The "crypto" jungle is utterly corrupt, suckers--and satanic CIA and satanic globalists are at the very center of it all--look at "Tether"

Apollonian

Guest Columnist

FTX ON STEROIDS: IS “TETHER” THE BIDEN WORLD’S CRYPTO BCCI?​

Published: November 20, 2022

SOURCE: 2ND SMARTEST GUY IN THE WORLD

Link: https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/83795/ftx-on-steroids-is-tether-the-biden-worlds-crypto.html

[numerous vids at site link, above]

A simple crypto rule to live by: any token or exchange that has a CEO, identifiable individual or development team associated with it is not real crypto; it's the antithesis of crypto.
This substack has been warning for quite some time that all of these centralized exchanges are nothing more than grifting operations, IRS reporting nodes and CIA black ops money laundering facilitators.
I have been warning since around 2019 that Tether is the single most egregious crypto scam out there. It is far worse than FTX, with Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and his team of scammers having had direct ties with Tether. The sordid cadre of snake oil salesmen behind Tether makes SBF look like an ethical player.
Tether is made possible by the CIA, and in particular the Democratic party of the illegitimate Federal government that has been laundering money to Ukraine using both FTX and Tether.
This substack has covered the criminal CIA and taxation:
2nd Smartest Guy in the World - Original Social Engineering Sin
“...the socio-psychological foundations of socialism is identical to that of the foundations of a state, if there were no institution enforcing socialistic ideas of property, there would be no room for a state, as a state is nothing else than an institution built on taxation and unsolicited, noncontractual interference with the use that private people c…
Both the CIA and taxation happen to have literally funded the likes of FTX and Tether while protecting these criminal exchanges and centralized “backed” tokens from the very investigations that the unconstitutional three letter agencies are allegedly tasked with enforcing.
2nd Smartest Guy in the World- -FTX was a Democrat Money Laundering Operation with Wall Street Dark Money & PSYOP-19 "Pandemic" Ties
The story of the scam that was FTX is going to be epic when discovery takes place for all of the upcoming trials. In the meantime, here are some of the latest facts about this crypto Ponzi exchange: There is a lot more to this story, and it intersects with all of the usual Cult players, from BlackRock to the CIA to the WEF and various “nonprofit” slush fu…
The FTX collapse has incontrovertibly proven that all of my warnings and misgivings were correct.
It is now only a matter of time before Tether is blown up too, and that may be one of the causes and/or excuses for the global financial crash to end all crashes that will most conveniently be leveraged into ushering in the Great Reset.
https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fec1b8bdd-2a80-4221-a99f-32761b86d991_475x512.webp


Since FTX was laundering for the WEF, and FTX was directly involved with Tether, it then follows that the WEF was always tethered to Tether.
All of these centralized exchanges and tokens are just the latest One World Government money laundering setup.
And the payoff will be even more ingenious: the elimination of all centralized exchanges and tokens due to a sudden global “regulation” epiphany.
Of course, said “regulation” epiphany will then be aggressively enforced only after the max amount of money laundering and wealth extraction from all of the debt-slave tax donkey crypto investors suckers has taken place. We are almost at that inflection point. There are not many more rounds of crypto muppet slaying left.
And when the likes of the WEF, CIA, Democrat party and One World Government have determined that their centralized crypto scams are no longer effective, they will unleash regulations, 51% BTC attacks and wipe out the current crypto ecosystem exactly in the same manner that they will wipe out the wholly untenable global financial markets. This twin financial demolition will further strip the freedoms of humanity and usher in a global CBDC that will be inextricably tethered to the social credit score system, replete with CO2 monitoring and never-ending “vaccine” compliance.
Below is a must read expose on Tether and its ties to FTX, the CIA, and the One World Government:

https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F62e761c2-569d-4fd0-a145-dcb8d0cd490e_1718x938.jpeg


