FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, still serving his sentence, posted a thread on X on July 6 through the proxy account @SBF_FTX under the headline “A tale of two Presidents.” In the posts, he drew a direct comparison between Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, known as JOH, while accusing Western liberal media of treating the two cases differently.
Bankman-Fried argued that both men rose to power in what he described as narco states, but said their records diverged sharply after that. He claimed JOH worked with the United States against drug trafficking groups, leading to a major drop in trafficking and a peaceful transfer of power at the end of his term. Maduro, by contrast, was described by SBF as cooperating with trafficking groups, presiding over a sharp increase in drug flows, and refusing to recognize election results before becoming a dictator.
SBF frames the arrests as legally similar but politically covered in different ways
He then pointed to what he called a shared enforcement pattern: both were arrested in their own countries and extradited to face proceedings in the United States. In his account, JOH was arrested immediately after leaving office, while Maduro was detained after refusing to accept election results. That comparison sat at the center of the thread. It was also the basis of his attack on media coverage.
SBF said Western liberal outlets condemned Maduro’s arrest as “illegal,” yet stayed silent on JOH’s arrest or supported it. He also claimed that some called for Maduro’s release while offering no similar defense of JOH. The closing line was blunt: he wrote that the issue was not about the rule of law, but about media hostility toward Trump, which in his view led them to back Maduro while opposing JOH after Trump granted him clemency.
Posts appeared after two high-profile case developments
The thread came against the backdrop of two major events cited in the source material. On January 3, 2026, U.S. special forces carried out an operation in Venezuela, arrested Maduro, and transferred him to detention in New York. The listed charges included narco-terrorism conspiracy and cocaine importation. JOH, on the other hand, had previously received a 45-year prison sentence in the United States on related drug charges, but was fully pardoned and released by Trump in December 2025.
Although Bankman-Fried remains in prison, he has continued to comment publicly on politics and on matters connected to his own legal fight. This latest thread pushed his name back into discussion well beyond the crypto sector.