The whiz kid at the center of the FTX collapse has been a big-time Democratic donor.
The whiz kid at the center of the FTX collapse has been a big-time Democratic donor.
H ave you noticed that almost no media outlets have ever reported that most of the largest financial scandals of the past 50 years have been major donors to Democrats and liberal causes/PACs?
That was true of the savings-and-loan crisis and the “Keating Five” (four of whom were Democratic senators and the fifth was the late John McCain). Bernie Madoff was a darling of the Democrats. And the Fannie Mae bankruptcy involved its PAC and executives giving millions to mostly Democrats. A partial exception was the 2001 collapse of Enron, whose executives gave about two-thirds of their money to Republicans.
For much of the last 20 years, the media have instead obsessed over the “dark money” from the Koch brothers — who never violated the law or defrauded investors — while they ignored many of the real crooks and even celebrated them.
So now we have flimflam man Sam Bankman-Fried, the 30-year-old billionaire whiz kid CEO of crypto exchange FTX, which is currently under federal investigation. “SBF,” as his chummy Democratic friends affectionately called him, became the Democratic Party’s second-biggest donor this year. He funneled tens of millions of dollars into Democratic coffers in order to help write crypto-regulation bills to his liking.
New York magazine reports that Bankman-Fried had become a real power player among Democrats:
Had things kept on going the way they were, Bankman-Fried could have been the face of softer regulation and the force that would keep a handful of crypto-friendly Democrats from regulating it like the rest of the financial industry.
SBF is unlikely to be making any future donations, given that his fortune has evaporated amid allegations that he misused customer money and that his entire “crypto empire” may have been a vast Ponzi scheme.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, SBF and two other FTX execs gave an estimated $57 million to Democratic candidates and groups and $22 million to Republican candidates and groups.
Here are the entities that are known to have received at least a million dollars in political contributions from the three top FTX execs:
Protect Our Future PAC (pro-lockdown group, Dem): $28,000,000
American Dream Federal Action (pro-lockdown group, GOP): $15,000,000
Future Forward USA (Dem): $6,000,000
House Majority PAC (Dem): $6,000,000
Reproductive Freedom For All: $4,000,000
GMI PAC: $3,500,000
Senate Majority PAC (GOP): $3,000,000
Senate Leadership Fund (GOP): $2,500,000
Women Vote! (Dem): $2,250,000
Congressional Leadership Fund (GOP): $2,000,000
America United (Dem) $1,300,000
LGBTQ Victory Fund (Dem): $1,100,000
O’Rourke, Beto (Dem): $1,100,000
Mind the Gap (Dem): $1,000,000
A complete list is available here.
I, for one, plan to keep track of which politicians and PACs give the money back, so it can go to the victims of the FTX Ponzi scheme. So far Bloomberg reports that “only a handful” have announced they will return the stolen money.
Author Michael Lewis, who spent much of the last six months shadowing Sam Bankman-Fried, is already hawking the movie rights to a book on him. Let’s hope the final credits feature a list of all of the politicians in both parties who ever took FTX’s money and didn’t return it.