Another crypto convict is trying to curry favor from President Donald Trump.
Over a series of Bitcoin into mainstream relevance. Silk Road users paid in the cryptocurrency to buy illegal drugs, among other illicit products.
And Bankman-Fried isn’t even the first FTX executive to angle for help from Trump. Ryan Salame, the former co-CEO of FTX’s Bahamas subsidiary, claimed he was the victim of political persecution from Biden’s Department of Justice. A staunch Republican, Salame told Bloomberg shortly before he reported for a seven-and-a-half-year prison sentence in October that he was hoping the next president, who turned out to be Trump, would look favorably on his case.
Bad judge, bad DOJ
Bankman-Fried echoed other Trump talking points in his interview with the New York Sun. Like Salame, he decried “the politicization of the DOJ over the last decades,” which he said was “speeding up recently.”
Before Trump won a second term in 2024, federal prosecutors came after the current president for allegedly mishandling classified documents as well as working to subvert the results of the 2020 election. Trump has repeatedly said that former President Joe Biden weaponized and politicized the DOJ. Federal prosecutors dropped the two cases against Trump after his election.
Bankman-Fried highlighted that Lewis Kaplan, the judge who presided over his trial, also presided over a civil case against Trump, in which a jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll.
“I know President Trump had a lot of frustrations with Judge Kaplan,” said Bankman-Fried. “I certainly did as well.”
