Yesterday, we received an object lesson in the dangers of disinformation when news of changes to the criminal charges against FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried began spreading like wildfire on social media. Influential figures misrepresented the changes, in some cases with the obvious goal of feeding a conspiratorial and partisan narrative, as The Node newsletter reported. This narrative, which has been circulating since FTX’s collapse, holds that Bankman-Fried is a puppet for the Biden administration, and that he’s getting away with it thanks to friends in high places.
However, it is important to note that Bankman-Fried is not going to get away with it. He still faces a laundry list of active charges scheduled to be tried in October, and prosecutors will likely continue to pursue the campaign finance charges. Similar procedural issues led to the dropping of another set of charges, including bank fraud, in June, but those charges were quickly revived as part of a separate trial scheduled for March 2024.
Despite this, political influencers including right-wing blogger Ian Miles Cheong and co-founding editor of The Intercept Glen Greenwald leveraged their mischaracterization of events to advance the FTX-Democrat connection. Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy followed swiftly after, castigating the corrupt Department of Justice (DOJ) for supposedly going easy on a major Democratic donor.
The most important thing to understand is that the campaign finance charges against Sam Bankman-Fried are unlikely to go away. As Journalists reported, they were dropped from the omnibus trial scheduled for this coming October, but if prosecutors instead attach the campaign finance charges to the March trial, that would likely mean more jeopardy for Bankman-Fried, not less.
The real harm of the partisan and fact-averse interpretation of the FTX scandal as a Democratic Party operation is that it obscures the fact that to the rich and powerful, America’s political parties are nothing but strategic playthings. People like Bankman-Fried and his coterie are dangerous not because of their political commitments, but because of their complete lack of real values beyond pursuing their own benefit. The very fact that Bankman-Fried was consciously working both sides of the aisle shows why it’s so misguided and dangerous to turn his prosecution into a political football.
But you wouldn’t know any of this if you listened to figures like Ian Miles Cheong, The Node newsletter reported. Replies to the post make clear that his followers believe Bankman-Fried has simply walked away scot-free – and that his Democratic donations were the key to this (nonexistent) get out of jail free card.