Why Isn't Sam Bankman-Fried In Handcuffs Yet?

For a party that seems to absolutely loathe billionaires, Democrats and their friends in the media sure are taking it soft on Bankman-Fried.

To be honest, it’s kind of hard to try and entertain the innuendo and rumors that Democrats and the media are working to do damage control on behalf of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, because the idea is just so reprehensible.

But they sure do keep giving us ammunition to make that suggestion, don’t they?

Bankman-Fried and House Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters

Bankman-Fried - the second biggest donor to Democrats behind George Soros - has all but admitted that he squandered billions of dollars of other people’s money carelessly, writing “I fucked up” on Twitter in a mea culpa about two weeks ago, days after a run on his exchange exposed it to be a shell of what many perceived it to be.

Institutional investors in FTX have written their stakes in the firm to $0.

The $5 billion bank-run on FTX that started it all has many everyday crypto investors worried that their “investments” with FTX are total losses. For many, it was their life savings.

Since then, Bankman-Fried’s former company continues to be at the center of extremely shady circumstances. It has seen a “substantial amount” of its assets go missing in the days after its blowup.

The lawyer hired to oversee the liquidation of FTX, who also was in charge of the same task for Enron, has said “he’s never seen a company in worse shape than FTX.”

“I have over 40 years of legal and restructuring experience. I have been the chief restructuring officer or chief executive officer in several of the largest corporate failures in history. . . . Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.”

To add insult to injury, Bankman-Fried has also admitted that his entire persona of being an altruist was a ruse, calling it a "dumb game we woke westerners play."

Now widely accepted by the public and most in the financial industry to have committed a massive $30 billion fraud that has spawned innumerable comparisons to Madoff and Enron, it’s unclear to me what more of an admission of guilt is needed to extradite Bankman-Fried to the United States and place him under arrest.

I know I’m not the only one who can hear the drumbeat of potentially covering up for Bankman-Fried beating a little louder with every day that goes by and he isn’t shown being paraded off somewhere in handcuffs.

Instead, the only photo I have seen of Bankman-Fried since his firm’s blowup has been one of him meandering around a grocery store in the Bahamas.

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For historical reference, Bernie Madoff was arrested on December 11, 2008.

On December 11, 2008, financier Bernard Madoff is arrested at his New York City apartment and charged with masterminding a long-running Ponzi scheme later estimated to involve around $65 billion, making it one of the biggest investment frauds in Wall Street history.

His arrest came two days after he admitted to his brother that he was running a fraud.

“On December 3, he told longtime assistant Frank DiPascali, who had overseen the fraudulent advisory business, that he was finished. On December 9, he told his brother Peter about the fraud.”

Between the beginning of December and his arrest on the 11th, he also confessed to his sons, who “turned him in”.

This means, at the maximum, it was 11 days between Madoff being “turned in” and being arrested.

For reference, FTX collapsed around November 8, 2022 and Binance turned down the company’s bailout on November 9, 2022. Bankman-Fried admitted to “fucking up” on November 10, 2022 and FTX filed for bankruptcy on November 11, 2022, which means it has already been 11 days since the bankruptcy filing - and nearly 2 weeks since the firm’s collapse.

In the interim, instead of Bankman-Fried being brought to justice in the United States, we find out that “members of the House are requesting testimonies from Bankman-Fried, top executives from FTX and Alameda at a hearing in December.”

"The fall of FTX has posed tremendous harm to over one million users, many of whom were everyday people who invested their hard-earned savings into the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, only to watch it all disappear within a matter of seconds.

Unfortunately, this event is just one out of many examples of cryptocurrency platforms that have collapsed just this past year. That’s why it is with great urgency that I, along with my colleague ranking member McHenry, announce the Committee’s intention to hold a hearing to investigate the collapse of FTX."

Rep. Maxine Waters

Not at a criminal court - at a congressional hearing. Not anytime soon - in December.

In the interim, we are being treated to a cushy response from the media, who has hailed Bankman-Fried as anything other than a criminal. The New York Times wrote a widely criticized puff piece on Bankman-Fried 3 days after FTX filed for bankruptcy.

The Washington Post’s take was that he was a pandemic fighter:

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For a party that seems to absolutely loathe billionaires, Democrats and their friends in the media sure are taking it soft on Bankman-Fried.

Key democrats also took it soft on Theranos founder and former billionaire Elizabeth Holmes. After she drove an $8 billion fraud into the ground and was found guilty in a court of law, Democrat Cory Booker even wrote a letter pleading for a light sentence for her. Try to keep your lunch down while reading this:

Now, what do these two frauds have in common?