Federal prosecutors have moved to drop campaign finance charges against Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of crypto platform FTX and once a major donor to Democratic political campaigns.
The letter said that the Bahamas had only intended to extradite Bankman-Fried to the U.S. to face fraud charges stemming from the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX and his investment fund, Alameda Research, in which billions in customer deposits went missing. Bankman-Fried donated $46.5 million to the Democrats in 2022, making him the party’s second-largest donor behind George Soros that year. Much of the money went to various political action committees, with more than half of his donations going to the Protect Our Future PAC, which advocated for pandemic preparedness.
“Reporters freak the f*** out if you donate to a Republican, because they’re all super liberal. And I didn’t want to have that fight, so I just made all the Republican ones dark,” he said in the interview. He said he thought he may have been the “second or third biggest” GOP donor that year.