A few minutes after running this story on SBF yesterday, I got a call from an acquaintance on Capitol Hill, a congressional staffer interested in rooting out corruption. He told me he’s been liking the DWT crypto-coverage but that I was missing something over the past couple of months— La Famiglia.
I’ve mentioned Sam’s bro, Gabe, before because he was in charge of pretending the Protect Our Future PAC was about pandemics instead of about getting political hacks to buy into the corrupt crypto-regulatory agenda. And I mentioned that there was once an interview in which SBF blamed his conservatism on his parents. But I didn’t even know their names, just that they’re law professors at Stanford. Now I know the mother’s name, Barbara Bankman-Fried. She also runs a PAC, the conservative Democratic Mind the GAP PAC (located in Stanford, California), whose members are directed to donate to anti-progressive Democrats.
This cycle, the Super PAC’s top donors were a bunch of executives at FTX who bundled a nice, cool and very precise $1,000,000. Like most scams of this sort, most of the money— Babsy took in $3,921,663 this cycle— went towards salaries (81.77%). Nothing went to any candidates or any independent expenditures. Apparently Sam didn’t just inherit his parents’ penchant towards conservativism but also their penchant towards self-dealing. Keep reading; this gets better. [I don't know anything about the father yet.]
Between 2018 and 2020 Mind the Gap members funneled over $500,000 to Sean Casten (D-IL) which he repaid by hiring Barbara Bankman-Fried’s other son, Gabe. Gabe got a low-level staff job as a “legislative coordinator,” a fancy way of saying that he responded to mail for the congressman. But suddenly the mail answerer started showing up a sensitive Financial Services Committee meetings, including high level, confidential meetings. Not even chiefs of staff come to those meetings, let alone mail answerers. There was no disclosure from Casten about his relationship with Barbara Bankman-Fried.
When GBF left Casten’s employ, he helped SBF run the phony pandemic PAC— Protect Our Future— which was used to bribe corrupt Democrats like Ritchie Torres and Josh Gottheimer, corrupt Republicans being bribed through a separate PAC, American Dream Federal Action, run by FTX’s Ryan Salame, which made sure that Republicans on the Financial Services Committee, like Tom Emmer, were paid off to protect FTX’s interest… and to rise up through the ranks of House Republican leadership. After throwing around a lot of FTX money, Emmer was elected last week to be GOP whip, the third highest position among Republicans in the 118th Congress.
I almost forgot while talking about all these Bankman-Frieds, to mention that SBF’s ex-girlfriend, Caroline Ellison (pictured on the right), who ran Alameda for him— she has since gone into hiding, reportedly first in Hong Kong and then in Dubai— was also funneling large sums of money to crooked members of Congress. He claims he doesn't "control her." Dubai, one of the most corrupt places on the face of the earth, was no extradition treaty with the U.S.; just sayin'.
The media is mostly not asking any of these crooked politicians anything and when they do, the crooked politicians never answer. Greg Hinz from Crain’s Chicago Business, has been asking questions— but not getting answers. “The media,” he wrote this morning, “has done a lousy job of pulling together the complex story of what FTX boss Bankman-Fried and associated political action funds did, covering it only in bits and pieces… How and why did a pAC heavily funded by Bankman-Fried— he gave Protect the Future PAC at least $27 million before his company hit the rocks— come to spend $199,853 on ads and mailers this spring urging a vote for [Chuy] Garcia in a Democratic congressional primary race in which he was unopposed? Are Chicago voters really expected to believe that the money sort of fell off a truck and had absolutely nothing to do with Garcia’s service on the House Financial Services Committee, which regulates, crypto?”
Garcia is currently running for mayor of Chicago and the House Financial Services Committee still hasn’t actually regulated crypto. A little more on the Bankman-Frieds from the local Palo Alto newspaper:
Bankman-Fried, also known as “SBF,” was born at Stanford and raised on campus by his parents as a utilitarian.
Utilitarianism is a philosophy that says the morally right action is the action that produces the most good, though different utilitarians have different takes on it. The philosophy has been criticized for not emphasizing justice, as utilitarians weight the benefit of the majority over individual rights.
