In what may be a first in American history, President Trump just expanded the presidential pardon power to include corporations.
Corporations are artificial legal fictions designed to maximize shareholder wealth. Nonetheless, they can theoretically commit crimes and be indicted for them. According to a 1999 memorandum from the Justice Department, the “important public benefits” of prosecuting corporations include “deterrence on a massive scale,” particularly for “crimes that carry with them a substantial risk of public harm,” such as “financial frauds.”
Such public benefits now fall prey to the whims of the president with his pardon of a cryptocurrency company that smacks of political corruption.
On Friday, Trump issued full and unconditional pardons to four individuals and a related cryptocurrency exchange, BitMEX.
BitMEX solicits and takes orders for trades in derivatives tied to the value of cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin. Last summer, BitMEX entered a guilty plea in a Manhattan federal court for violating the Bank Secrecy Act for having operated without a legitimate anti-money laundering program. Prior to August 2020, customers could register to trade with BitMEX anonymously, providing only verified email addresses.
On Jan. 15, 2025, BitMEX was criminally fined $100 million in connection with its guilty plea, which was on top of $130 million in civil penalties previously imposed by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. At sentencing, the judge noted that BitMEX, which is incorporated in the Seychelles, had claimed not to operate in the U.S. for several years even though U.S. customers comprised a large share of its business.
Although the text of the pardon is not yet public, it presumably wipes out the criminal penalties against BitMEX and forgives the crimes, making it legally impossible for federal prosecutors to go after the company for any crimes falling within the scope of the pardon at any point in the future. It also changes the company’s incentives for compliance with federal criminal laws. On March 31, the company posted on X that its trading volume had surged $1.22 billion the prior week.
According to Damian Williams, then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, “BitMEX opened itself up as a vehicle for large-scale money laundering and sanctions evasion schemes, posing a serious threat to the integrity of the financial system” by allowing financial institutes to be “exploited for illicit purposes” in order to obtain “revenue through the U.S. market without regard to U.S. criminal laws.” In 2022, co-founders Benjamin Delo, Arthur Hayes and Samuel Reed, and a former employee, Gregory Dwyer, also pleaded guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act.
Williams — who also prosecuted Ghislaine Maxwell, Sam Bankman-Fried, Sean “Diddy” Combs, New York Mayor Eric Adams and former Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) — stepped down on Dec. 13, 2024.
Trump panned cryptocurrency as a “scam” in 2021, but he has since created his own crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, with his eldest sons. Last week, the firm announced it would be introducing a new coin (its fourth), which will be known as “USD1.”
So far, Trump’s crypto companies have reportedly sold $550 million in coins, with a business entity tied to the president getting 75 percent of sales. That’s not including the memecoins that he and Melania Trump both launched before his inauguration. As of Feb. 11, the memecoin $TRUMP had plunged in value, but had generated $100 million in fees reportedly owed to an entity associated with Trump.
Article II of the Constitution, in granting presidents the power to pardon, does not identify who can receive pardons, referring only to the president’s power to grant “Reprieves and Pardons” for federal offenses “except in Cases of Impeachment.” Still, the Justice Department’s online application for federal pardons lists its benefits as restoring civil liberties, such as the right to vote or sit on a jury, and its lifting of barriers to employment, housing and education — all things that attach only to human beings.
In Schick v. Reed (1974), the Supreme Court explained that the president has broad “authority to ‘forgive’ [a] convicted person in part or entirely, to reduce a penalty in terms of a specified number of years, or to alter it” by waiving certain conditions, making no mention of corporations, which were not chartered in America until the 1790s, after the Constitution was ratified.
The historical reasons for pardons have no bearing on corporations, either. The “prerogative of mercy” underlying the presidential pardon dates back to English history, when the king would issue pardons to people too poor to pay criminal fines or who faced the death penalty for low-level crimes or despite their innocence. Corporations, by contrast, cannot go to jail and or be physically executed. Pardoning a corporation does not satisfy the “amnesty” rationale for pardons, either — which aim to heal the country after a national crisis — as with President Jimmy Carter’s pardon of Vietnam War draft dodgers.
The BitMEX pardon sends a different message: Companies involved in financial crimes don’t have to worry about accountability under this president, as least when it comes to crypto, for reasons that he has no incentive to ever make known. BitMEX can continue its prior criminal practices with federal impunity, and maybe even rely on the pardon to thwart future investigations into related conduct by federal lawmakers or state prosecutors.
The biggest losers in this deal are, once again, the American people, including the more than 77 million who might finally be realizing that they voted for lawlessness last November.
Kimberly Wehle is author of the book “Pardon Power: How the Pardon System Works — and Why.”
