Of all the tools and executive authorities available to President Donald Trump, perhaps none has been wielded with as much naked transactional ambition as his ability to effectively pardon any federal convict for virtually any crime. Domestically, Trump’s penchant for pardoning has seen commutations extended to celebrities and lawmakers alike, often coming with an explicit expectation of quid pro quo. However, Trump’s use of political pardons hasn’t stopped at the nation’s borders; the president is increasingly using pardons with an international theater in mind, letting the world know that crossing America’s justice system may not be as final an act as it once was.
Here are the influential foreign figures Trump has pardoned over his two terms in office.
Changpeng Zhao
Although Trump has extended clemency to several cryptocurrency-associated figures over the years, his October 2025 pardon of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao sparked the “most intense backlash of all crypto pardons,” said Benzinga. The move raised “immediate criticism” from lawmakers who said the pardon risked “serious ethical concerns.” Zhao, who was born in China before moving to Canada as a child, had previously pleaded guilty to charges that he enabled financial fraud and money laundering at the “world’s largest exchange for cryptocurrency or digital money on the internet,” CBS News said.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Latest Videos From
The “self-dealing aspect” of Trump’s pardoning of Zhao, in terms of the “benefit that it conferred on Trump and his family, and people in his inner circle,” is “unprecedented,” said former Justice Department pardon official Elizabeth Oyer to CBS. The pardon came amid the president’s pivot toward a “more friendly stance toward cryptocurrency than his predecessors,” the BBC said.
Juan Orlando Hernández
Elected as president of Honduras just two years before Trump, Juan Orlando Hernández, commonly known as JOH, earned his “place in infamy for the one-time U.S. ally in the war on drugs” in 2024 when he was convicted in New York City for cocaine trafficking, The Guardian said. Hernández’s actions “paved a cocaine superhighway to the United States,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jacob Gutwillig claimed during the trial, in part by protecting certain traffickers “with the full power of the state.”
Trump’s December 2025 pardon of Hernández came after the former Honduran leader “sent the president a four-page letter casting himself as a victim of ‘political persecution’” while “comparing his fate to that of the American president,” The New York Times said. Speaking about the pardon, Trump affirmed a sense of kinship with Hernández, who was, he said, “treated like the Biden administration treated a man named Trump.”
Aviem Sella
While not a widely known figure himself, Israeli businessman and former IDF officer Aviem Sella played a central role in one of the biggest intelligence breaches in American history, serving as recruiter and handler for American intelligence analyst-turned-spy Jonathan Pollard. Sella was indicted in absentia on multiple espionage counts in 1987, but was not required to be extradited to the United States for what U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova said was a “political offense,” said The New York Times.
Trump’s surprise pardon for Sella, delivered in the waning hours of his first term, was “requested” by Israeli officials to “close this unfortunate chapter in U.S.-Israel relations,” the White House said in a statement announcing the action. The pardon was “supported by the Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer, the United States Ambassador to Israel David Friedman and Miriam Adelson.”
Ben Delo
Along with fellow BitMex founders Arthur Hayes and Samuel Reed, British tech entrepreneur Ben Delo pleaded guilty in 2022 to violating the Bank Secrecy Act, failing to enact requisite money laundering protections at the widely used crypto exchange. The Biden administration’s investigation and prosecution of BitMex and its founders was “among the first and most significant” legal actions to “target the crypto market,” said Bloomberg. Trump’s March 2025 pardon of Delo, along with a host of other finance and entrepreneurial figures, showed there’s “never been a better time to be a white-collar crook,” Axios said.
In a statement thanking Trump for the pardon, Delo said his company had been targeted for being the “most successful crypto exchange of its kind,” with him and his colleagues “wrongfully made to serve as an example, sacrificed for political reasons and used to send inconsistent regulatory signals.”
