The FTX founder appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show looking for a Trump pardon. Here’s why he might get it. #CriptoNews

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

Sam Bankman-Fried’s latest move has been in the making since the moment FTX, his crypto exchange, collapsed in 2022. As prosecutors began to build a case that would culminate in Bankman-Fried’s convictions on seven fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy charges, the disgraced boy king of crypto jotted down 19 ideas to rehabilitate his reputation.

Bankman-Fried’s journal of “random probably bad ideas that aren’t vetted” is in a court document that was later unearthed by Bloomberg. These ideas included things like “Come out as extremely pro crypto, pro freedom” and being interviewed on TV by Michael Lewis—the author who was working on a book about SBF at the time of the collapse. But, as he hunts for leniency, it looks like Bankman-Fried is angling for a pardon from Donald Trump. For him, this means going back to item No. 3 on his 2022 list: “Go on Tucker Carlsen, come out as a republican.” (The misspelling was SBF’s.)

At the time, Bankman-Fried thought about appearing on Carlson’s former Fox TV show and publicizing that while he was most famously associated with donating to Democrats, he’d given lots of dark money to Republicans, too. He added that he’d also “Come out against the woke agenda” and argue “how the cartel of lawyers is destroying value and throwing entrepreneurs under the bus.”

This week, he began precisely the media blitz he theorized about at the moment FTX was falling apart. He appeared in a 43-minute video interview with Carlson, which Bankman-Fried recorded live from his prison in New York. The call was unauthorized and landed Bankman-Fried in solitary confinement, the New York Times reported.

In a world of cynical image-rehab plays, Bankman-Fried’s effort with Carlson may actually set a new bar as the most brazen attempt to run a dishonest PR playbook. Bankman-Fried executes his 2022 vision to a perfect T, using the interview to portray himself as a common-sense former Democrat who abandoned the party because of its modern lunacy, became friendly to Republicans, and went to prison because of it.

Carlson asks Bankman-Fried why Democrats let him go to jail—something the host says Democrats would not normally let happen to one of their own. “That’s a really good question,” SBF answers, and then he offers just the theory he laid out in his 2022 note to himself: Bankman-Fried had donated to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, thinking he’d be a solid center-left president. But he was “shocked” by Biden’s performance in office and stepped up his dark money donations to Republicans. SBF posits that Democrats let him rot in prison because he was no longer their exclusive patron. “That started becoming known right around FTX’s collapse,” he said. “So that probably played a role.”

The notion that partisan politics would play a role in Bankman-Fried’s case was popular from the beginning. Many of the least savvy observers in the world, including Elon Musk (“SBF was a major Dem donor, so no investigation”), were confident that SBF’s Democratic associations would spare him from so much as an investigation. SBF is now trying to play the other side of the coin, arguing that it was his drift from the Democratic Party that landed him behind bars.

Bankman-Fried is singing this song for an audience of one. He and his family are making a calculated play for Trump’s sympathy, the Times reported Friday. The paper called his pardon effort a “long-shot campaign,” but I’m not sure it’s such a long shot anymore. The reason has less to do with Trump’s support of the crypto industry and more to do with the cast of characters involved in Bankman-Fried’s entirely appropriate convictions.

At first glance, SBF is a pardon candidate because Trump is apt to do favors to crypto bigwigs. Trump already pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the former operator of Silk Road, the dark-web marketplace responsible for only god knows how many drug sales. Crypto purists rallied around Ulbricht, whose site did lots of business in crypto. Bankman-Fried historically has not had the same sort of crypto backing. When FTX went down, the organized crypto industry went to great lengths to paint Bankman-Fried as a black sheep. That was a dubious pretense, given just how deeply the mechanics of crypto tied into Bankman-Fried’s corporate malfeasance and fraud. Bankman-Fried’s criminality was of the good, old-fashioned variety: lying to customers and investors, and laundering money. But the way SBF drove FTX into the ground was a perfect crypto story: sending FTX customer money to his own crypto hedge fund, which lost it, leaving FTX depositors with no insurance and no money. FTX’s bankruptcy team later recovered just about all of it, but depositors missed a two-year bull market in crypto and didn’t see their investments multiply.

So if not as a favor to an industry that spent a ton of money on his election, why would Trump pardon Bankman-Fried? There are some simple reasons that you could probably guess: Trump is easy to flatter. He loves the notion of sticking it to the Demsand Bankman-Fried is trying to position his freedom as a way to achieve that. But just as important are some of the personal specifics of SBF’s case.

The prosecutors who tried his case were from the United States Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York, the jurisdiction that handles lots of high-profile financial cases. Trump is quite interested in painting that specific office’s work during Biden’s presidency as illegitimate. SDNY is the office that charged New York Mayor Eric Adams in his corruption case, which Trump’s Justice Department is seeking to have tossed out in a blatant quid pro quo for assistance with immigration roundups. As Trump’s Justice Department enforcers have tried to retrofit a non-corrupt reason for dropping the case, they have zeroed in on the political ambitions of the U.S. attorney who charged both Adams and Bankman-Fried. Naturally, it would suit Trump well to recast Bankman-Fried’s open-and-shut convictions as the result of a witch hunt carried out by a prosecutor’s office that has hindered his agenda in other ways.

Some personalities involved in Bankman-Fried’s case might further fuel Trump to side with SBF. Judge Lewis Kaplan, who oversaw Bankman-Fried’s trial (and whom Bankman-Fried offended enough to be jailed before trial), was also the judge overseeing the E. Jean Carroll defamation case against Trump, who repeatedly risked being held in contempt with standoffish behavior in Kaplan’s courtroom. Trump may like the chance to undermine Kaplan, or at least that seems to be SBF’s team’s calculation.

The acting U.S. attorney who resigned rather than do Trump’s dirty work on the Adams case played a major role in Bankman-Fried’s trial. Danielle Sassoon was the prosecutor who made Bankman-Fried look like an utter fool after he decided to testify in his own defense. Sassoon’s brutal cross-examination (recounted from the courtroom at the time by Slate’s Nitish Pahwa) was the event that made it clear Bankman-Fried was due for a long, long prison sentence. (Sassoon is a Federalist Society member and former Justice Antonin Scalia clerk, not classic résumé lines for someone doing hatchet jobs on behalf of the Democratic Party.) A jury convicted Bankman-Fried because the SDNY lawyers (and his own co-conspirators) made it obvious that he was extremely guilty. Trump’s management of the Justice Department depends on making obvious things seem less obvious. Here’s a chance to do that.

There’s not a good-faith justification for pardoning Bankman-Fried, at least not until many thousands of more deserving prisoners have been freed. He has still not offered more than the most evasive non-apologies for his actions, and there is a strong case—one the government offered at his sentencing—that Bankman-Fried would repeat his FTX crimes if he had the chance. He is a crook with no constituency other than people who don’t believe they should ever face consequences for anything. His reason for hope is clear, though: The man who would pardon him is a card-carrying member of that group.

Sign up for Slate’s evening newsletter.