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, used an appearance on MSNBC to raise concerns around Trump’s apparent conflict of interest with crypto via his son’s crypto project World Liberty Financial (WLFI), alleging the recent pardoning of Binance co-founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao was “blatant corruption.”
“You’ve got a foreign billionaire who was basically engaged in money-laundering,” Khanna said of CZ, adding, “then he petitions for a pardon from Donald Trump after basically funneling money to terrorists.”
However, CZ recently fired back at similar accusations from Senator Elizabeth Warren, claiming she “can’t get her facts right.”
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 alleged that the Binance co-founder was being let off the hook due to Binance’s financial backing of WLFI — echoing recent sentiments from US Representative Maxine Waters.
“And what he does is he says ‘I’m going to support World Liberty,’ which is the president’s son’s cryptocurrency firm, which they’re making millions of dollars on while Donald Trump is president. And Donald Trump gives him a pardon while he is basically financing 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 has any connection to the project. In an interview in September, Eric stressed that his father “is running a nation. He’s not involved in our businesses in any way, shape or form.”
Khanna did not go into specific details of his legislative proposal, but did not mince his words, concluding by calling for a ban on “any elected official from having cryptocurrency and accepting foreign money.”
According to government records, Khanna’s latest bill has not yet been officially introduced.
Related: How Changpeng Zhao regained power between prison and pardon
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 highly contested for some time.
The debate currently rages on in the US via the bipartisan congressional stock trading bill, which is expected to be voted on soon.
To provide context on how muddied the waters are, while Khanna has called out Trump’s ties to crypto, he also has some vested interests of his own in the stock market, highlighting some potential hypocrisy.
According to data from Quiver Quant, Khanna himself has notched up $80.3 million worth of stock trade volume in 2025.
Since becoming a California representative in 2017, Khanna has made over 35,000 trades that account for more than $580 million in total volume, with his top three traded sectors being financials, information technology and healthcare.
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