Disgraced crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried formally asks Trump for a pardon
Samuel Bankman-Fried, the imprisoned former cryptocurrency executive and billionaire, has asked the Trump administration for a pardon.
In 2024, Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison and $11 billion in forfeiture on a raft of fraud and conspiracy charges tied to the collapse of his FTX cryptocurrency exchange two years earlier.
The crypto fraudster asked this year for a “Pardon after Completion of Sentence,” according to a Justice Department website, though it doesn’t specify on which date he filed for the reprieve. Bloomberg previously reported the pardon effort.
Prosecutors accused Bankman-Fried, known by his nickname SBF, of misappropriating billions of dollars of customer funds for personal use, political donations and repayment on billions of dollars in loans tied to a sister trading fund. The Justice Department called the scheme “one of the largest financial frauds in history.”
In an interview with Fox Business earlier Monday, Bankman-Fried maintained that the original prosecution was unjust and that his customers have been more than properly compensated for any losses. The former FTX boss is also challenging his conviction in federal appeals court.
“I didn’t steal user funds either,” he said. “Customers have been repaid now 170 percent or so on their deposits. It’s one of the very few cases where the platform was over-collateralized, where customers were more than made whole. And yet there was, you know, not just a criminal investigation, but a prosecution. And, you know, dozens of years of sentence[s].”
In January, President Donald Trump told The New York Times that he had no intention of pardoning Bankman-Fried.
The Independent has contacted the White House and Justice Department for comment.
Bankman-Fried, who rose to fame in part as a prolific donor to progressive causes and Democratic candidates, has reportedly been interested in seeking a pardon since Trump’s 2024 election.
Since then, Bankman-Fried has gone on a media tour from inside New York’s Metropolitan Detention Center, giving interviews and appearing on Tucker Carlson’s podcast, where he criticized courts and crypto regulators and noted his donations to the GOP.
In a series of personal notes aired as part of his trial, Bankman-Fried pondered a plan to “come out as Republican” as FTX collapsed.
Attorney Michael Avenatti, who once represented adult film star Stormy Daniels in her defamation case against Trump before heading behind bars for fraud himself, criticized the pardon effort from his former fellow prisoner.
“Sam and I argued more than once about the same thing: his refusal to accept ANY responsibility for what he did. Not once did he admit he’d done anything wrong — even after I told him repeatedly he could never begin to redeem himself without that acknowledgment,” Avenatti wrote on X. “You don’t earn a pardon when you can’t admit, even to yourself, that you did wrong.”
Though Donald Trump once dismissed cryptocurrency as a “scam” and unwanted rival to the U.S. dollar, the Republican has since embraced the industry, which donated heavily to his 2024 campaign.
President Trump and his family have founded a series of highly lucrative, opaque cryptocurrency ventures.
The president has also pardoned multiple individuals tied to crypto-related crimes, including Arthur Hayes, co-founder of the crypto exchange BitMEX; Ross Ulbricht, founder of the dark web marketplace Silk Road; and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who had previously partnered with the Trump family’s crypto business.
The president has also pushed to create a national bitcoin reserve, temporarily sending the value of his supporters’ crypto assets skyrocketing, after a season of scandal and declining prices, including the SBF saga.
Source: independent.co.uk
