Sam Bankman-Fried, the convicted fraudster who made billions disappear in a crypto fog machine, would now like Donald Trump to help him launder the consequences.
Bankman-Fried is serving 25 years for fraud and conspiracy after FTX collapsed into one of the great “oops, all customer money gone” disasters of the crypto era. Now he has formally asked for a pardon, reportedly after completion of his sentence, which is somehow even more pathetic than asking to be sprung early. It is not a jailbreak request. It is a branding exercise for 2037.
Now that Bankman-Fried has dragged his pathetic little ask out into the open, we’ve learned his request is that Trump pardon him “after completion of sentence.”
Man, what? That is some wuss-ass behavior. You’re begging Trump to let you serve out your full 25 years. To be fair, a post-incarceration pardon does have value. Bankman-Fried would not face any restrictions on, say, voting or the type of job he could hold. And to some extent, a softer ask makes sense here given that Trump has been exceedingly public about saying he will not pardon Bankman-Fried.
But the whole thing also smacks of a sort of profound delusion. Even if our boy Sam is on the goodest of good behavior, at best he could get that sentence down to about 12.5 years. With that, he’d walk out of prison around 2037, at which point he will be in his mid-40s and out of the crypto grift game for nearly 15 years. Does he really think he’ll just flip a switch and go back to gobbling up billions? Or would this little scheme result in Bankman-Fried perhaps not having to pay that hefty $11.2 billion he was ordered to forfeit? Who can say!
The blockchain was decentralized. The begging is not.
He probably has monies or other financial resources hidden that a Presidential Pardon might allow him to use.