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The White House has confirmed that President Trump will not grant clemency to Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the collapsed crypto exchange FTX, Fortune reported Tuesday.
The confirmation, delivered by a White House official, reinforces Trump’s previously stated opposition to freeing the imprisoned crypto executive.
In an interview with The New York Times in January, Trump ruled out pardoning Bankman-Fried after granting clemency to prominent figures such as Changpeng Zhao, co-founder of Binance, and Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX.
Bankman-Fried is attempting to secure a presidential pardon by publicly aligning himself with Trump. In recent weeks, he has posted messages criticizing the judiciary and embracing conservative platforms, marking a sharp departure from his previous support for Democratic causes.
The strategy has so far yielded no results.
With his political pivot failing to gain traction, Bankman-Fried is continuing to challenge his conviction through the appeals process.
The former CEO of FTX was convicted in March 2024 on multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy tied to the misappropriation of customer deposits. His exchange, once valued at $32 billion, filed for bankruptcy in November 2022 after revelations about risky financial practices surfaced.
The denial puts to rest speculation that Trump’s broadly favorable stance toward digital assets might translate into clemency for one of the industry’s most notorious figures.
Bankman-Fried donated $5.2 million to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign and offered no comparable support to Trump, a factor observers say may have influenced the outcome.
At his peak in early 2022, his net worth reached an estimated $26.5 billion. That figure fell to zero following FTX’s implosion, which also cratered FTT, the exchange’s native token.
The collapse triggered widespread regulatory scrutiny of centralized trading platforms and eroded confidence across the sector. Policymakers have since pushed for tighter oversight of crypto exchanges to prevent similar failures.
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