On Tuesday, as an attorney for Sam Bankman-Fried argued with a judge considering his appeal, an email landed in the inboxes of those who subscribed to the disgraced crypto mogul’s Substack.
The email was from Bankman-Fried’s mother, Barbara, a Stanford Law professor. So there was no confusion, she wrote, “Just to confirm for those asking: yes, the post below was written by Barbara Fried.”
Attached was a 65-page report, written by Fried, which made an aggressive case in defense of her son, who was charged in 2023 with defrauding customers of his crypto exchange FTX out of billions of dollars. The erstwhile billionaire was convicted on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
It’s a sentence Bankman-Fried’s lawyers are appealing in federal court this week. Oral arguments began on Tuesday, with his lawyer Alexandra Shapiro reportedly making the case that his first trial was “fundamentally unfair.” She put forth a similar argument to Bankman-Fried’s mother: that FTX collapsed as a result of a liquidity crisis, not fraud.
Judges in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals – where, in a neat coincidence, Bankman-Fried’s mother once clerked – were reportedly skeptical of his lawyer’s arguments. “From my reading of the record, [there was] very substantial evidence of guilt,” one of the judges told Shapiro. The other two judges on the panel reportedly shared in that skepticism.
Should Bankman-Fried lose his appeal, which seems likely given the high burden in such cases, there is another well-trodden path out of federal prison: a pardon.
President Donald Trump has, in just his first year back in office, proven to be perhaps the most unrestrained pardoner in modern presidential history, with a particular focus on white collar criminals. Those to whom he has tossed salvation include Silk Road creator Russ Ulbricht, Ozy Media fraudster Carlos Watson, and another criminal cryptobillionaire, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao.
So it may not be that far-fetched that Bankman-Fried, despite his past life as a Democratic megadonor, would nab a coveted get-out-of-jail-free card from Trump. He’s been making the rounds. Bankman-Fried sat for a jailhouse interview with Tucker Carlson in March, during which he put forth some subtle MAGA-signalling. “In 2020, I was center-left and I gave to Biden’s campaign. I was optimistic he would be a center-left president,” he told Carlson. “I spent the next few years in D.C. a lot. I was really really shocked by what I saw there… and not in a good direction.” He added: “By late 2022 I was giving to Republicans as much as Democrats.”
CBS News reported that Bankman-Fried donated more than $40 million in the 2022 election cycle, with the vast majority going to Democrats. He later claimed that he did donate to Republicans, just using “dark” money so as not to spark controversy.
As Bankman-Fried works publicly to cast himself as a liberal apostate, his parents have reportedly mounted a behind-the-scenes effort to secure a pardon. Barbara Fried and her husband, Joseph Bankman, who is also a Stanford law professor, are “consulting with Kory Langhofer, an Arizona lawyer who worked for Mr. Trump’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns,” according to the New York Times. When reached for comment, Fried pointed me to Langhofer for questions concerning the pardon efforts.
What are the chances? A White House official said they do not comment on “the existence or nonexistence of pardons” and that Trump has “final say” on such matters. A former Trump official estimated the chances are “low.” “I don’t see that one happening,” they said. “But I guess never say never.”
Bankman-Fried’s best chance at seducing Trump might be in appealing to the president’s own irrepressible feeling he was wronged by the justice system during the 2024 campaign. When Trump pardoned Ulbricht, he wrote on Truth Social: “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me.”
In a jailhouse interview with the New York Sun earlier this year, Bankman-Fried alleged that both he and Trump suffered from the “politicization” of the Biden DOJ. He also pointed out that Judge Lewis Kaplan, who sentenced him to a quarter-century bid in prison, is the same judge that presided over E. Jean Carroll’s successful defamation case against Trump. Trump labeled Kaplan a “bully” and a “Trump hating judge” during that trial, and behaved so belligerently in his courtroom that he nearly got kicked out.
“I know President Trump had a lot of frustrations with Judge Kaplan,” Bankman-Fried told the Sun. “I certainly did as well.”
The post Sam Bankman-Fried’s Mom Is Posting From His Substack. Why? appeared first on Vanity Fair.
