There is no question but that the pardon power belongs to the president, and only the president, and is unreviewable. And while I remain unconvinced that crypto-currency isn’t the modern equivalent of tulips, I have no personal feelings about Changpeng Zhao, or CZ as he’s called, the richest man in crypto, being pardoned per se. Heck, pardons are good, even bad pardons. Mercy is good. Even mistaken mercy is good.

But was this mercy?

President Trump granted a pardon to Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, wiping away one of the U.S. government’s most significant crackdowns on crypto crime.

Mr. Zhao had pleaded guilty to money-laundering violations in 2023 and served four months in federal prison, after a yearslong investigation by financial regulators and U.S. prosecutors.

By money laundering, they mean for groups like Hamas, Al Qaeda, ISIS, and evidence made clear that they knew it. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt decided that the best way to spin the pardon was to pretend it was a reaction to Biden, because isn’t everything?

“President Trump exercised his constitutional authority by issuing a pardon for Mr. Zhao, who was prosecuted by the Biden administration in their war on cryptocurrency,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement on Thursday. “The Biden administration’s war on crypto is over.”

When asked, Trump was less certain about what he did or why he did it.

Of course, when you pardon a lot of people, it can be hard to remember the details of who or why, or even whether it was done by hand or autopen. But it seems like Trump might have remembered this pardon.

The pardon was the latest example of how high-profile business partners of Mr. Trump and his family have benefited from his rollback of the wide-ranging crypto crackdown orchestrated by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. To seek the pardon, Mr. Zhao hired lawyers and lobbyists with ties to the Trump administration, while Binance struck a business deal with World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto start-up.

That deal alone is poised to generate tens of millions of dollars a year for the Trumps and the family of Steve Witkoff, the president’s top Middle East adviser.

Are tens of billions of dollars enough of a reason for Trump to remember CZ? Many people say so, to borrow a phrase. There is nothing about this prosecution which gives rise to any justification for a pardon. CZ was not sentenced to an outrageously long period of incarceration. Indeed, he got four months, about as minimal as possible, and he already served them before moving to and becoming a citizen of Emirates. There was no doubt that he committed the crimes charged, as he admitted during his allocution. He had one, and only one, thing going for him. He was the richest man in crypto.

When the Supreme Court decided Trump v. US, the question was raised whether pardons, clearly a core presidential official duty, would be immune from prosecution if they were flagrantly sold.

They include, for instance, commanding the Armed Forces of the United States; granting reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States; and appointing public ministers and consuls, the Justices of this Court, and Officers of the United States. See [Article II] §2.

This was about as clear as it gets that Trump sold a pardon to CZ, there being no other reason to pardon him and there being an enormous amount of money in the transaction. It falls in line with other questions raised, whether the president in commanding the Armed Forces could order the murder of people on the high seas, or his political rivals or drug dealers on the streets of Miami. These were the outer fringe cases, the theory taken to its logical extremes. At least as to pardons, it looks like we’re there. As for murders, we’re awfully close as well. At least the former has the virtue of mercy, even if undeserved.