The rise of more grass-roots news sources (podcasts, memes, social media) also leads to tons of conspiracy theories, and mistrust that builds this idea of corruption being ubiquitous, just not out in the open. And yes, that happens, but this atmosphere magnifies it 10x.
So when someone like Trump does it out in the open, people are more likely to excuse it because "everybody is already doing it, at least this is out in the open".
No, its not, pardon and the closely linked power of clemency are common powers in representative democracies, often situated with the chief of state or the head of government (in the US, and other Presidential systems, the President is both), or sometimes the cabinet instead of the head of government in a parliamentary or semi-parliamentary system (in some cases, one or the other is assigned by law to a subordinate bureaucracy rather than being HoS/cabinet discretion, as is the case with pardon but not clemency in Canada.) It is generally more used in the US than other Western states, in part because the US has a much harsher criminal justice system with much longer sentences and much weaker provisions for relief other than executive pardon than other systems, but the power itself is common. [0]
The way it is used under Trump is wildly abnormal (for the US or the other representative democracies), though.
[0] see, e.g., https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/pardon-power-is-co... ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardon ; etc.
It's also true his son was prosecuted politically, because few if any people go to jail for 4473 falsification.
It's also true that this is new and unprecedented.
Reminds of Biden pardoning his relatives without even saying for what. Just blanked pardon for everything. No democrat dropped his jaw.
He feared Trump would force the DOJ to prosecute them.
And, based on what Trump's done so far with the DOJ and his enemies, he was right to do so.
I think this whole pardoning thing should go away. It makes the presidents Kings.
But something like that would fly in the face of the "Unitary Executive" insanity and would (I suspect) require a constitutional amendment, which is no longer remotely feasible.
A first comment said "without saying why". The second comment just says that this is blatantly not true, and that the rationale presented has been since confirmed as a very accurate prediction.
Everyone I talked to (more than 10, including myself) that I knew who voted for Biden was pissed, disappointed, even angry at his pardoning of Hunter.
(Frankly, the idea that being convicted for making the conscious decision to go out of your way to circumvent KYC/AML laws is somehow the result of partisan bias is ridiculous in itself, so none of this [or how Balaji claims to feel about the matter] is even really relevant).
This is not a company vs. company sort of issue, this is a "I want to avoid regulations that would cost me money as a fundamental aspect of my industry " issue.
If Coinbase thought they could legally not worry about all of this, do you think they would want to deal with it?
The sheer quantity of money used in cryptocurrency for money laundering and activity where traditional payment processors will not accept payments (largely illegal, e.g. drugs, counterfeit goods) also means that the keeping the ecosystem healthy involves having ways for this money to flow.
For example if your crypto is the proceeds of ransomware, you're going to have a hard time cashing out without using something like Monero (which effectively has no offramps) without going through an exchange that knows perfectly well that you're trying to touch tainted goods. Exchanges like Binance that just don't bother to check who their customers are when they withdraw cash for such assets are just as critical to the ransomware plague as any security bug or social engineering issue. It's one of the reasons that pre-crypto, even though ransomware was technically feasible, it was never able to grow into a large-scale operation--no offramps. But hey maybe the official stance of CZ supporters is now that ransomware is good, actually, and if you don't like it it's because you have partisan bias (???)
CZ is the first and only known first-time offender in U.S. history to receive a prison sentence for this single, non-fraud-related charge of improper platform AML KYC implementation. Big banks routinely pay a fine for this, and never face imprisonment. The judge found no evidence that he knew of any illicit transactions and that it was reasonable for him to believe there were no illicit funds on the platform. Credit where it's due, they somehow pulled off a 4 month sentence for this unprecedented charge. And now it's all for naught.
Historically bank CEOs have been smart enough to note this difference.
The laws exist to restrict funding for countries under sanction, drug operations, terrorist organizations, etc.
We can argue about whether these laws are a good idea (either in general or in specific details), but you need to change the law, not just now follow it.
This is a terrible precedent... unless you're a con man, that is. (Balaji Srinivasan isn't stupid. I would guess he understands how real what he's arguing here is.)