House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Rep. Maxine Waters says she will not subpoena FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried to testify at Tuesday’s hearing, preferring to see SBF testify “voluntarily.”
Bankman-Fried said in a tweet that he would be glad to testify once he had “finished learning and reviewing” what went wrong.
Rep. Waters, and the House Committee on Financial Services:
Once I have finished learning and reviewing what happened, I would feel like it was my duty to appear before the committee and explain.
I'm not sure that will happen by the 13th. But when it does, I will testify. https://t.co/c0P8yKlyQt
— SBF (@SBF_FTX) December 4, 2022
SBF knows full well what happened to his company. He mixed funds from FTX with his trading company, Alameda Research and once it became public, his entire rickety crypto empire went kaput.
FTX, which is headquartered in the Bahamas, was launched in 2019 and had accrued more than one million users by 2022. Users suddenly demanded $6 billion in withdrawals after an article published by CoinDesk revealed last month that the two arms of Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency empire, FTX and Alameda Research, had significant overlap on their balance sheets in the form of the cryptocurrency FTT, which FTX invented. Rival firm Binance, which had been planning to purchase FTX, announced that it would discharge all holdings in the coin and eventually reversed course on the acquisition.
The disheveled 30-year-old went from boasting a $15.6 billion net worth to having “no material wealth” over the span of approximately two days. Federal and state officials are now investigating whether Bankman-Fried broke laws with his actions at the company.
A half dozen federal regulatory agencies would love to get a close look at SBF’s books. Meanwhile, Rep. Waters appears to be handling Democratic mega-donor SBF with kid gloves. The 30-year-old snake oil salesman gave $40 million in political campaign contributions — most of it to Democrats.
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It could very well be that Democrats are relieved that SBF won’t be subpoenaed for a number of reasons.
Bankman-Fried was the second largest donor for Democrats this last election cycle, only behind megadonor George Soros, giving at least $38 million to leftist causes, PACs, and candidates, Fox News reported.
Politico reported that Bankman-Fried was a top resource to whom Democrats went when lawmakers began looking at ways to regulate cryptocurrencies because of “his willingness to write multimillion dollar checks to boost Democrats.”
Bankman-Fried said earlier this year that he was preparing to spend between $100 million and $1 billion on the presidential election in 2024 to keep Democrats in the White House.
Buried in all those millions of dollars in contributions is the germ of scandal. SBF didn’t give that money out of love of politics or affection for Democratic members. He wanted something. And now that Republicans have control of that committee, perhaps they can dig deep enough to find out exactly what it was Bankman-Fried was after.
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