For others in Washington, the FTX founder’s arrest carried immediate political implications, since federal officials coupled their fraud charges against Bankman-Fried with allegations he conspired to commit multiple violations of campaign finance laws involving donations in the “tens of millions of dollars.”
In the two years leading up to last month’s elections, the crypto executive donated $40 million to candidates and campaign groups, according to federal records. Most of his money went to Democrats, though Bankman-Fried has alluded to additional, undisclosed contributions to Republicans. His publicly reported giving to Democratic-aligned groups was surpassed this election cycle only by that of George Soros, the liberal financier.
Two of Bankman-Fried’s biggest beneficiaries in 2022 were the House Majority PAC and the Senate Majority PAC, which help elect Democrats to their respective chambers. Those organizations alone received about $7 million from him over the past two years, federal data shows. Yet neither group — along with a raft of other Democratic and Republican organizations — would say Tuesday whether they planned to return the cash.
“Anybody who received political contributions from this person ought to be worried about whether everything was aboveboard,” said Noah Bookbinder, chief executive of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW)….
Yet many lawmakers faced questions of their own, having benefited from the $40 million in Bankman-Fried’s known federal donations — and tens of millions more from other top executives at FTX. The problems were more than mere optics, since federal officials charged the former chief executive with multiple campaign finance violations. That included allegations that Bankman-Fried illegally sourced some of the funds from his related crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research, then reported the contributions in the names of others, according to the Justice Department.
“All of this dirty money was used in service of Bankman-Fried’s desire to buy bipartisan influence and impact the direction of public policy in Washington,” said Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.