A federal judge in Manhattan denied FTX CEO and co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s request for a recent trial, rejecting his claim that recent evidence existed.
Judge Lewis Kaplan, who oversaw Bankman-Fried’s 2023 trial and sentenced him to 25 years in prison in early 2024, wrote in a statement: order on Tuesday that Bankman-Fried’s claims about recent evidence and witnesses were baseless.
“This motion appears to be part of a plan to save his reputation that Bankman-Fried devised and even committed to writing after FTX was declared bankrupt but before he was charged,” Judge Kaplan wrote.
In February, Bankman-Fried asked a different judge to oversee a recent trial, making the uncommon move of filing the motion without consulting his lawyers while an appeals court was considering his conviction and sentence.
On Wednesday, Bankman-Fried asked to withdraw his motion, telling Judge Kaplan that he did not believe he would “get a fair hearing from you on this matter,” which the judge denied.
Sam Bankman-Fried appeared on the podcast in March 2025 while he was being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. Source: YouTube
In his order, Judge Kaplan wrote that Bankman-Fried’s claim that three former FTX executives could counter the government’s argument that FTX was insolvent was “unfounded on a number of independently sufficient levels.”
“For example, none of the witnesses are “newly discovered.” “Bankman-Fried knew all three of them long before the trial and allegedly also knew what they would say if they testified,” Kaplan wrote.
Bankman-Fried argued that two former FTX executives who did not testify – Ryan Salame, former CEO of FTX’s Bahamian unit, and Daniel Chapsky, former head of FTX’s data analytics division – could counter the government’s claims about the exchange’s financial health.
Salame separately pleaded guilty to violating campaign finance laws and operating an illegal money transmitting business. In May 2024, he was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison.
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He also argued that Nishad Singh, a former engineering chief at FTX who took a plea deal with prosecutors to avoid prison and testified against Bankman-Fried at trial, changed his testimony “following threats from the government.”
Judge Kaplan said Bankman-Fried could have tried to force confessions from the three, but did not, and that his claim that their absence or decision to testify against him was the result of threats from the government “is wildly conspiratorial in nature and completely contradicts the record.”
Bankman-Fried was found guilty of seven criminal counts related to fraud and money laundering, and a jury found that he illegally funneled billions of dollars of FTX client money to trading firm Alameda Research to make risky trades that contributed to the stock’s collapse.
Bankman-Fried is incarcerated in a federal prison in Lompoc, California.
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