Of Course Sam Bankman-Fried Wants a Pardon From Trump

One of the worst cryptocurrency scam artists is trying to get a pardon from President Trump.

Sam Bankman-Fried has officially filed with the Justice Department’s Pardon Attorney Office, Bloomberg reports. The co-founder of the cryptocurrency trading site FTX was convicted on fraud and money laundering charges in 2024 and is now serving a 25-year prison sentence.

Whether Trump will pardon Bankman-Fried is an interesting question. The one-time crypto baron dropped millions of dollars on the Democratic Party and various Democratic political campaigns and PACs, as well as a smaller amount of cash on Republicans. That might make it less likely for Trump to extend a pardon, although Trump has pardoned Democrats before, such as former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and Representative Henry Cuellar.

Blagojevich was only able to get a pardon after extensively lobbying the president and conducting a slick PR campaign. Bankman-Fried seems to be trying the same strategy, giving a phone interview to Fox Business on Monday from prison and praising Trump’s Iran airstrikes In March. His real usefulness to Trump, however, is his cryptocurrency background. Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. are making millions through their crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, which could make the president more forgiving of Bankman-Fried.

Last year, Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange Binance. Zhao probably helped his own cause by helping to boost World Liberty Financial, as well as hiring people in Trump’s orbit to lobby for his own cause. Bankman-Fried now has to hope he has Trump’s attention to become one of the many white-collar criminals and fraudsters the president has let off the hook in his second term.

The FBI is interviewing former Wisconsin poll workers who helped to fuel President Donald Trump’s long-debunked claims of election fraud in 2020, Votebeat reported Monday

David Bolter, a poll worker whose claims about election fraud were included in Trump’s failed 2020 lawsuit seeking to overturn his election loss in Wisconsin, told Votebeat that FBI officials had arrived at his doorstep with questions about how local officials had handled the election.

In his affidavit, Bolter alleged that someone in Milwaukee’s absentee ballot counting facility had announced around midnight on Election Day that a “huge truckload of ballots” was going to be delivered. There has been no additional evidence of this claim, but it became central to some conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

The FBI also spoke to another 2020 poll worker, who Votebeat identified as Christine, in order to allow her to speak freely. Christine has also submitted an affidavit to Trump’s failed lawsuit claiming that she saw election workers continuing to count votes after she’d been told all of the votes were counted.

“I suspected wrongdoing, but I’m not saying that it actually happened,” she told Votebeat. “I’m just one lowly person that was working there.”

A nonpartisan audit of Wisconsin’s 2020 election found that the state’s elections were “safe and secure.” So what is the FBI hoping to find?

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said that the Trump administration’s efforts to revisit these long-debunked claims weren’t actually about uncovering anything new.

“This isn’t about the 2020 election, this is about the 2026 and 2028 elections,” he told Votebeat. “This is about intimidating election officials. This is about creating a stream of disinformation designed to delegitimize an election the president may believe he’s going to lose. This is designed by the president’s underlings to satisfy the unrealistic expectations of a president that still cannot comprehend that he lost an election that he definitely lost, and it’s incredibly destabilizing.”

The FBI has also reached out to several election officials in Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s largest city. It’s worth noting that the only people who appear to have plotted voter fraud in Wisconsin were members of Trump’s own team, who cooked up a fake electors plot to undermine the election results.

Immigration czar Tom Homan claimed that reports of inhumane conditions and abuse at the Delaney Hall detention center were false because he went there and had some spaghetti. 

“I went to the bathrooms, I went to the detention area, I went to indoor and outdoor recreation.… I hear a lot of complaining about the food. I went in there unannounced … and had lunch. I sat in the cafeteria with detainees, had the same meal they had—I had my security  detail with me of course—but I had the same tray of food that they had,” Homan said, accusing hundreds of detainees of lying about what’s happening inside the New Jersey detention center. “There was spaghetti and meat sauce, there was green beans, there was charro beans, there was rolls and butter.… Now is it a five-star cuisine? No. But was it a well established meal? Yes it was.” 

