Sam Bankman-Fried’s Turn to the Right Spurs Skepticism, but Could It Go Deeper Than Pardon Politics?

The rightward political trajectory of the fallen crypto founder Sam Bankman-Fried, disclosed to The New York Sun in a jailhouse interview, has occasioned skepticism — but could it amount to something more than expedient appeal to a president who holds the power to erase a sentence of a quarter century behind bars?Some in the press see in Mr. Bankman-Fried’s disclosures to the Sun evidence of a superficial shift. Coinpedia asks: “FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried Begs Trump for Pardon – Will Crypto’s Fallen King Walk Free?” The New York Post contends: “Sam Bankman-Fried rips Biden over ‘politicization’ of DOJ, warms to Trump.” Cointribune reckons: “The Founder Of FTX Courts Republicans From His Prison.”Whatever the angle of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s political trajectory, he now tells the Sun that he is “really frustrated and disappointed with what I saw of Biden’s administration of the Democratic Party” and that “I’ve been working with Republicans a lot more than had been previously thought.” It is possible, though, that the erstwhile billionaire was always destined for a divorce from the Democrats. Mr. Bankman-Fried’s conversations with the Sun showed him to be sure of his innocence. “I don’t think anyone was guilty,” he declared on a monitored prison line, and insisted that “FTX was never insolvent and it was never bankrupt. Neither was Alameda. They always had enough to, to, to make good on all their liabilities.” The FTX debtor estate reckons that 98 percent of FTX’s creditors will get 119 percent of their claims. Mr. Bankman-Fried contends that if FTX had never gone into bankruptcy, the bounty would have been greater still.Nevertheless, Mr. Bankman-Fried was convicted by a jury of seven criminal counts of fraud and conspiracy in a case brought by President Biden’s Department of Justice, a president whose policies on cryptocurrency he tells the Sun were “incredibly destructive.” The volte face is a startling one considering that Mr. Bankman-Fried was the second most generous donor to the 46th president’s 2020 election campaign.Mr. Bankman-Fried disclosed that he supported Mr. Biden four years ago to ward off the possible triumph of Senator Sanders, but that a stalwart of the “center-left” is “not how I view myself anymore.” He decried to this correspondent the similar “prosecutorial abuse” and “politicization of the DOJ” that President Trump often critiques. Mr. Bankman-Fried shared that “I know President Trump had a lot of frustrations with Judge Kaplan. I certainly did as well.”The FTX founder’s outreach to the right, though, predates the implosion of his empire and is more extensive than is often noted. During his trial, prosecutors — led by the erstwhile acting United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon — adduced evidence of a $10 million donation from Mr. Bankman-Fried to One Nation, a group aligned with Senator McConnell. Mr. Bankman-Fried’s donation to similar “dark money” groups amounted to some $50 million in 2022.There are some hints that the largesse of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s political donations found Republican pockets. That at least was the conclusion of Judge Kaplan, who in sentencing Mr. Bankman-Fried declared lest “anyone think that his attention was devoted all to the left end of the spectrum, it wasn’t. … [Mr. Bankman-Fried] set up a vehicle for making political donations to the right through straws that wouldn’t come back to him.”Mr. Bankman-Fried was originally charged with campaign finance violations — for giving to both parties. The United States attorney who brought the case, Damian Williams, declared: “All of this dirty money was used in service of Bankman-Fried’s desire to buy bipartisan influence and impact the direction of public policy in Washington.” Those charges were eventually dropped. According to one watchdog, Open Secrets, Mr. Bankman-Fried’s donations to Democrats before the 2022 midterms amounted to some $40 million, with only about $235,000 going to Republicans. Mr. Bankman-Fried’s mother, Barbara Fried, was involved in fundraising to boost the fortunes of Democratic candidates for Congress through her Super PAC, “Mind the Gap.” Mr. Bankman-Fried, though, told the podcaster Tiffany Fong in 2022, “All my Republican donations were dark. The reason was … because reporters freak … out if you donate to Republicans. They’re all super liberal, and I didn’t want to have that fight.” He tells the Sun that one of his deputies who donated to Republicans, Ryan Salame, received a relatively stiff prison sentence of seven and a half years. That sensibility also found expression in the immediate aftermath of FTX’s collapse, where Mr. Bankman-Fried told a journalist at Vox, via Twitter, that “ethics stuff” is a “dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.” Now he tells the Sun that the “Republican Party was far more reasonable” in respect of policy toward cryptocurrency and that he approves of Elon Musk’s “chainsaw” approach to slashing the size of the federal bureaucracy.It is impossible to know if Mr. Bankman-Fried would have made good on his vow to spend $1 billion on the presidential election in 2024. Also a mystery is determining whether that could have tipped the election away from Mr. Trump — or whether, in the event Mr. Trump still won, Mr. Bankman-Fried would have joined other modern Midases — Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Mr. Musk, and others — in supporting the 47th president.

Sam Bankman-Fried’s Turn to the Right Spurs Skepticism, but Could It Go Deeper Than Pardon Politics?

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