Senate Tells SBF: No Pardon, No Commutation, No "CZ Treatment" 🧱

The U.S. Senate adopted S. Res. 772 by unanimous consent on Wednesday, declaring that FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried should "under no circumstances" receive a presidential pardon or commutation of his 25-year prison sentence. The nonbinding resolution, introduced on June 17 by Senators Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) and Rubén Gallego (D-AZ), the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee's digital assets subcommittee, affirms the Senate's commitment to "the rule of law and integrity of the United States financial system." Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH) joined as a cosponsor on Tuesday. Because it is a simple resolution, the measure requires neither House approval nor the president's signature and carries no legal force; under the U.S. Constitution, the president retains sole authority to grant clemency.

Lummis, the crypto industry's most prominent congressional advocate, said at the resolution's introduction that Bankman-Fried "had his day in court," while Gallego was more direct: "Keep him locked up." A spokesperson for Lummis's office 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."

A federal jury convicted Bankman-Fried in November 2023 on seven counts tied to the 2022 collapse of FTX, once one of the world's largest crypto exchanges. He was sentenced in March 2024 to 25 years in federal prison after American customers lost more than $8 billion in what prosecutors called one of the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history. A federal appeals court upheld his conviction last month.

Bankman-Fried filed a clemency request with President Donald Trump in June 2026; the request is listed as pending in Department of Justice records. On Polymarket, traders are assigning less than a 1% chance that Trump will pardon Bankman-Fried by July 31, with the market drawing more than $734,000 in trading volume. Trump has pardoned or commuted the sentences of several 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, but said in January that he has no plans to pardon Bankman-Fried.