US Senate Unanimously Opposes Sam Bankman-Fried Pardon

The US Senate has unanimously declared that Sam Bankman-Fried should never win clemency solution on Wednesday it said that the convicted FTX founder should “under no circumstances” be pardoned or commuted of his 25-year sentence.

The measure, S. Res. 772, passed by unanimous consent – ​​a procedure that approves a resolution as long as no senator objects. In addition to its position on Bankman-Fried, it reaffirmed the Senate’s commitment to “the rule of law and the integrity of the United States financial system.”

As a non-binding resolution, it has no legal force and cannot limit the president’s constitutional power to grant clemency.

A rare dual front

The measure was pushed by Senators Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) and Rubén Gallego (D-AZ), the top Republicans and Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee’s Digital Assets Subcommittee, who introduced the measure on June 17. Lummis, the crypto industry’s most prominent advocate in Congress, said at the time that Bankman-Fried had “had his day in court.” Gallego was more blunt, saying, “Keep him locked up.”

A spokesperson for Lummis’ office said this at the time Declutter that “SBF has clearly stepped up its clemency campaign and Senator Lummis wants Fried to know that she and her colleagues believe he is exactly where he belongs.”

An increasingly narrow road to freedom

The vote rolls in as Bankman-Fried continues to look for a way out. He lost his appeal when a federal court upheld his fraud conviction last month, while President Donald Trump said in January he had no plans to pardon him.

Trump has been willing to extend clemency to other crypto figures — including Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, BitMEX co-founders Arthur Hayes, Ben Delo and Samuel Reed, and Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht, all of whom he pardoned.

How FTX Unraveled

A jury convicted Bankman-Fried in November 2023 on seven counts related to the 2022 implosion of FTX, once one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Prosecutors called it one of the largest financial frauds in U.S. history after U.S. customers lost more than $8 billion.

With the courts, the White House and now the entire Senate lining up against him, Bankman-Fried’s options are shrinking — leaving his scheduled release, sometime around 2044, his most likely path out.