FTX ($0.00) executives who cooperated with prosecutors got lenient sentences because they were Democrats, disgraced CEO Sam Bankman-Fried suggested in a recent interview with the New York Sun.
Speaking from Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, Bankman-Fried maintained his innocence and told the Sun his prosecution was partly motivated by his rightward turn and the “politicization” of the Department of Justice under former President Joe Biden.
“It was starting to come out that I’d been working with Republicans a lot more than had been previously thought,” he said in a recording of the interview published online.
Bankman-Fried’s comments come as his parents attempt to secure a pardon from President Donald Trump, according to a recent report from Bloomberg.
Bankman-Fried is serving a 25 year prison sentence for his role in the multibillion-dollar collapse of FTX. In November 2023, a jury found the former billionaire defrauded FTX customers by taking their deposits and spending the money on venture investments, luxury real estate, and political donations through a hedge fund he controlled, Alameda Research. He is appealing his conviction.
Once considered a budding Democratic mega-donor, Bankman-Fried has been distancing himself from progressive politics since his crypto empire began to unravel in November 2022.
This week, Bankman-Fried went even further, suggesting he and President Donald Trump were both victims of “politicization” of the Department of Justice.
Trump fought dozens of civil and criminal lawsuits in the run up to the 2024 presidential election, at one point appearing in front of the same judge that sentenced Bankman-Fried: Judge Lewis Kaplan of the Southern District of New York.
“I know president Trump had a lot of frustrations with Judge Kaplan,” Bankman-Fried said. “I certainly did as well.”
Bankman-Fried said he once considered himself “center-left.” But he became disillusioned with the party after seeing Biden’s “incredibly destructive” approach to crypto.
“That’s not how I view myself anymore, and it’s now how I’d come to view myself by 2022,” he said.
Three of Bankman-Fried’s closest associates pleaded guilty and testified against him at his trial. All three were rewarded for their cooperation: two dodged prison sentences, and the third, former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison, is serving two years in prison.
That was evidence the proceedings had become political, according to Bankman-Fried.
That’s because a fourth executive and Republican donor, Ryan Salame, received more than seven years in prison.
But Salame was the only one who hadn’t testified against his former boss during Bankman-Fried’s trial in October 2023.
Bankman-Fried repeated his claim FTX suffered from a “liquidity crisis” rather than insolvency — that it could have repaid customers if it had been given enough time to sell some of its assets.
It was an argument he made at his sentencing hearing last March, with little success.
“A thief who takes his loot to Las Vegas and successfully bets the stolen money is not entitled to a discount on his sentence,” Kaplan said at the time.
Later in his jailhouse interview, Bankman-Fried spoke about his experience behind bars.
“The days go by in a pretty undifferentiated manner. There isn’t a whole lot to do in prison,” he said.
Asked what he misses the most about being a free man, he said “freedom of information.”
“Just being able to Google things is something I really, sorely miss,” he told the Sun. “And then on the flip side, being able to work on something meaningful.”
Although he’s “cautiously optimistic” about his appeal, he tries not to dwell on what life outside of prison might look like.
“I try not to think about it too much right now, because there’s nothing I can do,” he said.
“I mean, right now I’ve got 20-something years left on my sentence.”
Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out to him with tips at [email protected].
