floods” in Kentucky. And in Oklahoma. And the folks in L.A., now fighting floods and mudslides exacerbated by the recent wildfires. And the folks in the wildfire zones in Pennsylvania, and in Minnesota. And the folks in Lahaina, who are still rebuilding. And the victims of the nightclub collapse in the Dominican Republic. And especially for our fellow citizens in the LGBTQ+ community, who deserve so much better from their country than they’ve been getting. And for all of us, who will be getting exactly what we deserve. Thank you for your attention to this matter.