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Article: Trump's DOJ is not falling for Sam Bankman-Fried's MAGA makeover on X

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5 / 10

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Sam Bankman-Fried, the convicted former FTX CEO, is attempting a political pivot by publicly aligning with Donald Trump and the Republican Party while in prison. He hopes this shift will garner a pardon or leniency, despite being a major Democratic donor previously convicted of stealing billions from customers.

Both the Trump White House and the Department of Justice have rejected these overtures. Prosecutors have dismissed his claims of political persecution as a premeditated and insincere strategy to secure a reduced sentence.

The main topics covered are Sam Bankman-Fried's political realignment, his pursuit of a pardon or new trial, and the official rejections of his efforts by the Trump administration and prosecutors.

Original URL

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/trumps-doj-is-not-falling-for-sam-bankman-frieds-maga-makeover-on-x/

Source Feed

Ars Technica

Published Date

2026-03-12 18:58

Fetched Date

2026-03-12 16:30

Processed Date

2026-03-12 16:31

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Present

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Ever since Donald Trump took office and declared himself a “pro-crypto president,” FTX’s disgraced founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, has been working to convince the administration that he’s a Republican now.
The former Democratic megadonor apparently hopes that a right-wing pivot might help him escape a 25-year prison sentence ordered after Joe Biden’s Department of Justice proved he stole more than $8 billion from customers of his cryptocurrency exchange.
These days, Bankman-Fried frequently praises Trump’s policies and quotes his Truth Social posts on X. He also regularly rants against Democrats, including Biden officials who, he claimed in a motion for a new trial, intimidated FTX employees into lying on the stand or refusing to testify in order to take down Bankman-Fried as a political foe.
However, Trump has yet to signal that he’s considering pardoning Bankman-Fried in light of this new fealty, despite similar pardons for other crypto figures like Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao and Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht. Quite the opposite. Just last month, the White House told Fortune that “Trump has no intention of pardoning Bankman-Fried.”
On the back of that disappointment, Trump’s DOJ has now confirmed that it’s also not falling for Bankman-Fried’s MAGA makeover. In a motion urging the court to deny Bankman-Fried’s request for a new trial, an attorney for the government, Sean Buckley, slammed the FTX founder for his “incoherent” attempt to claim “political victimhood.”
Pointing out that Bankman-Fried was “one of the largest donors to President Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign,” Buckley alleged that Bankman-Fried’s abrupt party-swapping was “a political strategy the defendant pre-planned and committed to in writing before he was convicted, and one he is now executing from prison in an insincere attempt to obtain leniency.”