Campaign Finance Charges Are Back on the Menu

Sam Bankman-Fried (Nikhilesh De/CoinDesk)

I suspect there are about 196 reasons why the Justice Department might want to dive more deeply into this specific set of allegations.

Bankman-Fried’s team hasn’t yet responded to the latest letter from the Justice Department, but we are going to hear from them later on Friday as the former FTX CEO shows up in court to learn whether he will be sent back to jail ahead of his trial in October.

Obviously I’ve written about this before, and so I’m not going to get too deep into it now, but here are the highlights: Bankman-Fried is accused of violating his bond conditions in trying to tamper with multiple witnesses as well as allegedly other shady behavior. The Justice Department says that he has abused his privilege in being allowed to spend his pretrial time at his parents’ home, and therefore, it wants to put him back into custody.

The defense claims that Bankman-Fried has done nothing improper although the lawyers admitted that he did indeed share his former girlfriend’s diary with the New York Times and they say that jailing Bankman-Fried would make it far more difficult for him to prepare for trial and therefore receive a fair trial.

Still the odds do not appear to be on his side at this moment. Judge Lewis Kaplan of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York notably ended the last hearing with Bankman-Fried by directly warning the defendant to take these proceedings seriously. It did not sound like a casual warning from a judge to any defendant but a specific one to a defendant who he has already once said may have conducted criminal activity.

Bankman-Fried will be at the New York District courthouse in Manhattan at 2:00 p.m. Eastern this afternoon. CoinDesk will be there of course, providing updates.

Stories you may have missed

• Figure Abandons Quest to be U.S. Chartered Crypto Bank After Three-Year Fight: Figure Technologies, the blockchain-related lending platform, withdrew its application to become a federally chartered bank in the U.S.

This week

Friday

• 14:00 UTC (2:00 p.m. EDT) Sam Bankman-Fried is going to be at the U.S. District Courthouse for the Southern District of New York.

Elsewhere:

• (Washington Post) Fun weather we’re having, huh?

If you’ve got thoughts or questions on what I should discuss next week or any other feedback you’d like to share, feel free to email me at nik@coindesk.com or find me on Twitter @nikhileshde.