Fox News host Guy Benson called for President Donald Trump to receive more scrutiny for admitting to pardoning a man he didn’t even know on Monday.
Last month, Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao — commonly referred to as “CZ” — received a pardon from the Trump administration. Zhao pleaded guilty in 2023 to “failing to sufficiently combat money laundering on his crypto exchange.” He was sentenced to four months in prison.
When pressed about the pardon on the most recent episode of 60 Minutes, Trump claimed he actually had no clue who Zhao was.
“Okay, are you ready?” Trump said. “I don’t know who he is. I know he got a four-month sentence or something like that. And I heard it was a Biden witch hunt.”
In response to the clip, Benson specifically pointed to former President Joe Biden’s autopen scandal to argue that Trump should face more heat for his comments.
“If we care about Biden’s autopen scandal on pardons and commutations (we should),” Benson said in a tweet, “shouldn’t this answer from POTUS on this set of facts draw scrutiny and concern? Oversight shouldn’t be selectively partisan and reflexively tribal, by either side.”
As noted by CBS’s Norah O’Donnell, Zhao’s company “helped facilitate a $2 billion purchase” of a Trump crypto venture.
