Thomas Lifson and other observers have noticed the strange kid-glove treatment that accused crypto-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried has been getting since his arrest in the Bahamas after reportedly misappropriating and losing billions in customer funds.

It was natural to note the huge campaign funding Bankman-Fried delivered, particularly to Democrats, at least $40 million, making him their second-largest donor.

But now another shoe seems to be dropping, based on this report from Bonchie at Red State here:

Sam Bankman-Fried, the man at the center of the FTX scandal, is back on US soil after having been extradited from the Bahamas to face federal charges. Naturally, because our justice system is about as coherent as a two-year-old quoting Shakespeare, the notorious fraudster was immediately granted bail and is now spending the holidays with his family. The American oligarchy is alive and well.

But I digress, there’s a lot more to the FTX scandal than just Bankman-Fried’s fate, and one of the more interesting aspects of the entire ordeal is just how close many Democrats were to him. In fact, according to Politico, a Democrat operative and close advisor to Bankman-Fried named Sean McElwee had a direct backchannel setup with the White House.

 

Sean McElwee had a Slack channel at DataForProgress “that became a rolling convo between McElwee, Biden Admin officials, & some well-known reporters” & “the day after FTX filed for bankruptcy & SBF resigned as CEO, McElwee abruptly shuttered the channel.”https://t.co/dufXMNGCty pic.twitter.com/O2ZXi5iZrx

— Jerry Christmas рџЋ…рџЏјрџЋ„ (@JerryDunleavy) December 22, 2022

 

That slack channel, which reportedly contained ongoing conversations between McElwee and administration officials (as well as “well-known reporters”) was promptly shut down when Bankman-Fried resigned as CEO. Moreover, McElwee is also a co-founder of Data for Progress and only began negotiating his exit from the organization after FTX collapsed in on itself. If everything was above board, then why would Data for Progress feel the need to cut ties so quickly?

To say there are a lot of red flags with this situation is to understate things dramatically, and the questions surrounding the administration’s involvement become obvious with this news.

It certainly does have a bad smell to it, given the Biden family's propensity toward involvement in multiple get-rich-quick schemes with Ukrainian oligarchs, red Chinese tycoons, and other skeevy big-dollar operations.

If Biden or his surrogates were talking to this guy, then it merits a congressional investigation as soon as the House changes hands. The public has a right to know why this enterprise was shielded from regulation, saw its founder given the kid-glove treatment upon his arrest, and somehow managed to rip off billions undetected, with the only thing he needed to do was throw money at Democrats. Note that most Democrats have yet to return their funds from his bad operation, and arguably won elections based on the stolen cash.

If all of the details lead where they seem to be leading, there's one heck of a new scandal emerging on the Biden front, one that would surely rival if not top the Hunter Biden fiasco.

Image: Cointelegraph, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported