Sam Bankman-Fried’s Mommy and Daddy Have a New Plan: Suck Up to Trump Until He Pardons Her Beautiful Boy

Boy Genius

While disgraced FTX cofounder Sam Bankman-Fried rots away behind bars for fraud, his parents are making the rounds in Trumpworld and trying to plant the seeds for a potential pardon.

As Bloomberg reports, an unnamed insider familiar with the machinations of Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, the 32-year-old's Stanford professor parents, said the erudite pair have taken meetings with lawyers in President Donald Trump's orbit to discuss clemency or a pardon for their beloved boy.

It's unclear who exactly SBF's parents have been meeting with, whether their efforts have borne fruit, or if knowledge of the meetings made its way to the White House before they were publicized.

All the same, taking these sorts of meetings falls in line with Bankman and Fried's staunch support for their con-spawn, who they've long insisted is innocent despite being sued themselves over his misdeeds. With Trump's flurry of early pardons including Silk Road mastermind Ross Ulbricht, it makes perfect sense that the Bankman-Frieds are trying to appeal to the president's newfound interest in all things digital.

Failson or Fugitive?

Before he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for helming the catastrophic FTX crash in 2022, SBF's parents kept cropping up in coverage for being ardent defenders of their crypto lad.

During pre-trial hearings in late 2022, for instance, the mop-haired crypto baron's father was seen literally plugging his ears in court, per Coindesk. That same report also noted that Fried was heard "audibly laughing" during the proceedings when prosecutors referred to her son as a "fugitive."

When the FTX fraudster was on trial in 2023, his mom told The New Yorker that Bankman-Fried was the victim of a "McCarthyite" witch hunt and that the government was on a "relentless pursuit of total destruction" against him.

"It takes a lifetime to build up a reputation as honorable people," Fried wrote in her angry email to the magazine. "It takes five minutes to destroy it, which they now have done."

That insistent defense of the professors' beautiful boy hardly made a difference during the actual trial. Between the new president's vitriolic distaste for the prior administration and his newfound love for crypto, however, their quest for SBF's clemency may actually get somewhere.

It's a fascinating dispatch from the circles of influence surrounding the newly reinaugurated president — and we're likely to see way more of this kind of cryptoworld influence-seeking moving forward.

More on Trump and crypto: Trump’s Meme Coin Is Down 64 Percent From Its High

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