Bankman-Fried’s mother is Barbara Fried, a law professor at Stanford since 1987. Her resume says she teaches courses in federal income taxation, legal theory, tax policy, distributive justice and moral psychology.
Like her son, Fried is involved in Democratic Party politics. She is a major donor to a political action committee called Mind the Gap that supported Democratic candidates in 2018 and 2020, according to Open Secrets, a nonprofit that tracks political donations.
… [Sam] Bankman-Fried was the second largest donor to President Biden’s 2020 campaign. He donated $5.2 million, second only to Michael Bloomberg’s $56 million donation.
For this year’s midterms, Bankman-Fried gave $27 million to a Democratic political action committee called Protect Our Future, according to Open Secrets.
And for 2024, Bankman-Fried said he would spend more than $1 billion, particularly if Donald Trump were to run.
“I would hate to say hard ceiling, because who knows what’s going to happen between now and then, but ($1 billion) at least sort of as a soft ceiling,” he told the “What’s Your Problem” podcast in May.
Bankman-Fried said he wasn’t particularly interested in cryptocurrency; he just wanted to make as much money as possible then give it away.
He said in an interview that he thinks about which causes and charities save the most lives per dollar, and then he gives money to them.
Bankman-Fried, a vegan, said he wants to focus his millions on global warming, Covid, tropical diseases and animal welfare.
Before the collapse of FTX, Bankman-Fried was written about as a prodigy, with glowing profiles in Forbes and the New York Times. He was known for wearing shorts and a t-shirt, and his company would “swoop in” to save troubled cryptocurrency firms with financial backing, Forbes reported.
At age 30, Bankman-Fried was number 41 on the Forbes list of richest people in the world with an estimated net worth of $24 billion, about half of which was tied up in FTX and its cryptocurrency.
Despite being just two years old, FTX had made a name for itself, boosted by an aggressive sports marketing strategy.
The Miami Heat play in the FTX Arena, and on Monday the Golden State Warriors gave out bobbleheads sponsored by FTX. Celebrities including Bill Clinton, Katy Perry and Shaquille O’Neal promoted the company.
Bankman-Fried lives in Nassau, where FTX is based. Not all of FTX’s trading features were available in the United States so the company didn’t have to follow as many regulations.
He's refusing to testify at the scheduled December 13 Financial Services Committee hearing into the FTX meltdown. I suspect a lot of members of the committee are extremely relieved. TechCrunch: "The U.S. authorities’ lethargic pace at its probe into FTX and its leaders has frustrated many entrepreneurs and crypto investors who believe that Bankman-Fried, who has been alleged to have misappropriated billions of dollars from customers, is getting away with one of the largest frauds with little to no scrutiny.
CoinDesk columnist David Morris wrote that the FTX collapse was no accident but a crime by a con man and farudster. "Since his con collapsed," wrote Morris, "Bankman-Fried has continued to muddy the waters with carefully disingenuous letters, statements, interviews and tweets. He has attempted to portray himself as a well-intentioned but naïve kid who got in over his head and made a few miscalculations. This is a softer but more pernicious version of the crisis management approach Donald Trump learned from the black-hat mob lawyer Roy Cohn: Instead of 'deny, deny, deny,' Bankman-Fried has decided to 'confuse, evade, distort.' And it has, to a significant degree, worked. Mainstream voices still parroting Bankman-Fried’s counterfactual talking points include Kevin O’Leary, who portrays an investor on the reality show Shark Tank. In a Nov. 27 interview with Business Insider, O’Leary described Bankman-Fried as a 'savant' and 'probably one of the most accomplished traders of crypto in the world'-- despite recent data implying immense trading losses even when times were good. O’Leary’s status as an investor in, and formerly paid spokesperson for, FTX (we sure hope those checks clear, Kevin!) explain his continued affection for Bankman-Fried in the face of mounting contradictory evidence. But he is far from alone in burnishing Bankman-Fried’s image... The scale and complexity of Bankman-Fried’s fraud and theft appear to rival those of Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff and Malaysian embezzler Jho Low. Whether consciously or through malign ineptitude, the fraud also echoes much larger corporate scandals such as Worldcom and, particularly, Enron."