Protests have continued outside the privately run detention center for over a week as prisoners endure a hunger and labor strike over allegations of being served rotten food, being pepper-sprayed excessively, and being held in neglectful conditions. 

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has also denied any reports of inhumane conditions, saying earlier this month that there were “only a handful of individuals” going on hunger strike “because they want their ethnic group—or their ethnic-right food. Well, they can go back to their country and get whatever food they want.” 

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka has threatened a lawsuit if the detention center is not shut down.

Texas turning blue wouldn’t have been on any Democrat’s bingo card back in November 2024, when President Donald Trump took the state with 56.2 percent of the vote and Ted Cruz easily held the senator’s seat. But thanks to Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton’s controversial past and the popular progressivism of Democrat James Talarico, the Lone Star State stands a good chance of swinging left come midterm season.

Just ask the Texas lawyer who represented Paxton in his impeachment trial, Dan Cogdell, who endorsed Talarico on Monday.

Paxton “has lost sight of his core mission, which is to represent the people of Texas,” Cogdell said. “Unlike Ken, I believe to my core that James Talarico believes in unity over division and that he knows how to assemble not only Democrats, but Independents and Republicans, and we need that right now.”

Cogdell defended Paxton in his 2023 trial, during which prosecutors alleged the attorney general accepted bribes and used his office to cover up his infidelity. The case saw Paxton impeached by the Texas House of Representatives but acquitted by the state Senate. Cogdell also represented Paxton in a separate securities fraud case, which was settled in 2024 after Paxton was made to pay $300,000 in restitution.

More recently, Paxton was criticized for offering a sweetheart plea deal to a repeated child molester, which would see the offender spend just one day in jail.

It’s difficult to ascertain where the Houston-based Cogdell falls on the political spectrum. He criticized Trump frequently in recent years but gave $6,500 to the hard-right Paxton’s campaign in 2025, according to campaign finance reports. He then gave Talarico’s campaign $1,000 in March.

Talarico appeared thrilled with his new ally, using the defection to petition others to do the same.

“If you voted for John Cornyn, you have a place in this campaign,” he said in a statement. “If you’re a Republican tired of the corruption you’re seeing in government, you have a place in this campaign. Even if you’re Ken Paxton’s impeachment lawyer, you have a place in this campaign.”

Mail-in ballots continue to be counted in the race to determine which candidates will square off in Los Angeles’s mayoral election, as California state law allows them to be received for seven days after Election Day (Tuesday, June 2) and they are verified before being counted. But a late surge for Los Angeles city councilmember Nithya Raman, a progressive Democrat challenging incumbent mayor and fellow Democrat Karen Bass, is driving right-wingers nuts.

They were hoping that Republican Spencer Pratt, known for his time on reality-TV show The Hills, would perform well enough to finish in the top two, allowing him to advance to November’s general election under California’s jungle primary rules. After initial reports last week showed him behind Bass in second place, his right-wing supporters thought his advancement was in the bag.

But ballot returns for the past few days now show him falling into a distant third, and MAGA supporters from far beyond L.A. are crying conspiracy. Several conservative influencers and pundits are calling Raman’s surge “impossible,” attacking the results as illegitimate and calling L.A. Democrats “cheaters.” X user DC Draino said the results showed “Insane levels of fraud.” Republican Representative Abe Hamadeh, whose district is in faraway Arizona, said “The steal is blatant.” Elon Musk spent his Monday morning amplifying conspiracy theories about the results.

President Trump has also weighed in, calling the mayoral race a “rigged election” in a Truth Social post Monday morning. But all of that whining belies the fact that the last polls before Election Day predicted Bass and Raman finishing first and second, respectively. And late-arriving mail-in ballots tend to favor younger, more left-leaning voters, especially in a solidly left-leaning city like Los Angeles. The right will just have to realize that L.A. voters are Democrats who aren’t going to be taken in by a reality-TV star.