Federal prosecutors have pushed back against FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s claims that they dumped millions of pages of potential evidence on his defense team just two months before his criminal trial. In a Tuesday court filing, prosecutors argued that the documents have been accessible to Bankman-Fried through his Google accounts for months.
He cannot plausibly claim to be prejudiced by the Government’s production of these materials, as he had months prior to being detained to mine them for materials relevant to his defense, prosecutors said.
Bankman-Fried is currently in pre-trial detention at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, and has requested that the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York bar a large stack of documents from being admitted as evidence at his October trial. He argued that his confinement to a high-security prison in Brooklyn, NY, would limit his access to the most recent swath of documents prosecutors have shored up.
Prosecutors also alleged Bankman-Fried took actions to thwart the government’s attempts to gain access to evidence. He identified documents from his Google accounts that he believed would discredit one of the Government’s cooperating witnesses and provided them to a widely read publication, the DOJ said in its filing.
Bankman-Fried faces seven charges, including several counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to securities and commodities fraud.