Sam Bankman-Fried’s new trial would be a waste of court time, judge says

In a system rejecting Sam Bankman-Fried’s request for a new trial, the judge criticized the disgraced founder of FTX for wasting the court’s valuable resources on wild schemes. To the judge, the decision seemed like a last ditch effort to give himself a MAGA makeover that a Trump’s administration was not buying.

Bankman-Fried was he was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2024 for “masterminding one of the largest financial frauds in American history,” US District Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote in his order. He was convicted of all counts, including wire fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, securities fraud, and money laundering.

There is already an appeal pending in another court, the judge said. But Bankman-Fried made a special request for a new trial, saying that there were “newly identified” witnesses and evidence that would have helped her defense, if Joe Biden’s Department of Justice had not threatened them with refusing to testify or, in one case, lying on the stand. He also asked for a new judge, asking Kaplan to turn himself in.

However, Mr. Kaplan said that “there are no witnesses” who were “just discovered.” And above all, Bankman-Fried did not provide evidence that the witnesses could prove the theory of “conspiracy” raised by the founder of FTX, saying that their absence in the case “is a threat to the state and revenge,” the judge wrote.

Bankman-Fried’s opinion “is completely contradicted by the literature,” Kaplan said. He also emphasized that granting Bankman-Fried’s request “would be a waste of resources because it would require another judge to know more and more complicated history.”

In addition, all three witnesses Bankman-Fried said could testify to the defense were known to him throughout the trial, and he refused to compel their testimony. And the “independent record” of the one witness who now says he lied when testifying against Bankman-Fried — “Ryan Salame, who pleaded guilty” — should be challenged “with a high degree of skepticism,” Kaplan said.

“If one were to take Salame based on what he has said here, he lied under oath in his admission of guilt before this Court,” Kaplan said. Even if taken seriously, “his out-of-court, unsworn statements don’t come close to exonerating the case,” Kaplan said, calling Salame’s credibility “highly questionable.”