A US lawmaker desires to ban US President Donald Trump, his family and members of Congress from trading cryptocurrencies or stocks.
U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democratic representative from California's seventeenth Congressional District and vice chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, used an appearance on MSNBC to lift concerns about Trump's apparent conflict of interest with cryptocurrencies via his son's World Liberty Financial (WLFI) cryptocurrency project to comment, claiming that the recent pardon of Binance co-founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao was “blatant corruption.”
“You have a foreign billionaire who was mainly involved in money laundering,” Khanna said of CZ, adding, “Then he requests a pardon from Donald Trump after he mainly funneled money to terrorists.”
However, CZ recently responded to similar accusations from Senator Elizabeth Warren by claiming she “didn’t get her facts straight.”
CZ pleaded guilty to a single felony count of violating the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act after failing to take care of an efficient anti-money laundering (AML) program at Binance.
Khanna claimed that the Binance co-founder was let off the hook attributable to Binance's financial support of WLFI – echoing recent views from US Rep. Maxine Waters.
“And he says, 'I'm going to support World Liberty,' the president's son's cryptocurrency company that they're making hundreds of thousands of dollars from while Donald Trump is president. And Donald Trump is pardoning him while he's mainly funding Donald Trump's cryptocurrency stablecoin.”
Trump has been repeatedly criticized for his ties to WLFI; However, his son Eric Trump consistently denied that his father had any connection to the project. In an interview in September, Eric emphasized that his father “runs a nation. He will not be involved in our business in any way, shape or form.”
Rep Khanna discusses his reasons for introducing the brand new laws. Source: Ro Khanna
Khanna didn't go into the specifics of his proposed laws, but he didn't mince his words, concluding by calling for a ban on “any elected official from owning cryptocurrencies and accepting foreign money.”
According to government documents, Khanna's latest bill has not yet been formally presented.
Ban on trading for presidency officials
The query of whether government officials ought to be allowed to take a position in areas similar to the stock market has been hotly debated for a while.
In the USA, the controversy is currently raging in Congress over the bipartisan bill on stock trading, which is attributable to be voted on soon.
To provide some context for a way unclear the situation is, while Khanna has highlighted Trump's ties to cryptocurrencies, he also has some interests of his own within the stock market, pointing to possible hypocrisy.
According to data from Quiver Quant, Khanna himself generated $80.3 million price of stock trading volume in 2025.
Since becoming a California representative in 2017, Khanna has accomplished over 35,000 deals totaling greater than $580 million, along with his top three trading sectors being finance, information technology and healthcare.
