Senate tells SBF: 25 years, no asterisks ⛓️

The U.S. Senate has unanimously declared that Sam Bankman-Fried should "under no circumstances" receive a presidential pardon or commutation of his 25-year prison sentence, adopting S. Res. 772 by unanimous consent on Wednesday. The nonbinding measure, introduced on June 17, affirms the Senate's commitment to "the rule of law and integrity of the United States financial system," but carries no legal force and cannot constrain the president's constitutional clemency power.

The resolution was steered by Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) and Senator Rubén Gallego (D-AZ), the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Digital Assets, with Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH) joining as a cosponsor on Tuesday. Lummis, a leading crypto advocate in Congress, previously said Bankman-Fried "had his day in court," while Gallego was more direct: "Keep him locked up." A spokesperson for Lummis told Decrypt that "SBF has clearly ramped up his pardon campaign and Senator Lummis wants Fried to know she and her colleagues think he's right where he belongs."

Bankman-Fried was convicted in November 2023 on seven counts tied to the 2022 collapse of FTX, once one of the world's largest crypto exchanges, with prosecutors calling the case one of the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history after American customers lost more than $8 billion. He was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison in March 2024, and a federal court upheld his fraud conviction last month, ending his appeal. He applied for clemency from President Donald Trump in June 2026, with the request listed as pending in Department of Justice records.

Trump said in January that he had no plans to pardon Bankman-Fried, though he has extended clemency to other crypto figures, including Binance founder Changpeng "CZ" Zhao, BitMEX co-founders Arthur Hayes, Ben Delo, and Samuel Reed, and Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht, all of whom he pardoned. On Polymarket, traders currently assign less than a 1% chance that Trump will pardon Bankman-Fried by July 31, with the market attracting more than $734,000 in trading volume. With the courts, the White House, and now the full Senate aligned against him, Bankman-Fried's clemency bid appears to have run out of institutional allies.