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.

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.

Reports emerged in January that SBF’s parents, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, were seeking a pardon for their son from recently-elected US President Donald Trump following his high-profile pardon of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht.

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Presidential pardon “unlikely” for SBF

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.

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.

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