By Noah Rothman
Friday, May 22, 2026
The Wall Street Journal published an immensely troubling
dispatch on Thursday exposing how cryptocurrency networks — specifically, the
formerly China-based crypto exchange Binance — have funneled hundreds of
millions of dollars into the hands of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
“Foreign law-enforcement officials said they have
continued to track money this year flowing through Binance accounts to Iranian
entities associated with the regime—identifying transactions as recently as
this month,” the Journal reported.
Binance’s spokespeople insist the currently Malta-based
interest does not tolerate transactions that financially support terrorist
entities like the IRGC and its proxies. But that’s hard to believe:
Based on how
terrorism-financing experts assess the purpose of trading accounts like
Zanjani’s, the $850 million in Zanjani transactions, which included both
deposits and withdrawals, likely means about $425 million moved through Binance
to finance Iran’s military, according to foreign law-enforcement officials and
other people familiar with the activity. Binance’s own investigators assessed
the accounts were a money-laundering network to finance the regime, according
to the compliance reports.
None of this should be news to the Trump administration.
In 2023, Binance’s founder, Changpeng Zhao, pleaded guilty to charges relating to the violation of U.S.
money-laundering statutes — a scheme that enriched child sex traffickers, international
scamming operations, and terrorist groups, including “Al Qaeda, the Islamic
State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades, and Palestinian
Islamic Jihad (PIJ).”
Like a bolt from the blue, however, President Trump gave
Zhao a pardon last October, putting a premature end to the Justice Department’s
three-year monitorship of the crypto exchange. The unanticipated act of
clemency made little sense to many observers until the Journal connected the dots.
“Binance has also been a key supporter of his family’s
World Liberty Financial crypto venture, a business that has driven a huge leap
in the president’s personal wealth,” its report read:
Binance first
reached out to allies of Trump last year, offering to strike a business deal
with the family as part of a plan to return the company to the U.S., the
Journal reported earlier this year. Representatives of the Trump family have held talks to take a financial stake in the U.S. arm of
Binance.
Cryptocurrency has long been accused of serving as a
vehicle for laundering funds to illicit and illegitimate interests, some of
which are opposed to U.S. interests and pose threats to Americans’ physical
security. But why should everyone else get rich investing in America’s decline?
Now, anyone can grab their own stake in the post-American world — up to and
including the president and his closest kin.
The promise of cryptocurrency notwithstanding, if it
serves merely as a vehicle for criminals and corrupt interests to strip the
United States down and sell it off, piece by piece, to its enemies, you might
expect the stewards of American interests to take a firmer line against it. And
they might have if they hadn’t already gotten theirs.
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