by revolver
Just days ago, Bloomberg estimated 30-year-old Sam Bankman-Fried’s (SBF) personal wealth at an astonishing $16 billion. Now, the disgraced FTX founder is essentially bankrupt, and if there is a shred of justice in the world, soon headed for prison.
The collapse of FTX and its founder is one of the most spectacular implosions in history. There is no shortage of narratives to mine for interesting article fodder. Celebrities like Tom Brady and his now ex-wife Gisele lost millions to the scam. Silicon Valley “smart money” that was hopelessly entranced by a wunderkind founder. SBF also used his filthy stolen lucre to become one of the largest donors in left-wing politics of the past four years. There’s also the FTX pet philosophy of “effective altruism,” the cult-like fad ideology of contemporary Silicon Valley that SBF exploited to conduct his fraud and justify taking enormous risks. There’s also the 28-year-old girlboss CEO of Alameda Research Caroline Ellison, who bragged that her vast financial empire only requires “elementary school math” to turn profits, and whose public list of turn-ons includes “controlling major world governments.”
Oh, and there’s also the group sex (don’t worry, everyone involved in this “polycule” situation is hideous).
https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F02a63326-1fa4-42f3-947e-ac31667627dc_641x380.jpeg


All of these storylines are being regurgitated ad nauseum by countless other media outlets. The story that Revolver is about to tell you is even bigger and more spectacular than all the other fascinating storylines listed above. In fact, dear reader, FTX may not even be the biggest scam in crypto. Another, even more spectacular scam may still be live, ready to collapse at any moment… if anyone decides to take a real look at it.
The story you’re about to hear concerns the third-largest crypto-currency on the planet, which you’ve probably never heard of. It is a story of how a former Disney child-actor — a Jeffrey Epstein associate who was embroiled in an under-age sex scandal — bizarrely emerged as one of the world’s strangest crypto-currency moguls. It is the story that raises serious questions as to whether an entire cryptocurrency is a scam — effectively a private money-printer. And to top it all off, there is reason to believe that if this cryptocurrency is the scam that it appears to be, it will nonetheless be allowed to continue because of this particular cryptocurrency’s usefulness to intelligence agencies in funneling money to foreign rebel groups and jihadis with plausible deniability.
Sound crazy? Sound interesting? Strap in, it’s about to get wild.
USDT, or Tether, is what is known as a “stablecoin.” A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency that, instead of fluctuating in value, is intended to hold to a consistent price. Tether is a USD stablecoin — each Tether is supposed to be equal in value to one U.S. dollar. While most cryptocurrencies are wildly speculative and backed by essentially nothing, each Tether is supposed to be backed directly by a U.S. dollar, or an extremely liquid, reliable investment like a U.S. treasury bond.
https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F05e2dff1-259f-4750-b134-dc34bd24eda9_1200x630.jpeg


These USD stablecoins are used on cryptocurrency exchanges to conduct on-the-blockchain trades in lieu of using actual U.S. dollars. Without stablecoins like Tether, the current crypto ecosystem simply would not exist. There are multiple USD stablecoins, but Tether is by far the most popular. According to coinmarketcap.com, Tether has the third highest market cap of any crypto currency at $66 billion, trailing only Bitcoin and Ethereum. Today, fully half of all bitcoin trades globally are executed using Tether.
A year ago, crypto news site Protos summarized Tether this way:
If cryptocurrency was an engine, Tether (USDT) is one of its pistons.
Over the past seven years, the maverick stablecoin has evolved into a primary crutch for the ecosystem. It’s a tool for onboarding new money, managing and growing liquidity, pricing digital assets, and generally oiling crypto markets to keep them smooth.
Tether boasted a $1 billion market capitalization when Bitcoin hit $20,000 at the end of 2017. This year, it’s a $70 billion-plus powerhouse.
Practically every crypto exchange supports USDT trade in some form. The makeup of Tether’s reserves and its inner workings are yet to be disclosed in clear detail.
Still, the question of who exactly buys Tether directly from its parent company Bitfinex has remained unanswered since its inception way back in 2014.
Earlier this year, Protos shed light on that mystery by reporting that just two companies, Alameda Research and Cumberland Global, were responsible for seeping roughly two-thirds of all Tether into the crypto ecosystem.
[Protos]
Did that last sentence set off any alarm bells? It should have. Alameda Research is the quantitative trading firm founded by Sam Bankman-Fried. Bankman-Fried and his partner in crime, Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison, allegedly propped up their trading firm by plundering FTX customer accounts.
The inner workings of Tether remain remarkably opaque. New Tethers are supposed to only be minted, and added to the crypto ecosystem, when somebody gives Tether Limited dollars to create them. And if that’s how it all worked, Tether would be fine.
But there is no evidence Tether actually works this way. We repeat: There is no proof that Tether stablecoins are backed by the store of tangible assets that is supposed to justify their value.
Despite first being released eight years ago, Tether has never been audited in any way. It first promised an audit in 2017…to, you know, happen eventually. How is that coming along? As reported by the WSJ, “Tether Says Audit Is Still Months Away as Crypto Market Falters”:
By Jean Eaglesham and Vicky Ge Huang
Updated Aug. 27, 2022 5:33 am ET

