Trump's DOJ is not falling for Sam Bankman-Fried's MAGA makeover on X

Ever since Donald Trump took office and declared himself a “pro-crypto president,” FTX’s disgraced founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, has been working to convince the administration that he’s a Republican now.

The former Democratic megadonor apparently hopes that a right-wing pivot might help him escape a 25-year prison sentence ordered after Joe Biden’s Department of Justice proved he stole more than $8 billion from customers of his cryptocurrency exchange.

These days, Bankman-Fried frequently praises Trump’s policies and quotes his Truth Social posts on X, where his bio confirms that posts are: “SBF’s words. Posted through a proxy.” He also regularly rants against Democrats, including Biden officials who, he claimed in a motion for a new trial, intimidated FTX employees into lying on the stand or refusing to testify in order to take down Bankman-Fried as a political foe.

However, Trump has yet to signal that he’s considering pardoning Bankman-Fried in light of this new fealty, despite similar pardons for other crypto figures like Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao and Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht. Quite the opposite. Just last month, the White House told Fortune that “Trump has no intention of pardoning Bankman-Fried.”

On the back of that disappointment, Trump’s DOJ has now confirmed that it’s also not falling for Bankman-Fried’s MAGA makeover. In a motion urging the court to deny Bankman-Fried’s request for a new trial, an attorney for the government, Sean Buckley, slammed the FTX founder for his “incoherent” attempt to claim “political victimhood.”

Pointing out that Bankman-Fried was “one of the largest donors to President Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign,” Buckley alleged that Bankman-Fried’s abrupt party-swapping was “a political strategy the defendant pre-planned and committed to in writing before he was convicted, and one he is now executing from prison in an insincere attempt to obtain leniency.”

Bankman-Fried’s plan to reinvent himself as a Republican, Buckley noted, was detailed in a Google Document that the court reviewed before convicting Bankman-Fried in 2024.

Buckley said the document showed how, “in the aftermath of FTX’s collapse,” Bankman-Fried “mapped out a rehabilitation and pardon campaign.” Attached to an email from Bankman-Fried’s account, the Google Doc was marked “confidential” and started with a note that emphasized that “these are all random probably bad ideas that aren’t vetted.”

However, many of the ideas were executed as planned, Buckley wrote. For example, Bankman-Fried planned to “come out as Republican” in an interview with Tucker Carlson, which happened.

“In March 2025, the defendant gave an interview to Tucker Carlson in which he portrayed himself as a disaffected Democrat who had become sympathetic to Republicans before his arrest” and “suggested his political reorientation contributed to his prosecution,” Buckley wrote.

Bankman-Fried also, in his document, considered using X to “come out against the woke agenda” and push the narrative that he had hidden Republican donations, which also happened.

“That checklist is being executed with near-perfect fidelity,” Buckley alleged. However, the plan isn’t working, and Bankman-Fried’s X posts aren’t causing Trump officials to warm to him, he said. “Evidence, not politics, drove the Government’s prosecution of the defendant,” Buckley insisted.

“Contrary to his claim that he has been targeted for his politics, the public record establishes unambiguously that the defendant was a major, publicly identified financial supporter of Democratic causes,” Buckley wrote. Later, he emphasized, “The motion’s suggestion that he was somehow prosecuted because of his party affiliation inverts the factual reality: he was a major donor, not a political adversary.”

Ars could not immediately reach Bankman-Fried for comment. It seems that the FTX founder has dropped his lawyers and plans to defend himself, at least at this stage. Last month, his lawyer mother, Barbara Fried, submitted his pro se motion for the new trial, which Bankman-Fried signed from the federal corrections facility where he is being held in California.

According to Bankman-Fried, he deserves a new trial not only because the government supposedly threatened his colleagues to push an allegedly fake narrative, but also because it was “false” to say he’d stolen from FTX customers.

Those who were harmed have since been repaid between 119 and 143 percent of the value of their lost cryptocurrency holdings, Bankman-Fried claimed.

The DOJ clearly found this argument more offensive than Bankman-Fried’s posturing as a Republican. Likening Bankman-Fried to a “bank robber” who wants to be acquitted because stolen funds were eventually recovered, Buckley singled out that argument as Bankman-Fried’s most aggressively misleading claim.

It’s “factually wrong” to claim that FTX customers have been made whole, Buckley said, since no one got their cryptocurrency back.

Receiving the cash value for crypto holdings at the time of FTX’s collapse is not the same as returning cryptocurrencies that, if held today, would be much higher in value, Buckley noted. For example, Bitcoin was trading at approximately $16,871 when FTX went bankrupt, but now it’s trading above $70,000.

Depending on which tokens customers were holding, the actual reality is that FTX customers only received “between approximately 10 and 50 percent of the value of the assets they deposited,” Buckley argued. Also, Bankman-Fried appears not to have considered any of FTX’s customers who couldn’t wait for bankruptcy proceedings before selling billions of claims “on the secondary market at steep discounts.”

“Those customers received neither the nominal 119–143 percent nor anything approaching the actual value of the cryptocurrency they deposited,” Buckley wrote.

Further, Bankman-Fried cannot rely on a multi-year recovery effort to repay FTX customers to excuse his crimes, Buckley argued, while noting elsewhere that Bankman-Fried’s arguments in his motion continue his “history of lying about the reason for FTX’s shortfall.”

“A defendant who misappropriates property and whose victim is later compensated from unrelated sources has nonetheless committed the underlying offense,” Buckley wrote.

Reminding the court that the evidence against Bankman-Fried was “overwhelming,” Buckley urged the court to deny his bid for a new trial in its entirety.

A grand jury unanimously convicted Bankman-Fried after only five hours of deliberation, Buckley emphasized. And Bankman-Fried offered “no credible reason” to believe that “any prosecutorial decision—from the first grand jury subpoena to the last argument at the trial—was influenced by politics, that any evidentiary ruling reflected political motivation, or that the conduct of the trial deviated in any respect from the ordinary adversarial process.”

“The notion he was targeted for his Democratic politics by the prior presidential administration is fanciful,” Buckley wrote.

On X, Bankman-Fried seems to also be struggling to sell himself as a Republican to the platform’s right-leaning users. Top comments on his recent posts are full of memes and haters mocking Bankman-Fried’s failed comeback.

On one post praising a Trump health care policy that had nothing to do with cryptocurrency, X users even appeared to arbitrarily add a community note to remind anyone who saw the post that “Sam Bankman-Fried is currently serving a 25 year prison sentence after being convicted in November 2023 on 7 counts of fraud and conspiracy. He misappropriated billions in FTX customer deposits.”