Just hours ago, Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and former head of the crypto exchange FTX, was charged with multiple counts of fraud for his illegal funneling of money from FTX into his other venture, trading firm Alameda Research. As the story comes out, it’s clearer and clearer that SBF hoped to invest tens of billions of laundered dollars in political power. Reporting for CNBC shows that customer funds were fraudulently transferred between FTX and Alameda and funneled into both Democratic and Republican political campaigns, allowing SBF to flex his financial muscles and exert pressure on American electoral results — in pretty flagrant violation of U.S. campaign funding laws (and if you’re violating our already dark-money-friendly laws, it’s got to be bad).
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No surprise, but we’re returning to this fascinating story for Episode 103 of KK&F with special guest Coffeezilla, self-professed “Internet Detective Exposing Scams” through YouTube reporting — check out his interview with SBF right here. While the mainstream press was writing puff pieces on SBF, Coffeezilla was seeing right through his bullshit.
We’ll talk to him about how the spectacular fall of the crypto world’s Lehman Brothers has come to be one of the most high-profile financial crashes in our memory, how federal prosecutors are handling this case (and where this kind of prosecution could go from here), and what FTX-gate means for the futures of crypto and campaign finance are probably the big questions on your mind. They’re the big questions on our minds, too, and we look forward to digging into them with Coffeezilla on this week’s episode.
Refresh your memory and get up to speed on SBF’s truly wild fall from grace with some recent reporting from Krystal and Kyle. Breaking Points has this recent primer on SBF’s indictment to explain the situation (we’re sure there will be new, even crazier details to add by the time Friday comes around). And over on Secular Talk, Kyle shares the breaking news of SBF’s arrest. This should tide you over until our episode comes out on Saturday (Friday for our paying subscribers), with all the latest on this quickly unfolding story.