Sam Bankman-Fried applies for a pardon from Trump

Posted by pseudolus 1 day ago

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Comments

Comment by tptacek 1 day ago

This story doesn't mean anything. SBF has been "seeking" a pardon for over a year now. There's no due process consideration for obtaining a pardon; "applying" for one doesn't get you anything more than asking for one on Twitter would --- given the current administration, asking on Twitter might get you further! I don't think SBF's case is slipping the administration's mind.

Comment by tim333 1 day ago

Maybe you apply to Trump's sons with a proposal as to how to enrich their crypto ventures?

Comment by kgwxd 1 day ago

> given the current administration, asking on Twitter might get you further!

Doesn't matter how you "apply", as long as the cash is received.

Comment by Tangurena2 1 day ago

Staff working for Giuliani reported that pardons cost $2,000,000.

Comment by asdff 1 day ago

If it were that cheap Sean Combs would be a free man. They probably increase the expected bribe based on your perceived ability to pay.

Comment by mattbillenstein 1 day ago

It's probably as much about PR as it is about money - Puffy is a heavy lift on the PR side...

Comment by masfuerte 1 day ago

Giuliani was hawking pardons in the final days of Trump's first term. I'd expect that Trump will be much more interested in money than PR in the final days of his second term too. But he might not live that long, which must be excruciating if you're a wealthy crook.

Comment by mattbillenstein 1 day ago

Yeah, but he has a lot more money now - grifted literally billions - so I guess more is more, so idk.

Comment by Snafuh 1 day ago

Apparently his net worth peaked at a billion dollars. And he only got 4 years. By the time a pardon would be arranged, he'd almost be out again.

SBF has more than 20 years left.

Comment by Kapura 1 day ago

you forget how racist trump is

Comment by stronglikedan 1 day ago

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Comment by CyberDildonics 1 day ago

This is a 5 minute search compared to your zero evidence.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/15/opinion/leonh...

https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-trump-racism-election-...

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/27/nx-s1-5763863/hegseth-soldier...

Comment by nailer 13 hours ago

This is 2 minutes of reading that NY Times piece:

- "A former hotel executive said Trump criticized a black accountant" OK, hearsay but OK.

- Trump doesn't like crime? Associating that with race makes the NY Times seem very racist.

- “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” - Islam isn't a race.

- Haiti is a shithole. It's not polite to say, but that's why people want to leave. The statement that Haiti isn't desirable has nothing to do with race.

- He claimed that the same caravan included “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners.” - and? Caravans from Mexico included a lot of people from unknown countries including some whose governments expouse wanting to kill Americans.

Comment by Larrikin 1 day ago

Why do people lie on the Internet? Trump is the most openly racist president in decades

Comment by ebbi 1 day ago

Virtually every American president is/was racist. If they weren't, they'd have more care and concern for the innocent lives taken by US created/backed wars/genocides.

Comment by raised_hand 1 day ago

that's it? seems low

Comment by legitster 1 day ago

It's important to remember that Trump was actually relatively cash poor when he ran for president.

If you get rid of all his insane statements about his own wealth, his entire fortune boils down to a skyscraper, a resort, and a handful of piddling licensing deals. His realistic net worth was probably closer to, $500 million and the annual discretionary free cash flow closer to $20 - $40 million.

So, yeah. A single $2 million dollar ... erm... "emolument" would be something like 5-10% of his annual cashflow for a year. He might have taken over a 100 of these - that's a substantial boon!

Comment by andrewstuart 1 day ago

Its volume pricing.

Comment by beastman82 1 day ago

Unless he's the only rich person on earth who can't figure out how to bribe, this will happen.

Comment by forinti 1 day ago

He spent a lot of money on political donations. I don't think it was from the goodness of his heart.

Comment by JeremyNT 14 hours ago

The problem for poor SBF is that he donated to the President's opponents, so presumably he'll need to pay a higher rate for his pardon.

Comment by Yizahi 1 day ago

Well, he knows the price for this service - you donate 2 billion real USD to Mr. Orange private shittoken scam "fund" and you go free. He should scrounge his pockets or ask his cronies to prepare a required fee.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/23/pardon-binance-founder-cz-tr...

Comment by jihadjihad 1 day ago

> Trump has pardoned a number of people who have donated large sums to his political campaigns.

It will be interesting to see how he'll be able to spin his well-documented donations to Democratic causes and sell that to the current administration:

"He personally gave at least $40 million to politicians and political action committees ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, mostly to Democrats and liberal-leaning groups, making him the second overall top donor to Democrats, only behind George Soros, according to the Center for Responsive Politics" [0].

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

Comment by bdcravens 1 day ago

By finding a way to get at least $41 million to the other side

Comment by cosmicgadget 1 day ago

You can call Trump "America's Hitler" and end up the VP pick. All that matters is bending the knee.

Comment by lukan 1 day ago

The question is, if he would see it really as an insult. Hitler was pretty successful in the beginning and did rise to the top against many odds and breaking conventions. (unlike Trump, he was not born rich, though)

Comment by jalapenoj 1 day ago

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Comment by yalogin 1 day ago

I was expecting this to be done by now as the administration is not worried about optics, so not sure what’s holding it up.

Comment by Maxatar 1 day ago

Unlike CZ, who made Trump and his family hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars, SBF has absolutely nothing to offer Trump. He's broke and a complete outcast.

Ross Ulbricht became a cause celebre among libertarians, but SBF was always genuinely despised by pretty much everyone.

Comment by evan_ 1 day ago

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly1qrl9l1qo CZ pardon- for reference

Comment by bpodgursky 1 day ago

Don't be a clown. If SBF was out of jail he could raise a twenty billion dollar fund tomorrow.

