Sam Bankman-Fried’s attempt to get a new trial collapsed Tuesday when a federal judge called his legal arguments baseless — and suggested the whole effort was less about justice than about fixing his public image.
Witnesses Were Never A SecretAt the center of Bankman-Fried’s argument were three former FTX insiders he claimed could have challenged the government’s case that the exchange was insolvent. He named Ryan Salame, FTX’s former Bahamian CEO, Daniel Chapsky, the exchange’s former head of data science, and Nishad Singh, FTX’s onetime engineering lead.
Salame, for his part, was not available as a friendly witness. He had pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and running an illegal money-transmitting business, and was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison in May 2024.
A Motion Filed Without LawyersThe bid for a new trial was unusual from the start. Bankman-Fried filed the motion in February without consulting his legal team — a rare move that raised eyebrows on its own. He also asked that a different judge oversee any new proceedings, citing doubts about getting a fair hearing from Kaplan.
Then he tried to pull the motion entirely. In a message to the court, he told Kaplan he didn’t believe he would get a fair hearing “on this topic in front of you.” That request to withdraw was denied too.
Bankman-Fried is currently serving his sentence at a federal prison in Lompoc, California. A separate appeal of his conviction and sentence remains before an appellate court.
The jury that convicted him found he had illegally moved billions of dollars in FTX customer funds to Alameda Research, the trading firm he also controlled. Those funds were used for risky trades that helped bring down one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world.
Featured image from MetaAI, chart from TradingView
