'The guy’s a piece of s - - t': SBF’s pardon push falls flat in Congress

Cryptocurrency supporters in Washington have spent the last four years working to rinse the stench of Sam Bankman-Fried off of legislative efforts that could legitimize digital assets.

Now, as the convicted former crypto tycoon publicly vies for a pardon, the industry’s leading cheerleaders in Congress are urging President Donald Trump not to take the bait.

Bankman-Fried, who was convicted in 2023 on fraud charges after his FTX crypto exchange collapsed, has been heaping praise on Trump and claiming on social media in recent months that his exchange was solvent — apparently part of a brazen campaign to win a pardon from the president.

Crypto supporters aren’t buying it.

“The guy’s a piece of shit,” said Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), a longtime crypto enthusiast who has championed industry-friendly legislation. “The guy shouldn’t be pardoned. The guy should go to jail for a long, long time.”

On X, Bankman-Fried’s account has lauded the Trump administration’s drug pricing initiative, praised his management of the economy and touted the president as a savior for the crypto sector. The one-time crypto wunderkind has also sat for a jailhouse interview with Tucker Carlson. He has blamed his conviction on “Biden’s lawfare machine,” likening it to the Justice Department’s indictments of Trump after he left office the first time.

(The X posts are “SBF's words” but posted “through a proxy,” according to the account’s biography, which says he can use Bureau of Prisons-approved “phone calls / emails to tell others what to post on our socials.”)

None of it is winning him any favor among Trump allies on Capitol Hill.

“I hope the president doesn’t fall for that,” said Sen. Cynthia Lummis, a Wyoming Republican who’s been dubbed the Senate’s “crypto queen.” “He hurt a lot of people. He should have to spend some time contemplating that.”

Rep. Mike Flood of Nebraska, an up-and-coming Republican on the House Financial Services Committee, was taken aback when told about Bankman-Fried’s campaign.

“He crashed the car, man. He engaged in massive fraud,” he said. “Wall Street’s not needing him back to fix any problems. He helped us identify a problem by committing a massive amount of fraud — and we rewarded him with a long stay in a federal prison.”

Lawyers representing Bankman-Fried did not respond to a request for comment.

The brazen pardon push remains a long-shot: Trump told The New York Times in January that he does not plan to pardon Bankman-Fried, and there is nothing to suggest his position has changed. But the effort comes after an array of white-collar criminals have won pardons from Trump — some after waging high-dollar influence campaigns. The White House did not respond to a request for comment about a potential pardon.

Democrats have seized on Trump’s use of the pardon power as corrupt. Asked about the possibility of an SBF pardon, Rep. Sam Liccardo, a crypto-friendly California Democrat, said that “precedent has amply demonstrated that if Sam Bankman-Fried or his friends commit to donate a sufficiently large plaque in the new White House ballroom, he will get pardoned.”

Trump has also pardoned several controversial figures in the crypto world, including Changpeng Zhao, the former CEO of the crypto exchange Binance, who pleaded guilty in 2023 to money laundering-related charges. On his second day in office, he fulfilled a campaign promise to free Ross Ulbricht, the founder of an online illegal marketplace known as Silk Road.

He faced little pushback from his own party for those moves. But Republicans see any link to SBF, whose crimes helped crash the crypto market and became synonymous with the risks associated with the industry, as a threat to their digital asset agenda.

Lummis, who is helping to negotiate a landmark rewrite of Wall Street regulations to accommodate crypto trading in the Senate, publicly rejected SBF’s endorsement of the legislative effort on X.

“I worked so hard trying to separate the fraudster from the means he used that I just don’t even want him to rear his ugly head in this argument,” she said in an interview. “Because he does muddy the water.”