Tether is designed to grease the rails of the roughly $1 trillion cryptocurrency market by promising each token can be redeemed for $1. Market observers have long questioned whether the firm’s reserves are sufficient and have been demanding audited information.
The company has been promising an audit since at least 2017. An audit is “likely months” away, said Paolo Ardoino, chief technology officer of Tether Holdings Ltd., which issues the tether coin that recently carried a market value of $68 billion.
“Things are going slower than…we would like,” Mr. Ardoino said.
Instead of a full audit, Tether, like other leading stablecoins, publishes an “attestation” showing a snapshot of its reserves and liabilities, signed off by its accounting firm.
Audits are typically more thorough than other types of attestation. The attestations for some crypto companies sign off on the numbers provided by the company’s management for a specific date and time without testing the transactions before or after that date. That process can make the reports more vulnerable to being used to paint an unduly rosy picture.
A 2017 attestation of Tether was skewed by its sister company, Bitfinex, transferring $382 million to its bank account, hours before the accountants checked the numbers, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said last year.
[WSJ]
Take a moment to register that: In 2017, when Tether’s total market cap was still under $1 billion, it needed a last-minute transfer of $382 million just to sly its way through a non-audit attestation of its assets. This is ominously reminiscent of the accounting trick used by borrowers to obtain so-called “liar loans” in the run-up to the 2008 subprime mortgage crash.
That 2017 attestation, incidentally, led the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to fine Tether $41 million last year, without the company admitting any wrongdoing. Tether also paid an $18.5 million fine to New York state to settle claims that it misrepresented its reserves. The settlement forced Tether and its associated Bitfinex exchange to cease operations in New York. Crucially, though, none of these fines have fully exposed how Tether works, forced it to change its methods, or even compelled it to admit wrongdoing. Tether essentially made a political payoff, it seems, and moved on.
You know things are fishy when even legendary scammer Jordan Belfort calls you out:

It’s important to state what is happening if Tether is not actually backed by the dollars that it claims. If Tether Limited is pumping out new Tethers without actually taking in an equal amount of USD, then it is essentially a privately-run money printer.
Just manufacture new Tethers, pump them into a crypto exchange, use them to buy bitcoin, then sell the bitcoin for real U.S. dollars.
That would be, in the words of Dire Straits, “Money For Nothing”:

To avoid a Dire Straits situation, in other words, the whole system must place its faith in the unaudited pinky promise of Tether’s management team. So, what remarkable financier is behind this arrangement? What person of impeccable morals is helming Tether such that it commands so much importance in the global crypto ecosystem despite doing so little to merit confidence?
Say, anybody remember the Mighty Ducks movies?
https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9237cca6-d065-42ff-aa2b-5c3b38010a9b_540x810.jpeg


Or how about the Sinbad movie First Kid? Anybody ever catch that on The Disney Channel back in the day?

Meet Brock Pierce.
https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F486881f8-dde6-40c1-8cf9-c6935947d103_218x280.jpeg


