Convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried shared his opinions on life behind bars in a new interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
The founder of the scammy cryptocurrency exchange FTX spoke to Carlson from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York. Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison last March for defrauding customers on his crpyto exchange to the tune of billions of dollars. Still, he maintains his innocence.
"I don't think I'm a criminal," he shared.
SBF described the infamous prison as "sort of dystopian," but added that he was keeping busy.
“I’ve, you know, started reading novels again. I play some chess, and I work on my legal case to the extent I can,” he said.
The former FTX boss also spoke on another notorious Metropolitan Detention Center detainee: Sean “Diddy” Combs. SBF said that the rapper and mogul was "kind."
“I’ve only seen one one piece of him which is, you know, Diddy in prison,” he said. “He's been kind to people in the unit. He's been kind to me.”
“If someone told me three years ago that, Oh, you’d be hanging out with Diddy every day, I’d be like, That’s interesting; I wonder how that’s going to happen,” Bankman-Fried added. “I guess he gets into crypto or something.”
The former Fox News anchor also asked the fraudster, who donated tens of millions to Democratic politicians in the years leading up to his arrest, why he figures it is that the party didn’t bail him out.
“You gave so much to Democrats that I kind of thought they would rescue you in the end. Where were your friends in the Democratic Party?” Carlson asked.
“One fact that might be relevant is that in 2020, I was center-left. I gave to Biden’s campaign, I was optimistic he’d be a sort of solid center-left president,” Bankman-Fried said, adding that he was “shocked… not in a good direction” by the Biden administration and its stances on crypto. “By late 2022, I was giving to Republicans privately as much as Democrats. That started becoming known right around FTX’s collapse, so that probably played a role.”
Some of his biggest criticisms of the Biden administration, he says, centered on its heavy-handed crypto regulations and oversight plans. He told Carlson the crypto industry would “hopefully” be in better hands under the Donald Trump administration, one which has welcomed crypto titans with open arms.
“You look at what the Trump administration said, you know, going into office. There are a lot of good things. There are a lot of things that, you know, were very different from the stance that the Biden administration took, that guys around the SEC took,” Bankman-Fried said.
Watch the full interview below:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dN1CR2dyfo8
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