I want to start today by playing a testy little exchange from last week between President

Trump and CNN's Caitlin Collins.

Collins is asking the president about his decision to pardon Changpeng Xiao, better known

as CZ. CZ was the CEO of the crypto platform

Binance, and he pled guilty to money laundering last year.

Today you pardoned the founder of Binance. Can you explain why you chose to pardon him and

did it have anything to do with his involvement in your family's?

Which one? Who is that? The founder of Binance. He has an involvement in

Europe. The recent one, yes. I believe we're talking about the same break because I do part

in a lot of people. I don't know he was recommended by a lot of people. A lot of people say that,

are you talking about the crypto person? A lot of people say that he wasn't guilty of anything. He served

four months in jail and they say that he was not guilty of anything, that what he did,

well, you don't know much about crypto. You know nothing about, you know nothing about nothing,

you have fake news. I played that exchange for Alex Kirshner. Alex is a contributing writer here at Slate, who writes a lot about crypto.

And I asked him to remind everyone what CZ actually did, because if you listen to the president,

well, it's hard to know.

The United States has rules that are designed to stop people from helping others launder money.

And finance not only didn't stick within the spirit of those rules, but flattered them,

aggressively, even mocked them in internal communications that the United States government unearthed.

And the reason why Changpeng

Zhao went to jail was because he turned Binance into a deliberate playground for money

launderers and financial criminals who were using crypto to skirt the rules of the U.S. and really global financial system.

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