US Senate votes unanimously against clemency for FTX’s Bankman-Fried
A nonbinding resolution led by Senators Lummis and Gallego signals bipartisan resistance to any pardon as SBF’s appeal options narrow.
The United States Senate has unanimously approved a resolution opposing any presidential pardon or sentence commutation for Sam Bankman-Fried, the convicted founder of collapsed crypto exchange FTX. The nonbinding measure, spearheaded by Senators Cynthia Lummis and Ruben Gallego, states that Bankman-Fried should “under no circumstances” receive clemency.
The vote’s unanimity is notable in an otherwise polarised chamber, and underscores the degree to which the FTX collapse remains a live political liability inside Washington’s ongoing effort to build a durable regulatory framework for digital assets.
A symbolic but pointed rebuke
Resolutions of this kind carry no legal force and cannot bind the executive branch’s clemency powers, which rest solely with the president. But their unanimous passage functions as a formal congressional statement of intent, intended to pre-empt any future clemency petition and to signal to the White House that lawmakers from both parties regard leniency for Bankman-Fried as politically untenable.
Bankman-Fried was convicted in 2023 on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy connected to the collapse of FTX and its affiliated trading firm Alameda Research, and is serving a 25-year federal sentence. According to reporting corroborated across multiple outlets, his bid for a pardon remains active even after he lost an appeal against his conviction, keeping the question of executive clemency in view for members of Congress.
Why it matters for crypto’s Washington politics
The resolution lands at a delicate moment for US digital asset policy. Lawmakers are simultaneously trying to finalise comprehensive market-structure legislation, with the Senate’s Clarity Act already stalled amid separate ethics disputes over the crypto interests of political figures, including President Trump. A unified Senate position on Bankman-Fried allows legislators to draw a clear line between the industry’s legitimate institutional participants and the fraud that triggered much of the sector’s post-2022 regulatory scrutiny.
For European and UK observers, the episode is a reminder of how deeply the FTX collapse continues to shape US legislative caution around crypto, even as the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regime and the UK’s own regulatory perimeter for digital assets move ahead on separate, more settled tracks. Institutional investors weighing US market access continue to watch Washington’s political temperature on crypto fraud enforcement as a proxy for the pace and shape of future federal rules.
The bipartisan nature of the vote also offers a rare data point of consensus in an otherwise fractious Congress on crypto matters, where disputes over stablecoin oversight, exchange licensing and conflicts of interest have repeatedly delayed broader legislative progress.
Read more: US Clarity Act stalls as Senate ethics fight over Trump’s crypto wealth deepens
