The Democratic Party’s second-biggest donor has been accused of making illegal campaign donations totaling tens of millions of dollars.
On Tuesday, prosecutors charged FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried with a plethora of financial crimes related to an alleged scheme to defraud FTX stakeholders, The Associated Press reported.
According to Open Secrets, Bankman-Fried donated just under $1 million to candidates during the 2022 election cycle in addition to $38.8 million to “outside groups,” making him the Democrats’ second-largest donor in the 2022 election cycle behind only billionaire mega-donor George Soros.
Bankman-Fried and two of his FTX associates, co-CEO Ryan Salame and director of engineering Nishad Sing, spent a whopping $70.1 million combined on the midterms.
Open Secrets reported that only $235,000 of those donations went to Republican candidates.
Even before his arrest in the Bahamas on Monday, Bankman-Fried found himself mired in controversy over the sudden collapse of his company and personal fortune.
According to Bloomberg, Bankman-Fried’s assets cratered from $16 billion to nearly zero in just a few days.
The company imploded last month after it was revealed that “at least $1 billion of customer funds” had vanished, Reuters reported.
U.S. prosecutors are claiming Bankman-Fried was behind a scheme to defraud FTX investors by diverting their money to cover expenses, debts and “risky trades,” the AP reported.
Some of these funds were used for extravagant purchases in real estate and large political donations, most of which seemingly went to the Democratic Party.
U.S. Attorney Damian Williams called Bankman-Fried’s alleged wrongdoing “one of the biggest frauds in American history” during a news conference on Tuesday.
During a congressional hearing on Tuesday, FTX’s new CEO, John Ray III, claimed that under the company’s previous leadership, customers’ funds were mishandled.
According to Ray, there was little oversight and “very few rules” regarding how the money was handled.
“This is not something that happened overnight or in a context of a week,” Ray said, according to the AP. “This is just plain, old-fashioned embezzlement, taking money from others and using it for your own purposes.”
Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler filed a complaint detailing the extent of Bankman-Fried’s alleged crimes.
“We allege that Sam Bankman-Fried built a house of cards on a foundation of deception while telling investors that it was one of the safest buildings in crypto,” Gensler wrote.
“He then used [his crypto hedge fund Alameda Research] as his personal piggy bank to buy luxury condominiums, support political campaigns, and make private investments, among other uses.”
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
