One of the most eye-popping claims made by Sam Bankman-Fried was that the Biden administration deliberately orchestrated his 2022 arrest to silence him in response to his donations to Republican politicians. The former FTX founder, who is now serving a 25-year sentence in prison, made such an assertion in an online post.
Bankman-Fried, in a post on GETTR, said that due to the increased scrutiny of his activities by the SEC and the DOJ, he had moved his political donations from the center-left candidates in 2020 to the Republicans in 2022. “I was a centrist, and (privately) donated tens of millions to Republicans,” he stated in the post that was apparently transcribed by a friend. “Weeks later, Biden’s anti-crypto SEC/DOJ went after me. They had me arrested weeks before the crypto bill I was working on was going to be voted on – and the night before I was going to testify before Congress,” he added.
The arrest time of Bankman-Fried had once been the subject of speculation and Inference by House Republicans who claimed that regulators arrested Bankman-Fried to silence him. In connection with the case, lawmakers sought access to the internal communications of then-SEC Chair Gary Gensler.
In his recent post, Bankman-Fried talked about the disappearance of the internal communication of Gary Gensler from his government-issued phone due to an automated deletion policy. A report from the SEC Office of Inspector General in September stated that the agency’s IT team had set up a system, which was not well understood, that resulted in an “enterprise wipe” of messages between October 2022 and September 2023.
During the same period, the SEC took the initiative to impose penalties on a number of crypto firms such as Coinbase and Binance. In an attempt to rationalize his political-targeting-by-the-administration theory, Bankman-Fried insinuated that his lost texts should be considered as evidence supporting that theory.
After being apprehended in the Bahamas last December, Bankman-Fried was found guilty in November 2023 of fraud and conspiracy charges related to the misuse of customer funds. His legal counsel has subsequently lodged a request for reconsideration of the decision and is also requesting clemency from President Donald Trump, who has previously pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road.
In another GETTR post, Bankman-Fried wrote that he is unable to post on his own and thus he said: “I give the dictation to a friend via a BOP-approved phone/email.”
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