David McAfee
November 2, 2025
RAW STORY
U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) gestures as Pete Hegseth, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's nominee to be secretary of defense, testifies before a Senate Committee on Armed Services confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., January 14, 2025. REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz
A billionaire who was pardoned by Donald Trump sent a lawsuit threat to U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who dropped a blistering reply through lawyers of her own.
Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire founder of crypto exchange Binance who recently received a pardon after months of boosting a crypto venture owned by President Donald Trump's family, reportedly asked Warren to retract a social media post about him. Specifically, the post claimed Zhao had pleaded guilty to a money laundering charge, which Warren says is objectively true.
Writer Brendan Pedersen flagged a letter sent by Warren's attorneys.
"We obtained a letter sent by lawyers for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) today in response to a defamation threat from Binance founder Changpeng Zhao. CZ wants Warren to retract a tweet saying he pleaded guilty to a 'criminal money laundering charge,'" he wrote before quoting the response statement.
"Your client asserts that Senator Warren has published a 'defamatory' statement about him in an October 23, 2025, post on X. Specifically, we understand your client to maintain that it is objectively false that he 'pleaded guilty to a criminal money laundering charge.' In relevant part, Senator Warren’s post stated that 'CZ pleaded guilty to a criminal money laundering charge and was sentenced to prison.' Senator Warren’s post is true in all respects and therefore cannot be defamatory," the letter says. "Senator Warren accurately represented publicly available and widely reported facts. The 'charge' referenced in Senator Warren’s X post refers to the 'charge' to which Mr. Zhao pled guilty and as to which President Trump had just pardoned him."
The letter adds, "The law Mr. Zhao pled guilty to violating is an anti-money laundering law. All of this is public record, and is plainly what Senator Warren’s X post concerned. Simply put, any threatened defamation claim would be without merit. We provide further context below, which we trust resolves any misunderstanding as to what Senator Warren’s statement means."
Read the letter here.
Trump makes 'emergency' Supreme Court power grab after AI plot by tech pals thwarted
David Edwards
October 27, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump gives a thumbs up as he returns to the White House from National Harbor following his address to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) annual meeting, on the South Lawn in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 22, 2025. REUTERS/Craig Hudson
President Donald Trump's administration filed an "emergency" Supreme Court plea to remove the register of copyrights at the Library of Congress, which had refused to support the plans of AI companies owned by his billionaire supporters.
In September, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that Trump lacked the authority to remove Shira Perlmutter because she worked for Congress, not the executive branch. Trump first tried to fire Perlmutter in May after she released a pre-publication version of the third part of the Copyright Office's report "Copyright and Artificial Intelligence," which suggested that AI companies could be infringing on copyrighted works.
"Donald Trump's termination of Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, is a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis," Rep. Joe Morelle (NY-25) said at the time of her firing. "It is surely no coincidence he acted less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk's efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models."
The pre-release of the copyright report stated that "the copying involved in AI training threatens significant potential harm to the market for or value of copyrighted works."
"Where a model can produce substantially similar outputs that directly substitute for works in the training data, it can lead to lost sales. Even where a model's outputs are not substantially similar to any specific copyrighted work, they can dilute the market for works similar to those found in its training data, including by generating material stylistically similar to those works."
Musk has suggested that all intellectual property laws should be repealed.
In September, Trump held a dinner with 33 tech industry leaders, including the CEOs of the top AI companies.
David Edwards
October 27, 2025
RAW STORY
U.S. President Donald Trump gives a thumbs up as he returns to the White House from National Harbor following his address to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) annual meeting, on the South Lawn in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 22, 2025. REUTERS/Craig Hudson
President Donald Trump's administration filed an "emergency" Supreme Court plea to remove the register of copyrights at the Library of Congress, which had refused to support the plans of AI companies owned by his billionaire supporters.
In September, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that Trump lacked the authority to remove Shira Perlmutter because she worked for Congress, not the executive branch. Trump first tried to fire Perlmutter in May after she released a pre-publication version of the third part of the Copyright Office's report "Copyright and Artificial Intelligence," which suggested that AI companies could be infringing on copyrighted works.
"Donald Trump's termination of Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, is a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis," Rep. Joe Morelle (NY-25) said at the time of her firing. "It is surely no coincidence he acted less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk's efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models."
The pre-release of the copyright report stated that "the copying involved in AI training threatens significant potential harm to the market for or value of copyrighted works."
"Where a model can produce substantially similar outputs that directly substitute for works in the training data, it can lead to lost sales. Even where a model's outputs are not substantially similar to any specific copyrighted work, they can dilute the market for works similar to those found in its training data, including by generating material stylistically similar to those works."
Musk has suggested that all intellectual property laws should be repealed.
In September, Trump held a dinner with 33 tech industry leaders, including the CEOs of the top AI companies.
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