Sam Bankman-Fried Turns to Trump for Pardon After FTX Collapse

Convicted cryptocurrency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried is asking the White House for a post-prison pardon.

The former FTX CEO is seeking a “Pardon after Completion of Sentence,” according to a notice on the Department of Justice’s Office of the Pardon Attorney website.

Bankman-Fried is serving a 25-year sentence following his conviction for fraud and money laundering. The DOJ had accused him of funneling billions of dollars in customer funds into personal expenses, donations to politicians and risky investments.

His attorneys have been trying to get that conviction overturned. In April, Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the original case, threw out Bankman-Fried’s self-written motion seeking a new trial.

The 34-year-old one-time crypto wunderkind had contended there were new witnesses whose testimony would justify a new trial. Kaplan deemed this claim baseless.

“None of the witnesses, for example, is ‘newly discovered,’” Kaplan said. “Bankman-Fried well before trial knew all three of them and purportedly knew also what he hoped they would say were they to testify. He could have obtained or at least sought to compel their testimony. But he did neither.”

President Donald Trump granted 166 individual pardons during the first year of his second term, according to the Cato Institute.

Experts have blasted the “pay-to-play” economy that has resulted from pardons in Trump’s second term, as intermediaries charge up to $1 million to bring their cases to the White House, the Financial Times reported Monday (June 8).

Bankman-Fried would not be Trump’s first crypto pardon, the report said. The president has also pardoned Changpeng Zhao, who founded Binance, and Arthur Hayes, who co-founded BitMex. Both were convicted of anti-money laundering failures.

In other FTX news, the law firm that advised the company before its collapse agreed last month to pay $54 million to settle claims brought by FTX customers who accused the firm of helping facilitate one of the largest financial frauds in American history.

Fenwick & West, known for representing technology companies, served as one of FTX’s primary outside law firms during the company’s rapid rise in the crypto industry. Plaintiffs in the case alleged that the firm “helped to craft and implement strategies that facilitated FTX’s fraud,” although Fenwick denied any wrongdoing.