Sam Bankman-Fried flatters Trump, flips on Biden while asking for pardon in first interview from prison

Sam Bankman-Fried is angling for a pardon from President Trump, in his first interview from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, where he is serving a 25-year sentence for perpetrating one of the largest cryptocurrency scams to date. In a series of three slightly edited interviews conducted by Ari Hoffmann of The New York Sun on Feb. 18, Bankman-Fried argues that his case was part of the “prosecutorial overreach” seen during the Biden administration. The timing of the interview comes as FTX begins to repay customers “in full,” a reckoning that some criticize as the cash value of these disbursements is tied to the multi-year low crypto prices of 2022 — when the exchange collapsed — rather than the current market rate. It also follows Trump’s pardon of Ross Ulbricht two days into his office, fulfilling one of the many promises he made to the crypto industry, and Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried’s reported attempts at seeking clemency for their son.Like many in and outside of the crypto industry looking to score political points during the chaotic days of Trump’s second term, Bankman-Fried is not-so-subtly looking to flatter the president through appeals to his biases and signaling fealty — largely by criticizing the Democratic party that Trump has professed weaponized the U.S. government against him. “A lot of my time was spent on crypto policy and I, you know, became really frustrated and disappointed with what I saw of, you know, the Biden administration and Democratic party,” Bankman-Fried said, hinting that his rightward shift began in 2022. “The Biden administration was just incredibly destructive and difficult to work with and frankly the Republican party was far more reasonable.” 'Not how I view myself anymore'Bankman-Fried implied that he and Trump share common enemies in Judge Lewis Kaplan, who oversaw the FTX fraud case and Trump’s federal defamation trial. Moreover, Danielle Sassoon, the federal prosecutor who led the suit against SBF, recently resigned after a “tussle” with Trump’s Department of Justice, which was pressuring her to pull the bribery case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in what some see as a “quid pro quo” for his help with immigration enforcement. "When politics get involved — both in a partisan sense and the career advancement for law enforcement sense — it blows everything out of proportion, and patterns that exist in a lot of places metastasize in an unconstrained way,” Bankman-Fried said. In 2020, Bankman-Fried was the second-largest donor to the Biden campaign, which he described as an attempt at preventing the Democratic party from becoming the party of democratic-socialist Bernie Sanders. He also reiterated that he gave an equivalent amount supporting Republican candidates using “dark money."“I viewed myself at the time as sort of Center-Left and that's not how I view myself anymore,” he said, noting the “vibe shift” that has taken place in the tech sector seen by formerly outspoken Democrats like Marc Zuckerberg and Marc Andreessen supporting Trump. Although a second trial over Bankman-Fried’s alleged campaign contributions fraud was dropped, he notes that former FTX Digital Markets co-CEO Ryan Salame, who was the outwardly Republican foil to SBF’s liberal mask, received a 90-month sentence for his unlawful political contributions. "You had one Republican who pled guilty to really small sets of the charges ... He got a seven-and-a-half-year prison sentence — four times as long as the other three combined, all of whom were on the other side of the aisle,” Bankman-Fried said, referring to his co-conspirators who testified against him. Criticizing the case, not the exchangeBankman-Fried is not the only person seeking clemency from Donald Trump. There are now several campaigns for Trump to pardon additional crypto builders, including Roger “Bitcoin Jesus” Ver and Ethereum Foundation researcher Virgil Griffith, who is serving time for giving a presentation about crypto at a conference in North Korea. Bankman-Fried is also appealing his case, arguing that it should be declared a mistrial. In particular, he repeated claims that FTX and sister trading firm Alameda Research were always solvent and that law firm Sullivan & Cromwell mishandled FTX’s bankruptcy after taking control in November 2022."There were enough assets to get all customers paid in kind, in full, in November 2022,” Bankman-Fried said. “Instead, customers have had to wait two and a half years while the estate said it’s hopelessly insolvent, a ‘dumpster fire.’"While it’s true that many of Alameda and FTX’s investments ultimately paid off, including a seed round investment in the Anthropic AI firm now valued at several billion dollars, customers need their money immediately during a bank run — not weeks, months or years later. Bankman-Fried maintains that there was evidence proving that he didn’t misappropriate billions of dollars of customer funds — and that the cash was on hand. "Judge Kaplan allowed the prosecution to tell the jury that everyone had lost all of their money, [but] in a separate ruling disallowed the defense from addressing the exact same topic — and the fact that the story the jury was told was false obviously made that a pretty critical point,” he said. He added — reiterating an often repeated argument — that “borrowing and lending” were part of FTX’s margin-trading platform, not evidence of theft, and that it only “looked like” the exchange was insolvent. “That doesn't answer all the questions but it does answer the question of whether fundamentally there was a theft or whether fundamentally there's like a contractual function,” he said. Although Bankman-Fried apparently attempted to make himself as sympathetic to President Trump as possible — from praising the taking a “chainsaw” to bureaucracy to badmouthing Biden — there is one way that he may forever remain unrelatable:“There are a lot of things I don't like about my personal situation right now, you know,” Bankman-Fried said. “Money isn't the important one.” Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. 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