Sam Bankman-Fried was trying to avoid accountability for fraud.
But today in the House Financial Services Committee hearing — in her typical style — Alexandria laid out the facts.
To catch you up: Samuel Bankman-Fried is the founder and former CEO of FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange that filed for bankruptcy last month. Bankman-Fried faces eight criminal charges, including wire fraud, lying to investors, and conspiring to defraud the U.S. by violating campaign finance laws. He was scheduled to stand before Congress today for questioning about the multi-billion dollar collapse of FTX, but was arrested in the Bahamas last night.
The House Financial Services Committee held the hearing today without him. Alexandria asked acting FTX CEO John J. Ray III about the timeline of events — including the timing of Bankman-Fried’s arrest just before congressional questioning, and a curious 25.5 hour period when Bahamian FTX customers were able to withdraw their money from the sinking business. Over the course of four hours, Ray described the downfall of FTX as a case of “old-fashioned embezzlement.”
Federal prosecutors also said in a newly filed letter to the judge that Bankman-Fried defrauded FTX customers “by misappropriating funds for his personal use…including to make tens of millions of dollars of political contributions,” and violated campaign finance laws, “by causing political contributions to candidates and committees associated with both major political parties to be made in the names of co-conspirators, when in fact those contributions were funded by Alameda Research with misappropriated customer funds.”1
Let’s be clear: Bankman-Fried made fraudulent contributions to both major political parties, he was coming for our entire system. He said himself in recent interviews that he was a major Republican funder, and that he relied on dark money methods for his GOP funding because he didn’t want the media finding out. In fact, Bankman-Fried said he was secretly “the third-biggest Republican donor” if you count dark money.2
This is just the latest example of why our campaign finance laws are broken and why Alexandria has routinely called on the Democratic party to shift toward everyday, small-dollar, diverse sources of funding.3
Unlike most politicians, Alexandria rejects all corporate money and relies entirely on grassroots support, the vast majority being small-dollar donations that average between $16-19. As she has said, “the influence [dark money] has is absolutely atrocious.”
Alexandria also refuses to take meetings with lobbyists or curry favor with billionaires. This is so she can legislate and operate independently from our corrupting system of campaign finance and revolving-door politics. Moments like today demonstrate why that’s so important.
Our movement must continue to shine a light on dark money to get corporate, corrupt interests out of politics once and for all.
In solidarity,
Team AOC
1 - New York Times
2 - Salon
3 - The Independent
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