Exclusive: Sam Bankman-Fried, Phoning the Sun From Jail, Rebuffs ‘Center-Left’ Politics — and Signals Sympathy With Trump

As Sam Bankman-Fried presses his appeal to the Second United States Appeals Circuit and awaits a transfer to a federal prison to continue his 25-year prison sentence, he’s undergoing changes — reflecting on the “destructive” policies of the Biden administration to which he steered millions, resentful of what he feels was the courts’ failure to presume him innocent, and somewhat startled at his own political trajectory.That’s some of the substance of what Mr. Bankman-Fried, speaking on a telephone line from Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, tells The New York Sun in the only published audio interviews Mr. Bankman-Fried has done from jail. With corrections authorities listening in, he accused Mr. Biden of engaging in “political censorship” and “misinformation disguised as anti-misinformation.” The founder of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, speaks on the telephone to the associate editor of the Sun, A.R. Hoffman. February 18 and 19, 2025Over the course of four separate abbreviated phone calls to the Sun, he speaks in a contemplative tone that nevertheless conveys conviction in the company he founded and lost, FTX. Has Mr. Bankman-Fried had a political awakening, or is this a tactical maneuver given that a pardon from President Trump may be his last resort? While Mr. Bankman-Fried laments his distance from the outside world, he appears to have his finger on the pulse of an evolving political climate. The Sun interviewed Mr. Bankman-Fried thrice on Tuesday evening and once on Wednesday. Prison rules limited each of those conversations to a quarter of an hour, and mandated that they be spaced an hour apart. The Sun is presenting the full audio of those tapes, combined and edited for clarity, below. If Icarus, who tried to fly, could speak, this is how he might sound, from beneath the waves, looking back up at the sky. Mr. Bankman-Fried once managed tens of billions of dollars of other people’s money. One of his biggest financial supporters once mused that he could become the planet’s first trillionaire. He amassed coins of all kinds. Celebrities and politicians came for a sliver of the largesse of this crypto Croesus, to borrow another analogy from the Greeks, who understood something of tragic twists and turns. And of hubris. Mr. Bankman-Fried is in prison after the implosion of his empire and conviction in federal court on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy. The Department of Justice asserts that he “orchestrated one of the largest financial frauds in history, stealing over $8 billion of his customers’ money” and that “his deliberate and ongoing lies demonstrated a brazen disregard for customers’ expectations and disrespect for the rule of law.”The DOJ lead prosecutor, Danielle Sassoon, the erstwhile acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, persuaded a jury at Manhattan that Mr. Bankman-Fried “took FTX customer funds for his personal use, to make investments and millions of dollars of political contributions to candidates from both parties, and to repay billions of dollars in loans owed by Alameda Research, a cryptocurrency trading fund that Bankman-Fried also founded.”Mr. Bankman-Fried, though, argues that the empire he built has always had more assets than liabilities, and that it faced a liquidity rather than a solvency crisis. That point is emerging as a crucial point on Bankman-Fried’s appeal. He asserts that the financial health of FTX helps answer the question of whether “fundamentally there was a theft” at all and contends that he was not allowed to surface that argument at trial. Mr. Bankman-Fried has appealed to the Second United States Appeals Circuit. His lawyers argue in their appellate brief that he “was never presumed innocent. He was presumed guilty — before he was even charged. He was presumed guilty by the media. He was presumed guilty by the FTX debtor estate and its lawyers. He was presumed guilty by federal prosecutors eager for quick headlines. And he was presumed guilty by the judge.”Now Mr. Bankman-Fried tells the Sun that his case is touched by the same “prosecutorial abuse” and “politicization of the DOJ” alleged on the campaign trail and from the Oval Office by President Trump. Those echoes could be intentional — since his case was a federal one, the 47th president has the power to pardon Mr. Bankman-Fried, or commute his sentence. He calls his sentence “a piece of the picture” in respect of the upheaval at DOJ.He also shares, with Mr. Trump, an antagonistic relationship with Judge Lewis Kaplan, who handed down a harsh sentence to Mr. Bankman-Fried after ruling consistently against the defense at trial. Mr. Trump resents Judge Kaplan, whom he calls “a bully,” for his oversight of the lawsuits brought against him by the sex and romance columnist E. Jean Carroll. Mr. Bankman-Fried shares with the Sun that “I know