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Congress blocks clemency
Senators Cynthia Lummis and Ruben Gallego introduced a resolution urging the executive branch to ignore Sam Bankman-Fried’s formal bid for a pardon, with the resolution asserting that his 25-year sentence “serves the interests of justice.”
Fortune reported that Lummis’s office said, “Sam Bankman-Fried has clearly ramped up his pardon campaign, and Senator Lummis wants Fried to know [she] and her colleagues think he’s exactly where he belongs.”
The push for clemency comes after Bankman-Fried was convicted of orchestrating one of the largest financial frauds in U.S. history, siphoning billions of dollars in customer funds from the crypto exchange FTX into his trading firm, Alameda Research.
TradingView said Bankman-Fried is currently serving a 25-year sentence after being found guilty on seven felony charges related to the misuse of customer funds, and the Financial Post said he applied for clemency last week while serving that 25-year prison sentence.
“Keep him locked up”
In a statement, Gallego agreed with Lummis’s position, saying, “He has shown no remorse for his crimes and has instead tried to laughably claim he is a victim of ‘lawfare.’ What a joke. Keep him locked up.”
The Financial Post said the senators planned to seek unanimous consent from all senators to quickly pass the resolution, which is not binding, and it described Lummis as saying Bankman-Fried “wants the country to forget that he ran one of the largest financial frauds in American history while victims are still waiting to be made whole.”
Cointelegraph reported that the resolution came after Bankman-Fried formally applied for a pardon from Trump of his conviction on seven felony counts related to the misuse of FTX user funds.
Cointelegraph also said a federal appeals court upheld the conviction and sentence last week, leaving his only legal path forward a presidential pardon or an appeal to the US Supreme Court.
Pardon stakes and fallout
The resolution and pushback are framed against a backdrop of Trump pardons, with Fortune saying Trump has granted a string of pardons to prominent crypto figures including Binance founder Changpeng Zhao and Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht.
Fortune reported that Bankman-Fried’s clemency effort comes after he exhausted key appeals in the courts, turning the White House into one of his last remaining avenues for relief, and it said a White House spokesperson pointed to Trump’s January comments that he had no plans to do so.
The Financial Post said Bankman-Fried’s conviction involved a fraud at FTX that cost lenders, customers and investors US$10 billion, and it said much of the money is being paid back under bankruptcy proceedings.
Cointelegraph added that Bankman-Fried was convicted in November 2023 following the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX a year earlier, which resulted in investor losses totaling billions of dollars, and it said he was later sentenced to 25 years in prison.
