Sam Bankman-Fried’s attempt to get a new trial collapsed Tuesday when a federal judge called his legal arguments baseless — and suggested the whole effort was less about justice than about fixing his public image.
Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over Bankman-Fried’s 2023 fraud trial and later sentenced him to 25 years in prison, rejected the motion in a written order. He said the filing appeared to be “one part of a plan to rescue his reputation” — a plan Bankman-Fried reportedly put to paper after FTX’s bankruptcy but before he was ever charged.
Witnesses Were Never A Secret
At the center of Bankman-Fried’s argument were three former FTX insiders he claimed could have challenged the government’s case that the exchange was insolvent. He named Ryan Salame, FTX’s former Bahamian CEO, Daniel Chapsky, the exchange’s former head of data science, and Nishad Singh, FTX’s onetime engineering lead.
The argument didn’t land. Kaplan wrote that none of the three qualified as newly discovered witnesses. Bankman-Fried had known all of them well before trial and already knew what he wanted them to say. The judge pointed out that he could have sought to compel their testimony but chose not to.
Singh had actually testified — against Bankman-Fried. He cut a plea deal with prosecutors and avoided prison time in exchange for his cooperation. Bankman-Fried argued Singh had changed his testimony under pressure from the government. Kaplan dismissed that claim outright, calling it “wildly conspiratorial and entirely contradicted by the record.”
Salame, for his part, was not available as a friendly witness. He had pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and running an illegal money-transmitting business, and was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison in May 2024.
A Motion Filed Without Lawyers
The bid for a new trial was unusual from the start. Bankman-Fried filed the motion in February without consulting his legal team — a rare move that raised eyebrows on its own. He also asked that a different judge oversee any new proceedings, citing doubts about getting a fair hearing from Kaplan.
Then he tried to pull the motion entirely. In a message to the court, he told Kaplan he didn’t believe he would get a fair hearing “on this topic in front of you.” That request to withdraw was denied too.
Bankman-Fried is currently serving his sentence at a federal prison in Lompoc, California. A separate appeal of his conviction and sentence remains before an appellate court.
The jury that convicted him found he had illegally moved billions of dollars in FTX customer funds to Alameda Research, the trading firm he also controlled. Those funds were used for risky trades that helped bring down one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world.
Featured image from MetaAI, chart from TradingView