President Trump had a lot of frustrations with Judge Kaplan. I certainly did as well.”Mr. Bankman-Fried tells the Sun that he believes he has not been given a “fair and balanced” pass through the legal system and that the “story the jury was told” by Ms. Sassoon and her office “was false.” He also asserts that political bias was at work in the seven and a half year sentence handed down to one of his FTX lieutenants, Ryan Salame. Mr. Salame, who pleaded guilty, was one of the few members of the company whose politics leaned to the right. Mr. Bankman-Fried’s other co-defendants, including his ex-girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, who ran Alameda Research also pleaded guilty in exchange for lighter sentences. Ms. Ellison testified against Mr. Bankman-Fried at trial, evidence that some saw as particularly damaging. Mr. Bankman-Fried sketches for the Sun his own political odyssey. In 2020, he was the second most generous donor to Mr. Biden’s election campaign, trailing only Mayor Bloomberg. He explains that his munificence to the future 46th president stemmed from “not wanting the Democratic Party to become the party of Bernie Sanders.” Mr. Bankman-Fried adds that he used to plant his political flag on the “center-left” but adds “that’s not how I view myself anymore.”Mr. Bankman-Fried, turning to his bread and butter — cryptocurrency — admits to being “frustrated and disappointed” by the policies of the Biden administration. He asserts that the “Republican party was far more reasonable” in respect of regulating crypto currencies. Mr. Trump’s nominee for the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Paul Atkins, has even suggested that regulation rather than any perfidy on the part of Mr. Bankman-Fried is responsible for FTX’s collapse.While most of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s public donations have flowed to Democrats, he tells the Sun that before FTX imploded “he had been giving to Republicans conservative causes a lot more than had been public” and that he had “been working with Republicans a lot more than had been previously thought.” The Sun asked Mr. Bankman-Fried to annotate the so-called “vibe shift” among the technology elite, epitomized by the political prominence of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and the warming of ties between the 47th president and the founder of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg. Mr. Bankman-Fried allows that he “can’t speak for them” but that he shares their diagnosis that the Biden administration pursued “political censorship.” He admits he has grown more sympathetic to Mr. Musk’s “chainsaw” approach toward reform.When the Sun asks Mr. Bankman-Fried what he makes of Mr. Trump’s launching of his own “memecoin” days before his Inauguration — it’s called “$Trump Coin” — he predicts that “We’re going to see more and more avenues of life start to dip their toes in, in part because it is a much more flexible medium to work it than traditional finance.” Mr. Trump has made billions — at least on paper — from his meme coin.Mr. Bankman-Fried relates that he finds the handling of FTX’s bankruptcy by the law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell “absolutely infuriating” and insists that “FTX was never insolvent and it was never bankrupt. Neither was Alameda. They always had enough to, to, to make good on all their liabilities.” That argument — that ultimately there was enough money to pay everyone back —is central to Mr. Bankman-Fried’s case on appeal Sullivan & Cromwell declined to comment to the Sun. Mr. Bankman-Fried laments that he “backed down from a fight” and allowed Sullivan & Cromwell — which is now representing Mr. Trump in his appeal of his hush-money conviction — to take over FTX in November 2022. Mr. Bankman-Fried, though, signed the paperwork installing Sullivan & Cromwell and his successor as FTX’s chief executive, John Ray. The firm has made hundreds of millions of dollars handling FTX, which it still represents. Lawyers for Mr. Bankman-Fried have argued that Sullivan & Cromwell worked hand in glove with prosecutors to build the case against him — and torched the value of the assets held by the exchange. The firm declined to comment. An examiner appointed by the DOJ found no evidence of misconduct and asserted knowledge of no “email or other document in which S&C expressly disclosed a crime to prosecutors or regulators” before charges were handed up. Mr. Bankman-Fried is contemplative about his fall in fortunes. He relates that notwithstanding the nearly limitless wealth he once commanded, his annual salary amounted to something like “$200,000” a year. When asked what he missed most about life outside of jail, he names the possibility to “have a positive impact on the world” and “the ability to Google things.”

Exclusive: Sam Bankman-Fried, Phoning the Sun From Jail, Rebuffs ‘Center-Left’ Politics — and Signals Sympathy With Trump

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