Senators Lummis and Gallego push resolution urging Trump to deny Bankman-Fried pardon

Sam Bankman-Fried wants out of prison. Two of the Senate’s most prominent crypto advocates want to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Senators Cynthia Lummis and Bernie Moreno are introducing legislation urging President Trump to reject a pardon request from the convicted FTX founder, who filed a formal application with the Department of Justice on June 8. SBF is roughly two years into a 25-year sentence for fraud that wiped out between $8 billion and $11 billion in customer and investor funds.

The pardon play and the political backlash

SBF has spent his time behind bars positioning himself as a Trump ally. Through prison communications, he has expressed support for the president and various crypto-friendly legislation, apparently hoping to build a case for clemency by aligning himself with the administration’s policy goals.

Senator Moreno called SBF “a piece of s–t.” Lummis criticized SBF for the harm he inflicted on victims and expressed hope that Trump would deny the request. Both senators framed their opposition not as anti-crypto sentiment, but as pro-accountability sentiment.

Trump himself already appeared to close this door. In January 2026, the president stated explicitly that he would not grant clemency to SBF, citing the sheer scale of the fraud. SBF filed the formal application anyway.

Why pro-crypto senators are leading the charge

Trump has granted clemency to other figures in the crypto space, which makes the SBF situation more nuanced than a blanket anti-pardon stance. SBF’s exclusion from that pattern isn’t about ideology. It’s about the magnitude of what he did.

The crypto industry’s accountability problem

The congressional response to SBF’s pardon campaign has been, to put it mildly, skeptical. The bipartisan nature of the opposition suggests this isn’t a partisan football. Democrats and Republicans who agree on almost nothing else seem to agree that the man who vaporized billions in customer deposits should serve his sentence.

SBF’s strategy of expressing support for Trump and crypto legislation from prison reflects a fundamental misread of the political environment. Lawmakers aren’t evaluating pardon requests based on ideological alignment, and with public disapproval of crypto fraud running high, the math doesn’t work in SBF’s favor.

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