Prosecutors seek 40-year prison term for disgraced tech bro, Dem donor Sam Bankman-Fried

According to court documents obtained by NBC, prosecutors said, "The scope, duration, nature, and sheer number of Bankman-Fried’s crimes, the resulting harm they have caused, the willful disregard of the rule of law, and the absence of countervailing mitigating circumstances render him exceptionally deserving of a sentence that is sufficiently severe to provide justice."

"Bankman-Fried could have pursued the rewarding, productive, and altruistic life he has sketched out in his sentencing submission," they added. "But instead, his life in recent years has been one of unmatched greed and hubris; of ambition and rationalization; and courting risk and gambling repeatedly with other people’s money."

Prosecutors said the victims of Bankman-Fried's fraud included "tens of thousands of everyday people" who lost their "entire life savings," and " retirement funds" in the scheme. "For these reasons, the legitimate purposes of punishment require a sentence of 40 to 50 years’ imprisonment," they concluded.

Bankman-Fried was convicted of seven counts of fraud in November after a jury found he acted with criminal intent in taking customer funds from FTX and using that money to pay for real estate, venture investments, corporate sponsorships, political donations and to cover losses at Alameda."

In 2022, it was revealed that Bankman-Fried and then-girlfriend Caroline Ellison had been using FTX's proprietary crypto coin to prop up her company Alameda, which caused both companies to be severely overvalued. When the head of crypto exchange Binance Changpeng Zhao announced he was selling off his holdings in FTX, it caused a rush for investors to withdraw their crypto from the FTX crypto exchange.

Because much of the funds were used to prop up Alameda, FTX was short of investor funds by nearly $10 billion.

Since FTX came crashing down, it was revealed that Bankman-Fried donated nearly $5.2 million to President Biden's 2020 election campaign and used over $100 million of FTX's investor money to support Democrat campaigns. However, charges of campaign finance violations were dropped by the US Department of Justice in December.