Lewis Kaplan denied Sam Bankman-Fried's motion for a new trial on Tuesday, six days after the convicted FTX founder asked to withdraw the same motion on the grounds that Kaplan would not give him a fair hearing. The judge denied the withdrawal too.
Lewis Kaplan denied Sam Bankman-Fried's motion for a new trial on Tuesday, six days after the convicted FTX founder asked to withdraw the same motion on the grounds that Kaplan would not give him a fair hearing. The judge denied the withdrawal too, and ruled on the merits anyway. The opinion called Bankman-Fried's claims "baseless" and "wildly conspiratorial" — language federal judges generally do not use about their own defendants unless they are quite sure.
The motion was Bankman-Fried's Rule 33 bid for a new trial, premised on what he said were three "newly discovered" witnesses whose testimony would have shown FTX was solvent at the time of bankruptcy and that customers were ultimately repaid in full. Kaplan dismissed both halves of that argument. "None of the witnesses, for example, is 'newly discovered,'" he wrote. "Bankman-Fried well before trial knew all three of them and purportedly knew also what he hoped they would say were they to testify. He could have obtained or at least sought to compel their testimony. But he did neither."
That is the procedural killer. A Rule 33 motion for newly discovered evidence requires that the evidence in fact be new — not merely something the defendant chose not to use at trial. Bankman-Fried's broader argument, that the FTX estate's full creditor recovery proves nothing was actually stolen, did not meet that bar either. The bankruptcy estate's eventual repayment of customers in petition-date dollars — bitcoin valued at roughly $16,000 a coin in November 2022 against today's $77,000 — does not constitute exculpatory evidence of the underlying fraud, only evidence that the price of bitcoin recovered.
The withdrawal request came on 22 April in a handwritten letter from federal prison. Bankman-Fried argued he had not been given enough time to respond to the government's opposition brief and, separately, that he no longer believed he would receive a fair hearing from the judge who had presided over his original trial. The argument was, in effect, that Kaplan should recuse himself by simply letting the motion lapse rather than ruling on it.
Kaplan denied that on its face and ruled on the merits. The opinion treated the withdrawal request as part of a broader pattern: a defendant attempting to keep his options open by removing a motion he expected to lose. The judge declined the courtesy. The Rule 33 motion was decided as filed, and decided against him.
The conspiracy framing is doing some of the work. Bankman-Fried's filings have argued, with increasing volume, that the prosecution withheld evidence and that the bankruptcy administrators misrepresented FTX's solvency. Kaplan's "wildly conspiratorial" label, picked up across the legal press on Tuesday, was directed at the broader thrust of the motion: the implication that the original trial had been corrupted by interests that wanted Bankman-Fried convicted regardless of the facts. The opinion treated those claims as both procedurally and substantively meritless.
The practical effect of Tuesday's order is that Bankman-Fried's pending appeal to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals is now the only remaining vehicle. That appeal argues, among other things, that Judge Kaplan's evidentiary rulings prevented the defence from putting on a complete case and that the jury instructions on the wire fraud counts were defective. A ruling in Bankman-Fried's favour would not result in his immediate release — it would likely send the case back for a new trial, with all the procedural costs that implies — but it is the only legal path that remains open.
Bankman-Fried is roughly two years into a 25-year sentence and is currently held at FCI Terminal Island, the low-security federal facility in Los Angeles he was transferred to in April 2025. The FTX bankruptcy estate has now distributed enough capital to pay creditors at petition-date values plus interest, the milestone his defence team has consistently cited as evidence that no fraud occurred. The legal system has consistently disagreed; the petition-date repayment is a function of Bitcoin's price recovery and the estate's continuing recovery efforts, not a backdated finding that the underlying business was solvent.
The Caroline Ellison parallel is hard to ignore. Ellison testified against Bankman-Fried at his trial, took a cooperation deal, and was released to community confinement in October 2025 before completing her two-year sentence in January. She is out. Her former co-conspirator, who took the case to trial and lost, will be in his fifties when he leaves federal custody. The Rule 33 denial closes off the last serious post-trial avenue for changing that outcome. The Second Circuit can still alter it. The bankruptcy estate cannot.
Kaplan's order read, in places, like a judge who had grown tired of relitigating the same arguments. The court has considered, and rejected, multiple iterations of the same claim that newly discovered evidence requires a new trial — first at trial, then at sentencing, now in a Rule 33 posture. The opinion's framing made clear that further filings on the same theory are unlikely to land any better. Bankman-Fried, predictably, is not finished. The Second Circuit remains.