His Anthropic investment alone would give him credibility. If it hadn't been liquidated for pennies FTX would have been one of the best performing funds of all time, even with the theft and mismanagement.

Comment by rozap 1 day ago

This is a good point. We should just let all the ponzi schemes that are currently underway ride. Maybe they made good investments that will return 100x. The only way to know is to not intervene.

Comment by bpodgursky 1 day ago

Did I say he should get out of jail?

IF he was pardoned, THEN he could easily raise money, because his old fund made EXTREMELY GOOD investment decisions. That's not a moral statement, that's a factual claim. "He should get out of jail because he is a good investor" is a strawman argument I did not make.

Comment by nujabe 1 day ago

I highly doubt investors would be flocking to give their money to a convicted fraudster. And I would be surprised if he wasn’t still banned from starting a company by the SEC.

Comment by themafia 1 day ago

> FTX would have been one of the best performing funds of all time

Ponzi schemes often have that feature. Right up until the bottom completely falls out.

Comment by bpodgursky 1 day ago

It wasn't a Ponzi scheme. You really need to read up before commenting. It was a wildly successful fund he used as a slush fund for other projects. There's no mechanism for FTX to collapse unless Anthropic among other projects collapses to zero.

Comment by verteu 1 day ago

Alameda was only profitable in the years when Bitcoin was going up. By 2022 their trading operations were deeply negative (hence the decision to steal customer funds).

Comment by themafia 1 day ago

> Ross Ulbricht became a cause celebre among libertarians

And was a campaign promise Trump issued in order to secure votes from that base.

Comment by mattas 1 day ago

I had no idea there was an _application_ you could fill out for a pardon.

Comment by christoff12 1 day ago

I'm surprised it's taken this long.

Comment by Animats 1 day ago

Does the White House take Visa for pardons?

Comment by iso1631 1 day ago

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Comment by pstuart 1 day ago

Likely TrumpCoin is the correct answer.

Comment by ecocentrik 1 day ago

Gold bars are his top preference.

Comment by lostmsu 1 day ago

Why would he want it back?

Comment by CyberDildonics 1 day ago

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Comment by ortusdux 1 day ago

Do pardons require a full confession?

Comment by wl 1 day ago

There's this notion from the Supreme Court case Burdick v. United States (1915) that accepting a pardon is an implicit admission of guilt. Therefore, a person can refuse a pardon. There isn't anything in the decision to justify the argument that accepting the pardon is an admission of guilt, it's just stated as a fact. It seems at odds with situations where pardons have been used to correct miscarriages of justice in cases of factual innocence.

Comment by Maxatar 1 day ago

Just to clarify, a pardon in the ordinary sense can't be refused. If you're imprisoned and the President pardon's you, you can't decide to refuse the pardon and remain in prison. As soon as the pardon is granted you are released, whether you like it or not, whether you "accept" it or not.

The Burdick case had to do with an individual who had not yet been convicted of anything being offered a pardon in exchange for testimony that could have otherwise incriminated him. The Supreme Court ruled that in that specific scenario someone accepting a pardon could be seen as admitting guilt, so the pardon couldn't be forced on Burdick to strip away his fifth amendment right and compel his testimony.

Comment by everforward 1 day ago

From what I recall last time I looked into it, sort of by current legal theory.

A pardon does not automatically require a confession (though it could be part of the terms), however blanket pardons remove the ability to plead the 5th on the topic if subpoenaed as a witness. The 5th precludes being forced to testify against yourself, but if the government has declared it not a crime then you can’t testify against yourself even if you wanted to.

From what I recall, non-global pardons still maintained some level of 5th Amendment protections. Ie you were pardoned for A, but talking about A might reveal you did B, so you could still potentially testify against yourself.

Iirc, non-global pardons usually come with a stipulation like “must testify that or about…” because of this.

Comment by margalabargala 1 day ago

No. Furthermore, they don't even need to name a specific crime, a person can be pardoned for "any crimes committed in this period" etc.

Comment by nickff 1 day ago

No; there have been a number of (controversial) pardons for people who were either not charged or had not been convicted. Gerald Ford set something of a precedent by pardoning Richard Nixon for activities related to the Watergate cover-up, and Joe Biden pre-emptively pardoned his whole family.

These applications of the pardon power have been controversial, but never successfully challenged.

Comment by LZ_Khan 1 day ago

L O L

Comment by b0sk 1 day ago

Remember Sam -- Trevor Milton got a pardon via hiring Pam Bondi's brother as his lawyer.

Comment by AgentME 1 day ago

This isn't that surprising after it was reported on that he had notes about claiming to "come out as a Republican and against the woke agenda" as a PR plan to defend himself. (https://gizmodo.com/sbf-floated-coming-out-republican-tucker...) I wonder if Trump is selling pardons and whether SBF still has the means for it. It's depressing that the US's state of affairs is such that this might be a workable strategy for him.

Comment by kachoio 1 day ago

Help Trump launch another meme coin and he’s out

Comment by Animats 1 day ago

SBF offering to manage Trump's meme coins might appeal to Trump. They've crashed. [1][2] Trump's stablecoin was just delisted a few hours ago, as part of a strange dispute.[3]

[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/official-trump/

[2] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/melania-meme/

[3] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/usd1/

Comment by MagicMoonlight 1 day ago

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Comment by askonomm 1 day ago

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Comment by cdrnsf 1 day ago

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Comment by josefritzishere 1 day ago

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Comment by perryh2 1 day ago

Check Polymarket

Comment by josefritzishere 1 day ago

I avoid that website like malware, but point taken. Even if it's a given some fool will play those odds.