FTX cofounder Sam Bankman-Fried has filed a formal request for a presidential pardon, asking President Donald Trump to erase the estimated fraud charges tied to the crypto exchange’s implosion—a long-shot bid that comes after Trump said in January he was not planning to grant the FTX founder any clemency.
Former FTX chief executive Sam Bankman-Fried leaves Manhattan federal court, New York, January 3, 2023. Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty Tuesday to US criminal fraud charges over the spectacular collapse of his crypto exchange. (Photo by Ed JONES / AFP) (Photo by ED JONES/AFP via Getty Images)
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The 34-year-old's petition appears on the Justice Department Pardon Attorney Office's public case-status listing, categorized as a request for a "pardon after completion of sentence."
He is serving a 25-year term handed in 2024 from prosecutors for defrauding billions from FTX customers and spending it on investments, real estate and political donations while assuring users their money was safe.
For months Bankman-Fried has worked to refurbish his image from a low-security facility in California—posting on X in support of Trump, including praise for the president's handling of the Iran conflict and several of his clemency decisions.
Speaking to Fox Business in an interview published Monday, the onetime major Democratic donor said he "absolutely" wants a pardon, while acknowledging the call rests with Trump.
Trump's second term has been marked by an unusually high volume of clemency for white-collar convicts. An NBC News analysis from January found that grouping accounted for more than half of his 88 individual pardons, with money laundering, bank fraud and wire fraud the most frequent charges. Crypto figures have done especially well.
Beyond crypto, recipients span corporate and political fraud: Trevor Milton, founder of electric-truck startup Nikola, convicted of misleading investors about his company's technology; Carlos Watson, head of the collapsed media startup Ozy, whose fraud sentence was shortened; Todd and Julie Chrisley, reality TV stars imprisoned for bank fraud and tax evasion. Last week, Trump issued a pardon to former Rep. Stephen Buyer, R-Ind., who had been serving nearly two years for insider trading.
$10 billion. That’s how much prosecutors estimated FTX defrauded investors of. The operation is among the largest such cases in U.S. history.
Bankman-Fried filed through the normal government channel for pardon requests—a Justice Department office that processes thousands of applications a year and recommends which ones the president should consider. But Trump has often skipped that process entirely in his second term, granting pardons directly to people who get his attention. To vie for his case, Bankman-Fried has pointed out that the same judge, Lewis Kaplan, oversaw both his fraud trial and a defamation case Trump lost—an attempt to cast the two of them as targets of the same court. “He used the same playbook on @realDonaldTrump,” Bankman-Fried posted on X in February. Trump, for his part, has framed his crypto pardons as fulfilling a 2024 campaign promise to end what he called a government "war on crypto," and his administration has sharply cut back the agencies that police financial and crypto crime.
Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes—convicted of deceiving investors about a blood-testing device that didn’t work—asked for clemency in 2025 but has yet to receive it. She was sentenced to 11 years in 2022.
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