A Manhattan federal judge has denied FTX CEO and co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s motion for a new trial, rejecting his claim that there is new evidence.
Judge Lewis Kaplan, who oversaw Bankman-Fried’s trial in 2023 and sentenced him to 25 years in prison in early 2024, wrote in an order on Tuesday that Bankman-Fried’s claim of new evidence and witnesses was baseless.
“This motion appears to be one part of a plan to rescue his reputation that Bankman-Fried hatched and even committed to writing after FTX declared bankruptcy but before he was indicted,” Judge Kaplan wrote.
Bankman-Fried in February had requested a new trial to be overseen by a different judge, making the rare move of filing a motion without consulting his lawyers and while an appeals court was considering his conviction and sentence.
On Wednesday, Bankman-Fried asked to withdraw his request, telling Judge Kaplan he didn’t believe he would “get a fair hearing on this topic in front of you,” which the judge denied.
Sam Bankman-Fried appeared on a podcast in March 2025 while 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 arguments that FTX was insolvent was “baseless on multiple independently sufficient levels.”
“None of the witnesses, for example, is ‘newly discovered.’ Bankman-Fried well before trial knew all three of them and purportedly knew also what he hoped they would say were they to testify,” Kaplan wrote.
Bankman-Fried argued that two former FTX executives who didn’t testify — Ryan Salame, the former CEO of FTX’s Bahamian arm and Daniel Chapsky, FTX’s former head of data science — 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. He was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison in May 2024.
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He also argued that Nishad Singh, FTX’s former engineering lead, who cut a plea deal with prosecutors to avoid jail and testified against Bankman-Fried at trial, changed his testimony “following threats from the government.”
Judge Kaplan said Bankman-Fried could have sought to compel testimony from the trio but didn’t, and his claim that their absence or decision to testify against him was a result of government threats “is wildly conspiratorial and entirely contradicted by the record.”
Bankman-Fried was found guilty on seven criminal charges related to fraud and money laundering, with a jury finding he illegally transferred billions of dollars of FTX customer money to the trading firm Alameda Research to make risky trades that contributed to the exchange’s collapse.
Bankman-Fried is being held in a federal prison in Lompoc, California.
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