Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) used a new X thread on Feb. 9 to reframe his criminal case as “Biden’s political lawfare,” positioning himself alongside Donald Trump and former FTX executive Ryan Salame in what read like a direct appeal for a future pardon.
SBF Cries ‘Gagged Trial,’ Claims DOJ Hid EvidenceSBF’s argument hinges on the idea that authorities and the court curtailed what the jury could hear. He repeatedly singled out Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over his trial, claiming the court “rubber-stamped everything Biden’s DOJ wanted” and “made sure I couldn’t show the jury the truth.”
In the thread, SBF linked to a court filing he said was authored by his prosecutor, “Sassoon,” describing it as “a 70-page document on all the evidence they didn’t want the jury to see,” and he framed the episode as part of a broader political effort to “silence the truth.”
A significant chunk of the thread is dedicated to Trump’s New York hush-money bookkeeping case, which Bankman-Fried portrayed as a routine classification dispute blown into criminality. “Charged him with 34 crimes over his bookkeeping of an NDA expense—should it be legal, campaign, or personal?,” he wrote. “These questions come up all the time when you’re running a business, and it’s often unclear.”
He then drew a parallel between court-imposed limits on Trump and his own pre-trial detention. “They then got the judge to impose a gag order on Donald Trump,” he wrote. “Biden’s DOJ silenced me, too—getting Judge Kaplan to gag and then jail me before trial. President Trump also had Kaplan as a judge.”
Bankman-Fried also amplified Salame’s complaints about licensing advice and charging decisions, alleging prosecutors leaned on pressure tactics to force a plea, including claims involving Salame’s fiancée, assertions presented as fact in the thread but not accompanied by supporting documentation beyond links to Salame’s posts.
At press time, FTT traded at $0.3021.
