Binance CZ admits Biden DOJ aggressively pursued prosecution
The post Binance CZ admits Biden DOJ aggressively pursued prosecution appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
Changpeng Zhao (CZ) has revealed that his trial was more about the U.S. government trying to stifle crypto development than his legal offenses. In a recent interview pushed out by the All-In Podcast, the founder of Binance, CZ, explicitly stated to host Chamath Palihapitiya that he believes his prosecution was “highly aggressive” under the Biden administration’s DOJ. Was the Biden DOJ’s prosecution of CZ a ‘political war’ on crypto? The All-In Podcast recently released an episode in which Changpeng Zhao characterized the Biden administration’s Department of Justice as being “uniquely aggressive.” “Before me, nobody got put in jail,” CZ told his host Chamath Palihapitiya. Many major global banks with similar compliance failure cases were made to pay billions in fines for anti-money laundering (AML) failures, rather than having their executives face prison time. CZ served a four-month sentence in a federal facility in 2024 before his eventual high-profile pardon by President Trump in October 2025. He argued that the DOJ’s pursuit was less about his specific legal charges and more about a “war on cryptocurrency” intended to restrict the industry’s growth in the U.S. In November 2023, Binance agreed to a historic $4.3 billion settlement, and CZ stepped down as CEO and pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an effective AML program. In the interview, he admitted that while mistakes were made in the exchange’s early “hyper-growth” phase, the government had a strong desire to see him behind bars. Since the 2025 change in administration, however, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has notably omitted digital assets from its 2026 examination priorities list. Did FTX collapse because of CZ’s personal feud with Sam Bankman-Fried? CZ gave a detailed account of his relationship with Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) during the interview, explaining that they first met in 2019 when Binance invested…
Filed under: News - @ February 11, 2026 8:26 am