Sam Bankman-Fried is facing a formal shutdown of a court retrial bid after a New York judge rejected the crypto mogul’s request, stating that the “new evidence is baseless”.
According to the order published on Tuesday, Judge Lewis Kaplan of the U.S. District Court expressed dissatisfaction with the new evidence provided by Bankman-Fried.
Sam Bankman-Fried had previously applied for a retrial in the hopes that new witnesses and evidence could demonstrate that key facts presented during his case were incomplete or misleading.
The main bone of contention, particularly regarding FTX’s financial condition and management decisions, was a key factor that the FTC CEO had sought to prove otherwise in the new trial.
He also argued that some testimony was unavailable during the original case and that this additional evidence could potentially have influenced the jury’s verdict.
Interestingly, Judge Kaplan, whom Bankman-Fried himself had asked to be recused, proposed evidence was not new and would not have changed the outcome of the case.
FTX’s bankruptcy, which took place in November 2022, was caused by a liquidity problem after it emerged that the sister company of FTX, Alameda Research, had a big stake in the FTT coin, which is FTX’s native token.
The news led to a loss of confidence, resulting in a huge rush for withdrawals and an 80 percent drop in the value of the FTT coin within three days. The fallout also saw around $8 billion-$10 billion in missing user funds.
Bankman-Fried withdrew retrial request
Despite the hope of bringing in a new perspective to the FTX case, Bankman-fried had somewhere already given up the idea of pursuing another trial. Last week, Bankman withdrew his motion for the retrial saying that he didn’t think he would get a “fair hearing”.
The closure from the federal court now provides a formal rejection to end the case even though Bankman-Fried dropped it last week.
In his first move for a new trial, filed in February, Bankman-Fried accused the Justice Department of concealing information while also containing what he claimed would have been evidence from FTX Digital Markets co-CEO Ryan Salame and Daniel Chapsky, the former head of data science at FTX. According to Bankman-Fried, both expressed their fear of testifying.
However, Judge Kaplan pushed back on Tuesday, saying the defense could have tried to secure or compel those witnesses to testify but chose not to. He also dismissed claims that their absence, or a witness deciding to testify against the defendant, was due to government threats or retaliation, calling those allegations “wildly conspiratorial” and not supported by the record.
Judge Kaplan also criticized Sam Bankman-Fried for trying to rally public support around what he described as new evidence, pointing to his media interviews with author Michael Lewis and commentator Tucker Carlson.
He said the effort missed a key point, that the so-called new claims were not actually new, but arguments the court had already reviewed multiple times during the trial.
Trump denies presidential pardon to FTX founder
Before the appeal for a retrial, Sam Bankman-Fried had hoped for a possible presidential pardon from Donald Trump, but the proposal didn’t see the light of the day.
Back in January of 2026, President Donald Trump had explained in a New York Times interview that he had “no plans” to pardon Sam Bankman-Fried, despite the jailed exec’s attempts for clemency.
Bankman’s current sentence
Sam Bankman-Fried, who is currently serving 25 years in jail time, was convicted of seven criminal charges, including fraud and money laundering, in 2023.
The crypto mogul faced allegations that he had stole billions of dollars worth of customer money from the defunct crypto exchange FTX and then diverted it to Alameda Research, an associated trading company.
According to the facts established by the prosecution, the stolen money was used to cover up trading losses, settle debts, finance different transactions, and even kept undercover for other uses.
A U.S. District Court Judge, Lewis Kaplan, sentenced him to twenty-five years in prison in early 2024. He is currently serving his sentence in a federal penitentiary in Lompoc, California. Bankman-Fried’s appeal proceedings are still ongoing and serve as the only avenue left open for him to legally challenge the conviction since his application for a retrial was rejected.