Sam Bankman-Fried ripped the Biden administration for its “politicization” of the Justice Department and expressed sympathy for President Donald Trump in a recent jailhouse interview.
The disgraced FTX fraudster, who has been a major financial backer of the Democratic Party, is set to begin serving a 25-year prison sentence after he was convicted of using customer funds to make risky bets with his hedge fund Alameda Research.
In a recent interview with the New York Sun, Bankman-Fried said he and Trump share “frustrations” with the Bill Clinton-appointed federal judge who presided over his trial.
US District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who was appointed to the bench in Manhattan federal court by Clinton in 1994, presided over Bankman-Fried’s fraud and conspiracy trial as well as the lawsuits filed against Trump by writer E. Jean Carroll, who successfully sued the president for defamation and sexual abuse.
“I know President Trump had a lot of frustrations with Judge Kaplan. I certainly did as well,” Bankman-Fried told the Sun during a 45-minute phone conversation from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
Trump, who has the power to pardon Bankman-Fried, has referred to Kaplan as a “bully” and a “totally out of control, Trump hating judge.”
The president’s attorneys have argued that Kaplan had a “conflict of interest” in the Carroll cases since he and the writer’s lawyer once worked together in the early 1990s at the same law firm.
Bankman-Fried told the Sun that the Biden-run Justice Department was rife with “prosecutorial abuse” and that he, like Trump, fell victim to “politicization of the DOJ.”
In a twist of irony, the federal prosecutor who led the case against Bankman-Fried was Danielle Sassoon, an assistant US attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Sassoon, who was appointed by Trump as acting US attorney for SDNY, resigned from her post last week after refusing to comply with a directive from the Trump DOJ to dismiss a corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
Bankman-Fried told the Sun that he was not given a “fair and balanced” trial and that the “story the jury was told” by Sassoon “was false.”
Bankman-Fried noted that his other FTX aides, including on-again-off-again girlfriend Caroline Ellison, received lighter sentences in exchange for their cooperation with prosecutors.
Bankman-Fried was a major donor to the Democratic Party, playing a significant financial role in the 2020 election cycle.
Nevertheless, Bankman-Fried insisted that 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.”
Bankman-Fried was highly critical of the Biden administration’s stringent regulations governing cryptocurrency, saying that he was “frustrated and disappointed” by the enforcement actions undertaken by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
He told the Sun that he found that the “Republican Party was far more reasonable.”
Bankman-Fried also praised Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO who is helping Trump shrink the size of the federal government.
The former FTX boss hailed Musk for his “chainsaw” approach.
The Post has sought comment from the White House.
