Sauve-qui-peut: America’s political elite, having benefited from huge financial contributions from Sam Bankman-Fried, is trying to distance itself from the fallen cryptocurrency star, accused of orchestrating a gigantic fraud.
The 30-year-old, now detained in the Bahamas, had become in recent years one of the largest declared contributors to the Democratic Party, and claims to have also financed, in the same proportion but in a hidden way, the Republican camp.
The case has been traced to US President Joe Biden, who received more than $5 million in donations from the businessman for his winning 2020 campaign.
Power kicks in
Asked regarding it on Tuesday, her spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre kicked in: “I am limited in what I can say,” she said, citing a law that prohibits her from making comments relating to in elections or campaigns.
Former boss of FTX, a cryptocurrency trading platform now in bankruptcy, Samuel Bankman-Fried was charged on Tuesday by American justice.
She claims that he misappropriated his clients’ money to carry out risky speculative operations but also to influence, fraudulently, political life.
He has “made millions of contributions through his company Alameda to candidates and political committees in anticipation of the 2022 elections”, which is not illegal in the United States. Except that he did so by seeking to “evade caps and transparency obligations,” reads the statement released Tuesday by the New York prosecutor in charge of the case, Damian Williams.
“Dirty money”
The magistrate told a press conference that Samuel Bankman-Fried was making the donations appear to come from wealthy accomplices.
“All this dirty money was used to try to buy influence within the Democratic and Republican parties, and to try to influence political decisions in Washington”, asserted the prosecutor.
On the Federal Elections Commission website, which lists donations, a search for those made by Sam Bankman-Fried yields 213 results since 2020, including $ 5 million paid in September 2020 to a support committee for Joe Biden, then a $50,000 donation in October to the “Biden Victory Fund”.
Money for Democrats
The vast majority of disbursements reported on this site went to Democratic structures or candidates.
But the businessman, who multiplied interviews and sensational statements while his company was taking on water, assured, in an interview in November with a specialist in cryptocurrencies, Tiffany Fong, that he had “given the same amount to both parties”.
“All my contributions to Republicans were hidden,” he said, “because journalists lose their minds when you give to Republicans. They’re all super left-wing.”
It’s time to settle accounts for some beneficiaries. The money paid by Samuel Bankman-Fried, even legally, seems very toxic.
Influence
Kirsten Gillibrand, Democratic Senator from New York, told the New York Post that she was donating the money received to an association working with disadvantaged populations.
The newspaper reports similar decisions by five other lawmakers – four Democrats and one Republican.
The Open Secrets association, which specializes in decrypting political funding, calculated that with nearly $39.2 million declared, the fallen cryptocurrency star ranked 6th among the most generous donors for the “midterms”. , with midterm elections held in November.
If only Democratic Party donors are considered, he comes in second only to George Soros, who poured more than $128 million through various channels to Joe Biden’s party.
Political finance in the United States is a complex business, involving billions of dollars. The regulation is more or less restrictive depending on whether the donations go to the candidates, or to the “PAC” and “Super PAC”. These “political action committees” are in reality a kind of investment fund playing an essential, if sometimes underground, role in the campaigns.
Investors, bosses, economic lobbies but also associations working for such and such a social cause hope, via their donations, to influence Congress, the government, the White House.
In the case of “SBF”, as it is dubbed, the hottest political topic was certainly the still-nascent regulation of the high-risk cryptocurrency market.
ats, afp
