Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX, has made headlines again for claiming that his 2022 arrest was a “politically motivated” result of the JOE Biden administration. According to him, it was only after he shifted his donations to Republicans that federal agencies began cracking down on him and FTX.
In a post Chia on the GETTR platform, Bankman-Fried said that in 2020 he was “leaning center-left,” but by 2022 he had become “neutral” after witnessing the tightening of regulation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) under Chairman Gary Gensler and the Department of Justice (DOJ) under the Biden administration.
“I was a centrist who had quietly donated tens of millions of dollars to the Republican Party,” he wrote. “Just weeks later, the SEC and Biden’s DOJ – which is notoriously anti-crypto – came after me. They arrested me just before the bill I was working on was due to be voted on in Congress, and just one night before I was scheduled to testify before Congress.”
At that time, many Republican congressmen in the US House of Representatives also expressed doubts about the timing of Sam Bankman-Fried's arrest, saying that this action seemed to be aimed at "preventing him from testifying". They asked SEC Chairman Gary Gensler to provide all relevant internal correspondence and documents, but Bankman-Fried asserted that Gensler "conveniently lost those data".
A recent report by the SEC’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) said the agency’s IT department implemented an “automated but poorly understood policy” that wiped all data from Mr. Gensler’s work phone, causing important text messages from October 2022 to September 2023 – the same period the SEC opened a series of major lawsuits against cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinbase and Binance – to disappear.
Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas in December 2022 and sentenced in November 2023 on multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy to misappropriate billions of dollars in FTX client funds. He is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence in the US, but is appealing the sentence.
