A legal representative for US Senator Elizabeth Warren is now defending a social media post in which the lawmaker alleged that “corruption” somehow led to the October 23, 2025 presidential pardon of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao or “CZ”.
A lawyer said to be representing Zhao has recently threatened to file a lawsuit against Senator Warren, after referring to her recent claims as “defamatory.”
Warren’s legal team also responded this past Sunday. Her attorney Ben Stafford said that simply put, any threatened defamation claim “would be without merit.”
Zhao had in 2023 actually pleaded guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act when he was the CEO of Binance, which remains the world’s largest crypto exchange in terms of trading volume and overall scope of operations.
Notably, CZ only admitted that Binance had failed to stop criminals, sanctioned entities, and various other bad actors from laundering funds. Along with this guilty plea, Zhao had formally agreed to step down from his role as Binance CEO and had to pay a $50 million penalty as well. Zhao was later sentenced to prison for 4 months.
Now, following the reelection of US President Donald Trump, Zhao may have campaigned for getting a pardon. And on October 23, Trump had officially pardoned Zhao. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt stated that the Binance founder had actually been prosecuted by the previous Biden Administration as part of their unjust war on cryptocurrency.
With Zhao’s latest presidential pardon, that so-called war has now come to an end, the Press Secretary claims.
However, US Democrats have had a strong reaction to this development.
Maxine Waters, the leading Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, has criticized the decision to move forward with the pardon, noting that it sends a rather “dangerous and reckless message to white-collar criminals and the entire cryptocurrency industry.”
Warren also took to social media and said that CZ pleaded guilty “to a criminal money laundering charge and was sentenced to prison. But then he financed President Trump’s stablecoin and lobbied for a pardon.”
She added that should Congress “not stop this kind of corruption, it owns it.”
Teresa Goody Guillen, the legal rep for Zhao, said that her client would not remain silent while the Senator seemingly “misuses the office to repeatedly publish defamatory statements.” Accordingly, she also said that Zhao respectfully “immediately requests the retraction of these false statements.”
A crowdsourced “community note” had been added to Warren’s social media post that said, “CZ pleaded guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act for failing to implement an effective anti-money laundering program. He did not plead guilty to money laundering.”
Meanwhile, Stafford unsurprisingly stated that Warren has nothing to apologize for.
In response to a letter from Goody Guillén, Stafford stated that Zhao had actually pleaded guilty to “a money laundering charge.”
In fact, Zhao had pleaded guilty to a violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, which is widely referred to “as an anti-money laundering law, including by federal agencies and courts,” Stafford said.
And even if Senator Warren’s X post was not quite accurate, it was not made “with malice” — which is said to be a required part of defamation lawsuits.
Still though, there is considerable reputational damage that could be caused here, which is definitely a legitimate reason to be concerned about such remarks.
Stafford also said that among other things, so-called ‘minor inaccuracies do not amount to falsity so long as “the substance, the gist, the sting, of the libelous charge is justified.”
And Warren’s attorney has emphasized that the senator was just referring to the charge CZ had actually pleaded guilty to. They also stated that her recent X post does “not state — and should not be construed to state — that he pled guilty to any other money laundering charge.”
It’s worth noting here that this does not seem like a good defensive strategy on Senator Warren’s part. The better course of action here might be to simply acknowledge that she was not as familiar with this case as she should have been, before making such statements. This would help end this issue at this point. Instead, it could get drawn out further and potentially lead to an undesirable outcome for Senator Warren.
