Sam Bankman-Fried filed a formal pardon request with Donald Trump. This is the same Sam Bankman-Fried serving 25 years for defrauding customers of FTX. The same FTX that imploded faster than you could say "effective altruism."
The strategy here is flawless. Ask a man famous for pardons to pardon you. Bankman-Fried's legal team clearly workshopped this for months. Groundbreaking stuff. Revolutionary thinking. Nobody has ever thought to ask the president for a pardon before.
Trump handed out pardons like Halloween candy during his first term. War criminals got them. Campaign advisors got them. A guy who ran a fraudulent charity got one. The bar is not exactly at Olympic height here.
But Bankman-Fried faces a unique challenge. He needs to convince Trump he's worth the political capital. This is the man who couldn't convince a jury he didn't know where $8 billion went. Good luck explaining that FTX customer deposits were just "resting in his account" or whatever the defense was. The trial lasted about as long as FTX stayed solvent.
Retail traders who lost everything on FTX are thrilled about this development. They love watching the guy who vaporized their life savings ask for early release while they're still trying to explain to their spouses where the mortgage payment went. Character building exercise. Teaches resilience.
The pardon application sits on Trump's desk somewhere between a request from a January 6th rioter and a guy who invented a cryptocurrency called PutinCoin. Tough competition. Bankman-Fried will need to stand out.
His best shot is writing the biggest check his parents' money can buy, but the irony is he'd need to find $8 billion first, and we already know how that story ends.
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