Senator John Kennedy grills SEC nominee Paul Atkins about SBF pardon

US Senator John Kennedy grilled potential Securities and Change Fee (SEC) chairman Paul Atkins a few potential pardon for Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried in the course of the Senate Banking Committee’s March 27 nomination listening to.

The Louisiana Republican directed a sequence of questions concerning the former FTX CEO towards Atkins and probed the potential SEC chairman about donations Bankman-Fried’s household made to Stanford College.

Kennedy then urged the SEC to take motion to forestall any potential pardons on behalf of SBF. Kennedy added:

“There shouldn’t be two requirements of regulation and punishment for individuals in America. And each time you come to this committee, I’m going to pounce on you want a ninja to search out out what the SEC has achieved as a result of I do not assume the SEC has achieved a rattling factor.”

“I learn within the paper that the Bankman-Frieds had been making an attempt to get a pardon. They’re crooks, and I count on the SEC to do one thing about it,” the Senator continued.

Experiences emerged in January that SBF’s mother and father, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, had been seeking a pardon for their son from recently-elected US President Donald Trump following his high-profile pardon of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht.

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Presidential pardon “unlikely” for SBF

SBF is unlikely to secure a pardon for a number of causes that differentiate the case from that of the Silk Street founder, in response to White Collar Assist Group government director William Livolsi.

Within the case of Ulbricht, the costs had been victimless crimes tied to the operation of a contraband market versus inflicting billions in investor losses.

Livolsi added that the sentence imposed on Ulbricht of two lifetimes behind bars plus a further 40 years with out the opportunity of parole and the general public marketing campaign promise made by then-candidate Trump to pardon Ulbricht set the state of affairs aside.

Regardless of this, SBF has attempted to cozy up to Republicans in a number of interviews with unbiased media shops, together with a February interview with The New York Solar and an interview with Tucker Carlson on March 2025.

The Carlson interview was not sanctioned by jail authorities, resulting in SBF being thrown into solitary confinement following the interview and moved from a jail facility situated in New York to Oklahoma.

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