On Wednesday, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried claimed his 2022 arrest was politically driven, saying the Biden administration targeted him after he started contributing to Republican campaigns.

Writing on GETTR, he explained that he had moderated his political views from center-left in 2020 to centrist by 2022, after seeing the aggressive crypto regulation by the SEC and the Justice Department.

He commented, “By 2022—having seen Gensler/Biden’s DOJ on crypto—I was a centrist, and (privately) donated tens of millions to Republicans. Weeks later, Biden’s anti-crypto SEC/DOJ went after me. They had me arrested weeks before the crypto bill I was working on was set for a vote — and the night before I was set to testify before Congress.”

Gensler’s government phone had messages deleted for a period of time

Around the time of Bankman-Fried’s arrest, House Republicans asked whether the arrest had been intentionally timed to prevent his testimony. They demanded that the then-SEC chair, Gary Gensler, furnish internal correspondence. However, Bankman-Fried wrote in a new post that Gensler suggested the records at issue had disappeared.

According to the report of the SEC’s inspector general, released last month, an “enterprise wipe” was performed on Gensler’s government phone, which deleted text messages from October 2022 through September 2023. The device had stopped syncing with the agency’s system in July 2023 and was classified as “inactive” for more than two months, despite remaining operational, the office stated.

Over those months, the SEC had consequently launched a series of high-profile actions against major exchanges, including Coinbase and Binance. The period also overlapped with the FTX collapse and Bankman-Fried’s subsequent arrest in the Bahamas.

So far, Coinbase has accused the SEC of deleting close to a year’s worth of messages from Gensler’s phone and is seeking sanctions over what it is calling the “destruction of evidence.”

Bankman-Fried is serving a 25-year sentence for fraud

On December 12, 2022, Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas and extradited to the U.S., where he was arrested. At the time, federal authorities alleged that Bankman-Fried planned the FTX fraud from day one and that it ultimately drove the exchange broke.

Shortly after his arrest, Bankman-Fried was granted release on a $250 million bond and confined to his parents’ residence on Stanford’s campus, monitored by an ankle bracelet. He was later remanded to custody due to allegations of witness tampering, and in under a year, a 12-member jury found Bankman-Fried guilty on every charge he faced. 

Currently, he’s serving a 25-year sentence but is seeking to overturn the conviction on appeal. He and his family have petitioned President Donald Trump for clemency, who recently pardoned Silk Road’s Ross Ulbricht.

In a separate GETTR post, the imprisoned FTX founder explained that his friend published his message on the site: “I can’t post directly; I dictate to a friend via approved BOP phone/email.” However, investigative journalist Laura Loomer has warned the public not to listen to any of Bankman-Fried’s claims. She noted that the FTX founder would only “pretend like he was a victim of Joe Biden and the Democrats” to receive a pardon.

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