According to Golden Finance, former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried recently appeared on the Tucker Carlson podcast, which is the latest stop on his media's "image reshaping journey". On the show, SBF claimed that he was sentenced to 25 years in part because of his growing ties with the Republican Party before his arrest. "I was a centre-left in 2020 and donated to Biden's campaign," SBF said. "But by the end of 2022, my private donations to the Republican Party were comparable to those of the Democratic Party. This began to be known before and after the FTX collapse and might have played a role." In fact, the SBF has donated more than $40 million to 196 members of Congress, including Republican and Democratic seniors, with one-third of them receiving funds from him. He also criticized former SEC chairman Gary Gensler and the way he regulated the crypto industry in an interview. A Google document exposed during the SBF trial showed that he had considered a variety of ways to reshape his image, including "public criticism of political correctness" and "on Tucker Carlson to show that he is a Republican." This strategy is now being implemented in the context of Republican control of Washington. SBF's parents — former Stanford Law professor Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman — are reportedly meeting lawyers and others in the Trump circle to try to win a presidential pardon for their son. SBF also recently posted comments on social media about the difficulty of layoffs, criticized by crypto communities as an attempt to please the Trump administration.