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Waste of time. Just buy a pardon [1][2][3][4][5].

[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/05/04/donald-trumps-...

[2]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/05/04/donald-trumps-...

[3]: https://apnews.com/article/nikola-trevor-milton-fraud-trump-...

[4]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz7e0jve875o

[5]: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/28/trump-pardon-bitmex-crypto-e...

He keeps trying: https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2026/06/08/sam-bankman-fried...

Hasn't succeeded yet, probably because he doesn't have the money, also too publicly associated with the Democratic Party. I wouldn't be shocked if Trump does it in the end because his empathy seems to be reserved for high-profile scammers.

Trump reportedly was disinterested in SBF money. During his tenure, SBF leaned left - with Clinton and others as paid speakers for events.
Trump himself supported Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2008.
Not sure how that's relevant. Trump does whatever Trump thinks is good for Trump. I'm sure his support of Clinton back then made sense to him, as did shifting far right several years later.

If he thinks accepting money from SBF will be good for him, he'll do it. If not, he won't. I suspect SBF is going to be left out in the cold, though, so Trump can say he's tough on white-collar crime, while pardoning the Binance guy and so many other rich fraudsters.

Yeah, it's odd he can't scrape together a couple million and just get a pardon. It seems like the people who were able to pick up FTX claims for .50-.60 on the dollar, and have now made a killing, would toss Sam a tip.
Why would they? What would be the return for them?
On the same basis as phishing emails having spelling mistakes a smart pyramid scheme would hire him as a mascot to keep the idiots buying and the critical analysis hard to separate from jokes.
Nothing is in it for them. It’s why I called it a tip - like tipping your blackjack dealer when you have a good run.
He was a top Democrat donor (the article says he was their number 2 individual donor in 2022) so I doubt he could buy one. Not that he seemed particularly left leaning himself and he also donated to Republicans but 5.2 million publicly to Biden seems like a dealbreaker.

https://time.com/6241262/sam-bankman-fried-political-donatio...

Not until 2028 anyway, depending on outcomes...
And this is why you play both sides.
He's not thug enough. Try again.
Good night, sweet prince
Good
How utterly predictable.
He will hold a Cabinet-level position before 2029.
Trump already chose the Binance money-launderer Zhao which was a competitor of FTX.

But the administration loves frauds, so maybe if Bankman can come up with a bribe.

Is there a corresponding bet on Kalshi or Polymarket
Bankman won't be Fried
Scam Bankman-Fraud is just one of the few highly publicised cases they will use to pretend they are actually serious about tackling these issues. Wake me when someone gets prosecuted for front-running Axios' "Iran deal is imminent" articles in the oil market.
He committed the one crime you can't buy your way out of: scamming the ruling finance class.
"You kill a whale, you'll get the greens, you'll get Greenpeace, you'll get Commander Cousteau on your back! But decimate a school of sardines, I like to tell you that you will be helped to can them!"

From the 1992 movie man bites dog.

> scamming the ruling finance class

Loads of fraudsters get off on technicalities or are being pardoned by this President. What started as a joke on Reddit appears to be taken seriously by way too many people.

Small criminals rot in jails but big ones like founder of silk road get out paying the government. This is shows how rotten american government is
I think the tiered justice system sucks, but this is no small criminal
His crime wasn't small, but he is because he wasn't already wealthy before committing his crimes.
>In appealing against the conviction, Bankman-Fried’s defense lawyers argued that US district judge Lewis Kaplan, who oversaw the trial, improperly prevented Bankman-Fried from introducing evidence to back up his belief that FTX had enough funds to cover customer withdrawals.

So it's been a few years now. Did people get their money in the end? That would presumably answer the question of whether they were stolen from. It wouldn't affect any decisions on crimes related to flouting regulations.

That is not how any of this works. He was convicted of fraud, and fraud was committed the moment he transferred the funds to Alameda. That he placed some bets that worked out, like his Anthropic investment, doesn't negate the crime any more than if I robbed a bank, placed a winning bet with it and returned the funds with interest.
I'm saying a Fraud conviction is not the same a stealing. I'm completely ok with a conviction for fraud, provided that the conviction and sentencing is based upon that fraud.

I would characterise robbing a bank, placing a bet and returning the funds as theft.

However if you entrusted me with $500 and I gambled and paid you back when you wanted the $500, I would not say that is theft. If I had promised not to gamble, then it would have been fraudulent.

You can characterize things however you want. But "theft" and "fraud" are extensively defined concepts in caselaw. Fraud, specifically, is legally defined quite differently than what most people think the word means in common usage and your example here does not have much relationship to it.
Except SBF didn't gamble away the money (still a criminal offence if he did); he spent it on lavish goods and apartments, with a lot of political donations. The very definition of fraud is deception, misappropriation, and loss to the users, all of which did happen.

In between placing a bet and returning the funds, the customer's funds were totally non-existent hence the loss to the user. That things later worked out after some years does not take away the misappropriation and that there was no actual money where it was meant to be at that moment, hence a fraud.

It's hardly even that-- he dumped the remaining customer assets to briefly crash the price of Bitcoin... causing an understatement in what he took from people.
Proof you can graduate from MIT and still be completely dumb.
I know people with doctorates who can't organise their lives. Being a good student does not make you smart in all aspects of your life.
Except when you pay someone to manage your money.

Remember this.

Would you consider it theft if you asked someone to watch over your house, and when you came back, they told you they sold your house but give them a few months and they should be able to buy it back? That's basically what SBF did here--he sold the customer assets that were not his to sell, and his defense is trying to obscure the basic fact.
If Michael Lewis is to be believed making Gemini whole was his largest mistake.
You SBF defenders have such a weird view of how the law works. If I embezzle money from my company and then bet it all on black in Vegas, intending to give it back if I win, your implication here is equivalent to saying I did commit a crime if the wheel comes up red, but I did not commit any crime if it comes up black.
This is how people who get to the top act, the ones you see at the top are the ones who correctly guessed the roulette number .

If you want to become successful sooner or later you'd have to do the same .

As I realized this I am slowly but steadily abandoning the race for money and I am trying to approach it by finding the best deals for the stuff that I like as money saved is money earned and there is very little difference between experiencing a top 85 percentile thing and a top 99.999 percentile thing , but that last 15% man that is what the money exonential really goes crazy

Not a SBF defender, and at no point am I suggesting that a crime was not committed. I am saying that the crime is different to theft.

Would you say that a misuse of funds with zero chance of the rightful owner losing their money is a less serious crime than a misuse of funds with a 50% or 100% chance of losing their money.

I think it is, and penalties should be proportionate. That is a principle that I hold independent to any of the specifics of this case.

I think Kraken has been selected to redistribute the funds, but not sure if it has happened yet. These things take time, I think Mt. Gox took like a decade to be distributed
They did, I had something like $50 in FTX and I got it back. I don’t remember when, I think it was about a year ago.
I think the victims were helped quite a bit by the runup in crypto assets. So even though some was lost, the run up in what was left ended up being quite a bit.
Yeah that happened with MtGox too. I don't think that aspect should be factored in as a defence. It should be more down to the degree of risk that people were exposed to at the time the offence occurred.