This Week In Blunders – June 14-20
“Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.” - Adam Smith
President Donald Trump has granted clemency to so many white-collar criminals that a bipartisan pair of U.S. senators fear he’ll free the most notorious crypto-klepto of all: Sam Bankman-Fried.
On Wednesday, Sens. Ruben Gallego, D-AZ, and Cynthia Lummis, R-WY, took the rare step of introducing a resolution expressing that the FTX founder should not receive any form of clemency.
Bankman-Fried, 34, is serving a 25-year prison sentence after building one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges and basically looting it into bankruptcy. Last week, he lost his latest appeal and now seems down to his last hope.
The furry-headed fraudster has been sucking up to Trump for more than a year, framing his case in familiar Trump themes of victimhood.
“Sam Bankman-Fried is a criminal,” Gallego said. “He took advantage of millions of Americans and stole their savings. Perhaps worst of all, he has shown no remorse for his crimes and has instead tried to laughably claim he is a victim of ‘lawfare.’ What a joke. Keep him locked up.”
In normal times, this would all go without saying. But Trump has granted scores of pardons and commutations to people found guilty of everything from tax evasion to Ponzi schemes, and Bankman-Fried has a pending application for clemency.
Most notably, relative to the crypto world, Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, 49, who pleaded guilty to violating U.S. anti-money-laundering requirements and was sentenced to four months in prison.
