Self-Enrichment Rewarded, Oversight Blindfolded
Floor Speech
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Mr. IVEY. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to address a deeply troubling pattern of behavior that strikes at the very heart of the American justice system. It is a pattern where self-enrichment is rewarded, oversight is blindfolded, and rule of law is bent to serve the powerful.
I sit on the Appropriations Committee, and we had a chance last week to hear the testimony of the Acting Attorney General, Mr. Blanche. I asked him about what I thought was a blatant pay-for-pardon scheme, and this involves the Binance Corporation.
Let me walk through some of the facts of what happened there, as I did there with the Attorney General.
In late 2023, Binance agreed to pay a penalty of $4.36 billion. A U.S. judge approved the guilty plea and settlement for the anti-money laundering and sanctions in February 2024. In other words, the chairman of Binance and the company itself pled guilty to crimes that involved money laundering. This involved money laundering that was helping groups like ISIS and al-Qaida, enemies of the United States, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
In December 2024, Mr. Zhao and Mr. Witkoff met in Abu Dhabi at the Bitcoin MENA 2024 Conference. Mr. Witkoff is the special envoy for the Trump administration who negotiates agreements with respect to the Middle East and does this on behalf of the Trump administration. They discussed the violations of anti-money laundering laws while Mr. Zhao was serving at Binance.
In October 2025, Mr. Trump granted a full pardon to Mr. Zhao. That meant that they did not have to pay back the money that was part of the fine, and it wiped away the conviction and the related elements of that.
According to The Wall Street Journal, part of what happened between the pardon and the meeting was that there was a payment that was made. That was money that was paid, according to The Wall Street Journal, from Binance, which took steps that catapulted the Trump family venture's new stablecoin product. The Trump family venture was WLF, and it dealt with cryptocurrency. Members of Trump's family, two of his sons, and Mr. Witkoff all had vested interests in that company.
While they put the money into the WLF transaction, that enhanced the credibility and pushed up the market value of the WLF company from $127 million to over $2.1 billion.
I asked Mr. Blanche, given that he had this meeting, then the money, and then the pardon, did he think it would be important to appoint a special prosecutor to review the transaction just to make sure that there was no misconduct that took place, whether it was on behalf of the President or any of the other factors or players who were involved, and he said no.
A special prosecutor would be someone who the Attorney General could appoint in order to have a full and independent investigation done, but he refused to do that.
It is important to put this into context, too. Just in the first 3 months of this year, Mr. Trump has engaged in 3,700 stock transactions personally, and his net worth has grown from $2.3 billion to $6.5 billion since 2024. That is a $4.2 billion increase in his personal wealth since he returned to the White House.
There are other issues that we should raise. In fact, the sentences to my right were taken from a New York Times article that chronicles many of these types of issues. Nvidia stock is another one where there was a potential benefit of $5 million to WLF and the Trump family.
I am not saying that there was or was not misconduct by Mr. Trump. We don't know that yet, but it is important to make sure that somebody who is independent, objective, and knowledgeable would conduct that kind of investigation.
So far, the Trump administration has refused to do that, so I am going to be introducing legislation that I think will help to facilitate that. If you have a President who doesn't want to have his Attorney General conduct any investigations into what his administration is doing, we should have other avenues to move that forward. We have in the past, like the Independent Counsel Act. We also could beef up the inspector general law which was put in place after Watergate took place and was put in place specifically because of the Nixon administration misconduct and the failure to have anybody in the Nixon administration investigate that.
You might recall that John Mitchell was the Attorney General. He ended up going to jail because he participated in that misconduct. We need to make sure we don't find ourselves in this situation again where we have got the fox guarding the henhouse.
We will offer this legislation soon, but I think it is critical to make sure we understand a couple of things in the wake of this. We need to keep an eye on the Trump administration, and we need to remember, too, that after the testimony he gave, he was promoted to Attorney General by the President.
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