The Senate agreed Wednesday that Sam Bankman-Fried should never receive clemency, passing a resolution that states the FTX founder should “under no circumstances” get a pardon or commutation.
It passed by unanimous consent, a procedure that clears a measure if not a single senator objects to it.
Senators Cynthia Lummis, a Wyoming Republican, and Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat, run the Senate Banking Committee's digital assets subcommittee as its top Republican and Democrat.
Lummis is the crypto industry's most committed advocate in Congress and has spent years writing the legislation the industry wants. She has led the effort to keep one of its its most infamous figure behind bars.
“He had his day in court,” Lummis said when the pair introduced the measure on June 17. Gallego's statement ended with four words: “Keep him locked up.”
Bankman-Fried is not eligible for release until around 2044. A jury convicted him in November 2023 on seven counts tied to the collapse of FTX, which prosecutors called one of the largest financial frauds in U.S. history, with American customers losing more than $8 billion.
President Donald Trump said in January he had no plans to pardon Bankman-Fried. He has cleared Binance founder Changpeng Zhao and Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht, along with other white-collar offenders.
Bankman-Fried ran two companies at once. FTX was a crypto exchange, which holds customer money the way a broker does and is not supposed to touch it. Alameda Research was a trading firm he also owned, and he moved billions of dollars of FTX customer deposits to Alameda, which spent the money on trades, venture investments, political donations and Bahamas real estate, while FTX's software gave Alameda an exemption from the rules that would have forced it to cover its losses like any other trader.
The facade was blown open after CoinDesk obtained Alameda's balance sheet in November 2022 and found that most of what the firm counted as assets was $FTT — a token FTX had created itself and could issue at will.
The collateral propping up Alameda was, in effect, something its sister company had invented. Further cracks came after prominent exchange Binance said days later it would sell its $FTT holdings, leading to a rapid collapse in $FTT prices.
Customers rushed to pull their deposits, and FTX could not return the money because it was no longer there. The exchange filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 11, 2022, just over a week after the story ran.