A US lawmaker is seeking to ban US President Donald Trump, his family, and members of Congress from trading crypto or stocks.
US representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat representative from California’s 17th congressional district and vice-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, uses an appearance on MSNBC to raise concerns around apparent conflicts of interest in crypto through his Son’s Crypto Project World Liberty Financial (WLFI), which states recently Introducing Binance Co-Founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao is “flawless corruption.”
“You have a foreign billionaire who is basically involved in money laundering,” Khanna said of CZ, adding, “Then he petitioned for a pardon from Donald Trump after actually funneling money to terrorists.”
However, CZ has recently fired back at Similar accusations from Senator Elizabeth Warren, claiming she “can’t get her facts straight.”
CZ pleaded guilty to a single felony count of violating the US Bank Secrecy Act after failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering (AML) program at Binance.
Khanna said the Binance co-founder was let off the hook because of Binance’s financial backing of WLFI—echoing recent sentiments from US representative Maxine Waters.
“And what he’s doing is he’s saying ‘I’m going to support World Liberty,’ which is the president’s cryptocurrency firm, which they’re making millions of dollars while Donald Trump is president. And Donald Trump is giving him a pardon while he’s basically funding Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency stablecoin.”
Trump has faced criticism for his ties to WLFI on multiple occasions; However, his son Eric Trump has consistently denied that his father had any connection to the project. In a interview In September, Eric stressed that his father “runs a country. He’s not involved in our businesses in any way, shape or form.”
Khanna didn’t go into the specifics of his legislative proposal, but didn’t mince his words, ending by calling for a ban on “any elected official from having cryptocurrency and receiving foreign currency.”
According to the government RecordsKhanna’s latest bill has yet to be officially introduced.
Related: How Changpeng Zhao gained the power between prison and forgiveness
Banning government officials from trading
The issue of whether government officials should be allowed to make investments in areas such as the stock market has been hotly debated for some time.
The debate is currently raging in the US over a bipartisan congressional stock trading bill, which is expected to be vote as soon as possible.
To give context to how muddy the waters are, while Khanna called out Trump’s ties to crypto, he also has some interests of his own in the stock market, which highlights some potential hypocrisy.
According to data from Quiver Quant, Khanna himself sees $80.3 million worth of stock trade volume by 2025.
Since becoming a California representative in 2017, Khanna has made more than 35,000 trades worth more than $580 million in total volume, with his top three traded sectors being financials, information technology and healthcare.
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