US Senator John Kennedy grilled prospective Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman Paul Atkins about a potential pardon for Sam “SBF” Bankman-Fried during the Senate Banking Committee’s March 27 nomination hearing.
The Louisiana Republican directed a series of questions about the former FTX CEO toward Atkins and probed the prospective SEC chairman about donations Bankman-Fried’s family made to Stanford University.
Senator John Kennedy questions prospective SEC chairman Paul Atkins. Source: Senate Banking Committee
Kennedy then urged the SEC to take action to prevent any potential pardons on behalf of SBF. Kennedy added:
“There should not be two standards of law and punishment for people in America. And every time you come to this committee, I am going to pounce on you like a ninja to find out what the SEC has done because I don’t think the SEC has done a damn thing.”
“I read in the paper that the Bankman-Frieds were trying to get a pardon. They are crooks, and I expect the SEC to do something about it,” the Senator continued.
SBF is unlikely to secure a pardon for several reasons that differentiate the case from that of the Silk Road founder, according to White Collar Support Group executive director William Livolsi.
In the case of Ulbricht, the charges were victimless crimes tied to the operation of a contraband marketplace as opposed to causing billions in investor losses.
Livolsi added that the sentence imposed on Ulbricht of two lifetimes behind bars plus an additional 40 years without the possibility of parole and the public campaign promise made by then-candidate Trump to pardon Ulbricht set the situation apart.
Tucker Carlson interviews SBF from prison. Source: Tucker Carlson
Despite this, SBF has attempted to cozy up to Republicans in several interviews with independent media outlets, including a February interview with The New York Sun and an interview with Tucker Carlson on March 2025.
The Carlson interview was not sanctioned by prison authorities, leading to SBF being thrown into solitary confinement following the interview and moved from a prison facility located in New York to Oklahoma.
Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips has told Sky News that councils that believe they don’t have a problem with grooming gangs are “idiots” – as she denied Elon Musk influenced the decision to have a national inquiry on the subject.
The minister said: “I don’t follow Elon Musk’s advice on anything although maybe I too would like to go to Mars.
“Before anyone even knew Elon Musk’s name, I was working with the victims of these crimes.”
Mr Musk, then a close aide of US President Donald Trump, sparked a significant political row with his comments – with the Conservative Party and Reform UK calling for a new public inquiry into grooming gangs.
At the time, Ms Phillips denied a request for a public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham on the basis that it should be done at a local level.
But the government announced a national inquiry after Baroness Casey’s rapid audit on grooming gangs, which was published in June.
Asked if she thought there was, in the words of Baroness Casey, “over representation” among suspects of Asian and Pakistani men, Ms Phillips replied: “My own experience of working with many young girls in my area – yes there is a problem. There are different parts of the country where the problem will look different, organised crime has different flavours across the board.
“But I have to look at the evidence… and the government reacts to the evidence.”
Ms Phillips also said the home secretary has written to all police chiefs telling them that data collection on ethnicity “has to change”, to ensure that it is always recorded, promising “we will legislate to change the way this [collection] is done if necessary”.
Operation Beaconport has since been established, led by the National Crime Agency (NCA), and will be reviewing more than 1,200 closed cases of child sexual exploitation.
Ms Phillips revealed that at least “five, six” councils have asked to be a part of the national review – and denounced councils that believed they don’t have a problem with grooming gangs as “idiots”.
“I don’t want [the inquiry] just to go over places that have already had inquiries and find things the Casey had already identified,” she said.
She confirmed that a shortlist for a chair has been drawn up, and she expects the inquiry to be finished within three years.
Ms Phillips’s comments come after she announced £426,000 of funding to roll out artificial intelligence tools across all 43 police forces in England and Wales to speed up investigations into modern slavery, child sex abuse and county lines gangs.
Some 13 forces have access to the AI apps, which the Home Office says have saved more than £20m and 16,000 hours for investigators.
The apps can translate large amounts of text in foreign languages and analyse data to find relationships between suspects.
With a sentencing hearing scheduled in a matter of weeks, Roman Storm is potentially looking at five years in jail for running an unlicensed money transmitting service.