Sam Bankman-Fried applies for a pardon from Trump
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Doesn't matter how you "apply", as long as the cash is received.
And what Biden did is not even remotely comparable to what Trump does with full support of conservatives and republicans.
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!
SBF has more than 20 years left.
Ross Ulbricht became a cause celebre among libertarians, but SBF was always genuinely despised by pretty much everyone.
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.
Ponzi schemes often have that feature. Right up until the bottom completely falls out.
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.
And was a campaign promise Trump issued in order to secure votes from that base.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/23/pardon-binance-founder-cz-tr...
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...
These applications of the pardon power have been controversial, but never successfully challenged.
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.
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.
[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/official-trump/