How the Washington Post Screwed the Pooch On the Binance Pardon
President pardons guy who increased his net worth by billions. Big story? Nah.
Illustration for Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale” from the Huntington Library’s early-15th-century Ellesmere manuscript of “The Canterbury Tales.”
Guess where the print edition of the Washington Post placed the story of President Donald Trump’s pardon yesterday for his business partner Changpeng Zhao, founder of Binance. No really, guess. Obviously not on Page One, or I wouldn’t be asking.
Page A3? Nope.
Page A8? You’re getting warmer, but no.
It’s on Page A13, just above a feature conveying the earth-shattering news that deepfakes are getting very hard to distinguish from the real thing.
Here you go:
Look, I know we aren’t supposed to care anymore where stories end up in the print edition, because print is dead. I don’t think the Post even has Page One meetings anymore. If I’m going to criticize the Post’s journalism I shouldn’t knock placement, which even on the home page doesn’t matter all that much. I should knock content!
All right then, I’ll knock content.
The Post story doesn’t get around to mentioning any connection between Trump’s business interests and Binance until … let’s see … yes, the 11th paragraph. That’s three paragraphs up from the bottom, so I guess I should be grateful the Post mentioned it at all. For comparisons sake, the Wall Street Journal put the Trump-Binance connection in the lede and Bloomberg, the Associated Press, and the Los Angeles Times all put it in the second paragraph. The New York Times put it in the fourth paragraph, but that’s a trivial offense compared to the Post’s.
Still reading at paragraph 11 of the Post story? If so, you’ll learn that (yawn) “In May, Trump’s crypto company, World Liberty Financial, announced a deal in which one of its crypto coins would be used in a $2 billion transaction between Binance and MGX, the state-backed Emirati investment firm.” But there’s no mention, either here or in the concluding paragraphs, that two weeks after UAE put $2 billion into a World Liberty Financial stablecoin Trump gifted the United Arab Emirates with cancellation of a Biden-era limit, imposed due to national security concerns, on UAE imports of U.S.-manufactured AI chips. (The Biden folks were concerned because UAE had conducted joint military exercises with the Chinese.) Trump put up for sale the national security interests of the United States, with the proceeds going into his own pocket. Then he pardoned the guy who helped put it there.
Others (including myself) have suggested that the UAE deal is the biggest political bribery scandal since Teapot Dome, and that the Justice Department’s public-integrity division would be looking into it if America still had a public-integrity department, which it doesn’t, except for two people whom I presume Russell Vought or Pam Bondi or Elon Musk spared only to satisfy some statutory requirement.
In the final paragraph of the Post story we learn that “the pardon raises the possibility of Binance being able to operate in the United States.” But we don’t learn that Binance has met already with representatives of the Trump family to invite them to participate in Binance’s U.S. operations, should such operations win approval from the U.S. government.
If you are a news-deprived Post reader and would like to read an account of the Zhao pardon written for grown-up people, I direct you to my latest New Republic piece. It’s no great feat of investigative journalism. I merely gathered, with links to news sources and publicly-available documents, what was known already and wove these strands into a standard explainer. This isn’t rocket science, Washington Post, and if you’re going to tell me every morning that democracy dies in darkness then don’t go around switching off the lights.