Prosecutors investigating accused crypto grifter Sam Bankman-Fried have demanded information from high-level Democrats — including the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the incoming House minority leader — to help prove their sprawling case, according to a report.
Top Dem lawyer Marc E. Elias, who represents a long list of political campaigns and super PACs, received an email from the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York asking for details about donations received from Bankman-Fried, sources told the New York Times on Saturday.
Unnamed Republicans and other Democratic campaigns received similar messages, the sources said.
Bankman-Fried, 30, who was arrested in the Bahamas Monday on a raft of felony charges in the wake of the November collapse of his FTX crypto exchange, allegedly siphoned off $1.8 billion dollars of customer cash, using some of it to become the Democrats’ second-largest individual donor — behind billionaire businessman George Soros — in the 2022 election cycle.
The cryptocurrency king spent $10 million on President Joe Biden’s election effort in 2020 and dropped more than $40 million on Democratic Party get-out-the-vote efforts in the 2022 midterms.
At least 11 Democratic and Republican members of the House Financial Services Committee, which oversees the cryptocurrency market, received nearly $95,000 in donations from Bankman-Fried and his FTX cronies, The Post has found.
The prosecutors asked for internal campaign records that could prove FTX executives lied by claiming the money they gave was their own, as required by the Federal Election Commission.
[Written in collaboration with other media outlets with information from the following sources]
