Sam Bankman-Fried Withdraws Appeal From Prison — Even as His Investments in SpaceX and Anthropic Appear Prophetic

The withdrawal of an appeal for a new trial from the convicted crypto-mogul Sam Bankman-Fried signals that his quest to exonerate himself from behind bars is a daunting one — even as he maintains his innocence and presses his appeal along other channels.The retrial request, formally known as a Rule 33 motion, was filed in February. Rule 33 motions allow for defendants to request a new trial based on newly discovered evidence or fundamental unfairness. The original motion was filed not by Mr. Bankman-Fried but by his mother, Barabara Fried, a professor emerita at Stanford Law School. She is sharing her thoughts on the fate of her son via a Substack, where she has also published excerpts of his prison diaries. The Rule 33 motion was filed pro se, meaning without the aid of an attorney. The presiding Judge, Lewis Kaplan, had asked Mr. Bankman-Fried to clarify his mother’s role in the process. Mr. Bankman-Fried writes to Judge Kaplan in this latest filing that he is moving to withdraw because he has “had to focus on responding to these questions” about the provenance of the motion and because “I do not believe I will get a fair hearing on this topic.” Mr. Bankman-Fried acknowledged to Judge Kaplan that his parents — his father, Joseph Bankman, is also a legal academic — “made editorial and organizational suggestions, some of which I incorporated into the motion. They also helped print it, as I no longer had access to a word processor.” Mr. Bankman-Fried also discloses that he shared a draft of the motion with a “New York attorney,” though they ultimately had no significant input.”Mr. Bankman-Fried requests that this Rule 33 motion be tabled “without prejudice to renewing it after my direct appeal and the related request for reassignment have been ruled upon.” That means that he wants to preserve the possibility of renewing the request for a new trial at a later date — after two other appeals currently docketed are decided.Mr. Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison by Judge Lewis Kaplan of the Southern District of New York following his conviction on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy stemming from the collapse of his FTX cryptocurrency exchange. Prosecutors alleged that he funnelled customer funds to an associated hedge fund, Alameda Research. Mr. Bankman-Fried argues that a liquidity crisis, not criminality, doomed FTX. The Department of Justice, though, secured the cooperation of some of his FTX associates — most notably his erstwhile girlfriend, Caroline Ellison — by promising them reduced sentences if they testified against Mr. Bankman-Fried. So extraordinary was Mr. Bankman-Fried’s early success that some predicted that he might be the world’s first trillionaire. Now, though, the fallen mogul is imprisoned at Terminal Island in California, following a stint at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center. His main appeal of his verdict — he alleged that he was “presumed guilty” by Judge Kaplan and that the jurist prejudiced his case before the jury, which brought in its verdicts in less than five hours — was heard in November by a panel of the Second United States Appeals Court. The appellate riders appeared skeptical of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s claim that his trial was “fundamentally unfair.” They have not yet handed down a ruling, which will be appealable to the entire Second Circuit and then possibly to the Supreme Court. Prosecutors filed their own response to Mr. Bankman’s Rule 33 motion, arguing that Mr. Bankman-Fried had not produced any new information that would warrant a fresh trial. Mr. Bankman-Fried has at times appeared to be angling for a pardon from President Trump. He praised the 47th president in an exclusive interview with The New York Sun, and has been critical of the Biden Administration. Mr. Trump, though, has insisted that a pardon for Mr. Bankman-Fried is not in the cards. The president has pardoned the founder of Binance, Changpeng Zhao. He initiated the spate of withdrawals that doomed FTX.Even as Mr. Bankman-Fried’s convoluted appellate push wends its way through the courts, speculation is surging over the true condition of FTX when his empire came crashing down. This week a prominent crypto news account reckoned that if FTX had not been liquidated as part of bankruptcy proceedings, its holdings — which included SpaceX, Anthropic, Solana, and Cursor — would today amount to some $115 billion. Another crypto watcher declares that “if Sam Bankman-Fried did nothing illegal, he might have been the best” venture capitalist “in history.”

Sam Bankman-Fried Withdraws Appeal From Prison — Even as His Investments in SpaceX and Anthropic Appear Prophetic

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