Consulting with a lawyer who has ties to President Trump. Reaching out to Washington lobbyists. And sitting for a jailhouse interview with Tucker Carlson.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced cryptocurrency mogul who was once a top Democratic donor, has embarked on a long-shot campaign to secure a pardon from the Trump administration, six people with knowledge of the matter said.
The effort has been driven by a small group of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s supporters, including his parents, Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried, who are trying to help their son escape the 25-year prison sentence he received after he was convicted of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering in the collapse of his crypto exchange, FTX.
There is no indication that the Bankman-Frieds and their allies have reached Mr. Trump directly or discussed a potential pardon with his White House advisers.
But the push appears intended to capitalize on Mr. Trump’s transactional approach to clemency. The president has favored pardon seekers with connections to him — either personally or through lawyers and lobbyists — and claims of prosecutorial misconduct that echo his own grievances about the cases against him.
As part of the clemency effort, Mr. Bankman and Ms. Fried, who are Stanford University law professors and longtime active Democrats, are consulting with Kory Langhofer, an Arizona lawyer who worked for Mr. Trump’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. Politically connected businesspeople and Washington lobbyists have also received outreach from intermediaries who claim to be allies of Mr. Bankman-Fried, three people with knowledge of the situation said.
His supporters have also taken steps that appear calculated to seek favor with Mr. Trump in smaller ways. Mr. Bankman, who has maintained a low profile since FTX’s collapse, co-wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post last month arguing that Mr. Trump’s plans for a sovereign wealth fund could help “dramatically increase corporate productivity.”
Mr. Bankman-Fried’s allies believe they can point to flaws in his prosecution that would resonate with Mr. Trump. “The prosecution told a story about FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried that is not correct,” Mr. Langhofer said. “If the public knew the full story, they would view it differently.”Reached by phone on Thursday, Ms. Fried declined to comment. Bloomberg News reported in January that Mr. Bankman-Fried’s parents had met with people in Mr. Trump’s orbit to work toward a possible pardon.
A White House representative declined to comment.
So far, the push does not appear to have gained traction, the people with knowledge of the matter said. The only indication that Mr. Bankman-Fried may be making headway came this week, when he got an audience with Tucker Carlson, who is close to Mr. Trump. On Thursday, the former Fox News host published a 43-minute interview with Mr. Bankman-Fried that was recorded via video call.
Speaking from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he has been held for the last 18 months, Mr. Bankman-Fried wore a dark brown prison outfit over a gray T-shirt and sipped from a white mug. He made an indirect pitch to Mr. Trump, arguing that at the time of his arrest, he was closer to Washington Republicans than to Democrats. He voiced cautious optimism about how Mr. Trump would unleash the crypto industry.
“Changing the guard helps,” he said.
The Bureau of Prisons has strict rules about who is allowed to communicate with inmates and which channels they can use. After the interview with Mr. Carlson was posted, Mr. Bankman-Fried was placed in solitary confinement, a person briefed on the situation said.
A representative for the Bureau of Prisons said “this particular interview was not approved.” She declined to comment on whether Mr. Bankman-Fried, who turned 33 on Thursday, was in solitary confinement.
Three years ago, Mr. Bankman-Fried was a billionaire crypto executive who hobnobbed with Tom Brady and Katy Perry and donated tens of millions of dollars to Democrats.
Then in November 2022, FTX collapsed. Federal prosecutors charged Mr. Bankman-Fried with stealing $8 billion from customers and committing fraud against the company’s investors and lenders. In 2023, he was convicted after a monthlong trial and later sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Mr. Bankman-Fried has maintained his innocence. He filed an appeal in September, arguing that the judge who oversaw the case was biased against him.
The pardon effort represents an even more audacious attempt to reverse his conviction. Mr. Bankman-Fried does not fit the profile of someone Mr. Trump would instinctively pardon. The former crypto mogul not only donated to Democrats, but also voiced opposition to Mr. Trump. His conviction was celebrated by Elon Musk, the president’s close adviser.
Still, Mr. Trump has shown a willingness to grant clemency to people whose causes have resonated with him or who have access to his circle of Republican allies. During the election campaign, he was enthusiastically backed by crypto executives, who urged him to act on several policy priorities. Among them: a pardon for Ross Ulbricht, a cult hero in the crypto world who was serving a sentence of life in prison for running the online drug marketplace Silk Road. Mr. Trump issued the pardon within days of his inauguration.
Since then, Mr. Trump has taken further steps to boost the industry, ordering the creation of a national reserve of cryptocurrencies and inviting executives to the White House for a first-of-its-kind “crypto summit” on Friday.
Those conversations are unlikely to help Mr. Bankman-Fried, who is widely resented in the crypto world. But his allies believe that elements of his case — and some of the people involved — could catch Mr. Trump’s eye.
The judge who presided over Mr. Bankman-Fried’s trial, Lewis A. Kaplan, also oversaw the defamation case filed against Mr. Trump by the writer E. Jean Carroll, who had accused the president of rape. (The jury ultimately ordered Trump to pay Ms. Carroll more than $80 million.) And one lead prosecutor in the FTX case was Danielle Sassoon, who resigned from the federal prosecutors’ office in New York last month after refusing to drop charges against New York City mayor Eric Adams, despite orders from officials in Washington.
In court, Mr. Bankman-Fried’s lawyers claimed that Judge Kaplan had unfairly prevented him from presenting evidence that would have contradicted Ms. Sassoon’s prosecution. That argument is the core of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s case for clemency, a person familiar with the effort said.
For months, Mr. Bankman and Ms. Fried have consulted with Mr. Langhofer, a former U.S. prosecutor who filed a lawsuit on behalf of Mr. Trump’s campaign challenging the 2020 election vote counting in Arizona.
Mr. Langhofer withdrew the election suit when it became clear that the case’s outcome would be insufficient to tip the results in the state. In a 2022 radio interview, Mr. Trump expressed unhappiness with his approach.
“When you look at Langhofer, I disagree with him as an attorney,” he said. “I did not think he was a good attorney to hire.”
Mr. Bankman-Fried has been slowly re-emerging as a public figure. Last week, he posted on X for the first time since January 2023, reflecting on Mr. Trump’s layoffs across the federal work force. He argued that sometimes it was important to fire people.
“There’s no point in keeping them around, doing nothing,” he wrote.
The biography section of the account was updated to read: “SBF’s words. Shared by a friend.” On Thursday, the account posted a link to Mr. Carlson’s video, thanking him for conducting the interview.
The video has caused friction among Mr. Bankman-Fried’s few remaining supporters. After it was published, his longtime spokesman, Mark Botnick, resigned. Mr. Botnick said he had found out about the interview only after it circulated online. He declined to comment further.
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.
