The United States Senate has done something it almost never does: agreed on something, unanimously, about crypto. On Wednesday, the chamber adopted S. Res. 772 by unanimous consent, a resolution expressing “the unambiguous sense of the Senate” that Sam Bankman-Fried should not, under any circumstances, receive a presidential pardon, commutation, or any other form of federal clemency.
Unanimous consent means no senator, from either party, objected. In a chamber that has spent months deadlocked over crypto legislation, the FTX founder is apparently the one thing all 100 members can agree on.
Who Wrote It, and Why That Matters
The most telling detail is the authorship. S. Res. 772 was introduced on June 17 by Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) and Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), respectively the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee’s Subcommittee on Digital Assets, and two of the most important people in the effort to pass US crypto market-structure legislation.
These are not crypto’s critics. Lummis is the industry’s foremost champion in Congress; Gallego is one of the few Democrats who voted the CLARITY Act out of committee. Their language was blunt.
“Sam Bankman-Fried is a criminal. He took advantage of millions of Americans and stole their savings,” Gallego said. “Perhaps worst of all, he has shown no remorse for his crimes and has instead tried to laughably claim he is a victim of ‘lawfare.’ What a joke. Keep him locked up.”
Lummis was equally unsparing: “Sam Bankman-Fried didn’t lose other people’s billions, he took them and used them to fund his lavish lifestyle, and now he wants a presidential pardon to shield him from the consequences of his own actions.” She added, “He had his day in court. A jury didn’t buy his act, and a judge gave him 25 years for a reason.”
The politics beneath that are worth naming. The CLARITY Act is stalled on the Senate calendar, and its opponents, Senator Elizabeth Warren chief among them, have framed the bill as a giveaway to an industry that enriches insiders and evades accountability. Nothing would validate that framing faster than the crypto industry’s own allies going soft on the man convicted of the largest fraud the sector has produced. For Lummis and Gallego, slamming the door on SBF is both a statement of principle and a defense of the bill they are trying to pass.
What the Resolution Says
The text is unusually pointed for a Senate resolution. It affirms that the 25-year sentence “reflects the extraordinary scale and deliberateness of his crimes, his lack of remorse, and the catastrophic harm inflicted upon millions of victims.” It explicitly rejects any characterization of the FTX prosecution as “lawfare,” affirming instead “the integrity of the Federal criminal justice process that produced Bankman-Fried’s conviction by a unanimous jury and sentence by an independent Federal judge.”
Its findings note that Bankman-Fried “has spent his time in prison lobbying for clemency rather than cooperating with efforts to make victims whole,” that the FTX estate’s compensation work “remains ongoing, with claims still unresolved,” and that clemency “would erase the conviction, weaken deterrence, and send a deeply damaging message that perpetrators of large-scale financial fraud can escape permanent accountability.” It cites the SEC’s characterization that Bankman-Fried secretly diverted billions in FTX customer funds to Alameda Research, using it “as his personal piggy bank.”
Why Now: The Pardon Campaign
The resolution responds to a real, active bid. After a federal appeals court upheld his conviction and sentence in June, with Circuit Judge Barrington Parker writing that FTX customers were defrauded when Bankman-Fried transferred their funds, “regardless of how strongly he believed he might later return the money,” and after a judge denied his motion for a new trial in April, clemency became one of his last remaining routes.
In June, Bankman-Fried formally petitioned the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney. The application is listed as pending. It followed reports that his parents had been engaging with figures connected to Trump’s inner circle, and an extended media campaign that included an unsanctioned interview with Tucker Carlson from prison in March 2025 and a Fox Business appearance in which he argued FTX was “one of the very few cases where the platform was over-collateralized, where customers were more than made whole.” Bankman-Fried, once among the largest Democratic donors in the country, has spent his imprisonment rebranding toward the right, and, in February, drew a rebuke from Lummis when his X account began promoting a crypto market-structure bill.
The Elephant: Trump’s Crypto Pardons
The Senate’s anxiety is not abstract. President Trump has already granted clemency to a series of crypto figures: Silk Road’s Ross Ulbricht, BitMEX co-founders Arthur Hayes and Ben Delo, and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, the last of which drew fresh scrutiny only this week, when Senator Dick Durbin used Todd Blanche’s attorney general confirmation hearing to note that Zhao had brokered a $2 billion deal routed into World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto venture, before his pardon.
There are real distinctions between those cases and this one: Zhao pleaded guilty to a Bank Secrecy Act compliance failure rather than defrauding customers, while a jury convicted Bankman-Fried on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy over roughly $8 billion in vanished customer money, with an $11 billion forfeiture ordered by Judge Lewis Kaplan. But the pattern is why senators felt the need to speak now.
Trump himself has said, in January, that he had no plans to pardon Bankman-Fried, and the White House has since pointed back to those remarks. Prediction markets price the odds in the single digits.
What It Actually Does and Doesn’t
It is essential to be clear on the limits. S. Res. 772 is non-binding. The president’s pardon power under Article II is effectively unreviewable; Congress cannot block clemency, condition it, or overturn it. Nothing the Senate passed on Wednesday has any legal force.
What it does is remove cover. Should Trump ever grant Bankman-Fried clemency, he would now be doing so against the explicit, on-the-record, unanimous objection of every member of the Senate, including all 53 Republicans. That is a political cost, deliberately imposed in advance.
Why It Matters for Crypto
For an industry still carrying FTX as its defining scandal, the vote is a useful marker. The clearest signal is not that Congress dislikes Bankman-Fried; it is that crypto’s own legislative champions calculated that distancing themselves from him was worth spending floor time on, at the precise moment they are begging colleagues for votes on market structure. The bet is that the industry’s path to legitimacy runs through visible accountability for its worst actor, not around it.
Whether that bet pays off will be settled elsewhere — in the ethics fight over officials profiting from crypto, in the Section 604 developer battle, and in whether the CLARITY Act reaches the floor before the August recess. But on Wednesday, at least, the Senate found one thing about crypto it could agree on unanimously. That alone is worth noting.
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