Prosecutors Tell New York Fed Court They Won't Try Sam Bankman-Fried on More Charges Before Sentencing

In November, we reported that a New York jury had found former FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) guilty of fraud:

Sam Bankman-Fried has been found guilty by a jury of his peers of fraud totaling $10 billion. The verdict was delivered on Thursday in New York after a trial that lasted a month. During the proceedings, Bankman-Fried took the stand himself for several days but was unpersuasive in the end.
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s spectacular rise and fall in the cryptocurrency industry — a journey that included his testimony before Congress, a Super Bowl advertisement and dreams of a future run for president — hit a new bottom Thursday when a New York jury convicted him of fraud in a scheme that cheated customers and investors of at least $10 billion.
After the monthlong trial, jurors rejected Bankman-Fried’s claim during four days on the witness stand in Manhattan federal court that he never committed fraud or meant to cheat customers before FTX, once the world’s second-largest crypto exchange, collapsed into bankruptcy a year ago.

But during the trial, prosecutors ran into a log jam on five of the counts they wanted to charge SBF with. As my colleague Streiff wrote, they were forced to drop "five other counts related to Bankman-Fried’s biblical scale defrauding of investors and customers."

Mr. Bankman-Fried has argued that prosecutors should not have been allowed to charge him with additional crimes after his extradition. But the withdrawal came with a major caveat: The prosecutors asked the judge overseeing the case, Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan, to schedule a second trial in early 2024 on those five counts.
The prosecutors said the delay was a procedural necessity. This week, Mr. Bankman-Fried won a ruling in the Bahamas, where FTX was based, granting him the ability to argue in court there that the Bahamian government should not consent to the additional charges. That legal dispute could take months to unfold.

Streiff added that when they dropped the charges in June, they had every intention of picking them back up in March 2024, which is when he'll learn his sentence for the first seven counts. But now, that isn't happening--and it's for the same reason they dropped them in the first place: The Bahamas. (Emphasis added)

US prosecutors submitted a letter to a New York federal court Friday saying that they don’t plan to proceed with a second trial against Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of crypto exchange FTX.[...]
Bankman-Fried was set to face a second trial in March on five additional charges that were severed from the original proceedings. A federal judge had asked prosecutors to decide by February 1 whether that would proceed.[...]
Bankman-Fried was previously extradited from the Bahamas, which has not yet granted consent for a trial on the remaining charges, “and the Government does not have a timeline for when The Bahamas may respond to its request,” prosecutors wrote.

US Attorney Damian Williams said in the letter:

“Given that practical reality, and the strong public interest in a prompt resolution of this matter, the Government intends to proceed to sentencing on the counts for which the defendant was convicted at trial."
The letter also said that the sentencing “will likely include orders of forfeiture and restitution for the victims of the defendant’s crimes.”

Now, you may be seeing hot takes out there that this move by prosecutors is a sign that Democrats are taking care of an ally/former donor. But I don't think that's what's happening here. SBF is already looking at up to 110 years in prison on the seven counts he was convicted on. It's also true that even those with whom we disagree politically deserve a speedy trial. The government has proven its case, a jury has convicted him, and he's not going to be walking out of jail anytime soon.