In the early 90s, Pierce enjoyed a brief career as a child actor. But before even reaching legal adulthood, Pierce pivoted into a new career, which soon ended bizarrely:
In the trailer for First Kid, the forgettable 1996 comedy about a Secret Service agent assigned to protect the president’s son, the title character, played by a teenage Brock Pierce, describes himself as “definitely the most powerful kid in the universe.” Now, the former child star is running to be the most powerful man in the world, as an Independent candidate for President of the United States.
Before First Kid, the Minnesota-born actor secured roles in a series of PG-rated comedies, playing a young Emilio Estevez in The Mighty Ducks, before graduating to smaller parts in movies like Problem Child 3: Junior in Love. When his screen time shrunk, Pierce retired from acting for a real executive role: co-founding the video production start-up Digital Entertainment Network (DEN) alongside businessman Marc Collins-Rector. At age 17, Pierce served as its vice president, taking in a base salary of $250,000.
DEN became “the poster child for dot-com excesses,” raising more than $60 million in seed investments and plotting a $75 million IPO. But it turned into a shorthand for something else when, in October of 1999, the three co-founders suddenly resigned. That month, a New Jersey man filed a lawsuit alleging Collins-Rector had molested him for three years beginning when he was 13 years old. The following summer, three former DEN employees filed a sexual-abuse lawsuit against Pierce, Collins-Rector, and their third co-founder, Chad Shackley. The plaintiffs later dropped their case against Pierce (he made a payment of $21,600 to one of their lawyers) and Shackley. But after a federal grand jury indicted Collins-Rector on criminal charges in 2000, the DEN founders left the country. When Interpol arrested them in 2002, they said they had confiscated “guns, machetes, and child pornography” from the trio’s beach villa in Spain.
[The Daily Beast]
Pierce managed to get out of his Interpol jam that without being charged, and his strange path through life continued.
“Wait, is there somehow an Epstein connection here?” you might be wondering. Oh, you bet there is an Epstein connection here.
In early 2011, about a decade after the Digital Entertainment Network imploded, [Brock] Pierce visited the Virgin Islands to attend “Mindshift,” a conference of top scientists hosted by Epstein. A representative for Pierce says he didn’t even know who Epstein was when he flew (commercial) to the event, which the financier had arranged as part of his elaborate effort to launder his lurid reputation. It was not even 18 months after Epstein had completed his slap-on-the-wrist solicitation sentence in Florida and registered as a sex offender.

Nothing suggests that anything of a sexual nature or anything untoward at all occurred at Mindshift. Pierce is only one of dozens of figures in Epstein’s dizzyingly vast network, and the link between the two may be nothing but a curiosity. But it is a strange tale: how a former child actor who never went to college ended up as an Epstein guest — a seemingly unlikely addition to a group that included a NASA computer engineer, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and a Nobel laureate in theoretical physics. “I don’t know what he had to do with science [or] why he was there,” says one person who attended.
[Hollywood Reporter]
So, we have world’s third largest crypto currency, a stablecoin that has never been audited, founded by a washed up former child actor involved in a sex scandal with underaged minors that quietly dissipated without charges, who has prospered in crypto despite zero technical background, and who maintained a hard-to-explain connection to Jeffrey Epstein. But hey, Pierce says he hasn’t actually been involved with Tether since 2015. And maybe Pierce was just the “celebrity” face of the venture, and the other leaders have more legitimate background.
Tether’s CEO is Jean-Louis van der Velde:
The chief executive of Tether ran a company that faced a string of lawsuits in China over unpaid bills and fines for late tax payments before he helped launch the contentious stablecoin now at the heart of the crypto industry.
As crypto has moved from finance’s fringes to its mainstream, investors have increasingly relied on stablecoins, digital tokens backed by real-world assets, as a means to buy and sell volatile currencies such as bitcoin.
But as Tether’s role in the crypto universe has mushroomed since it was founded in 2014, with $78bn of its stablecoins now in circulation, so has scrutiny from regulators. The company’s rapid rise has also turned the spotlight on publicity-shy chief executive Jean-Louis van der Velde.
The 58-year-old Dutch native’s career, spanning IT sales in Hong Kong, Germany’s software industry and an ailing Chinese electronics manufacturer, gave few hints of the significant role he would later assume.

While US politicians race to gather more information on Tether, even some of the group’s biggest customers say they have had few dealings with its chief executive.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the chief executive of FTX, the Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange recently valued at $25bn, told the Financial Times earlier this year that he had only met van der Velde once in person.
“My sense is that he’s less involved in the external operations aspect of the business and more involved in internal management and leadership,” Bankman-Fried said. Another cryptocurrency executive who has had dealings with Tether’s management put it more bluntly: “I don’t know a lot about JL and most people don’t.”
[Financial Times]
Hmmm… oddly sparse. Well, how about Tether’s CFO, Giancarlo Devasini?
When Giancarlo Devasini first got into cryptocurrencies in 2012, his interests were distinctly small-time. He piped up on a popular Bitcoin forum to ask if anyone wanted to buy DVDs or CDs for 0.01 bitcoin each, then roughly 11 cents, promising free shipping for bulk orders.
Today, the 57-year-old is one of the most influential players in the global cryptocurrency marketplace. From his position as chief financial officer at Bitfinex, a major exchange, and at Tether, its sister currency which has tokens worth $60bn in circulation, industry executives say he is the key decision maker at two companies that now sit at the heart of the opaque daily flows of crypto money worth billions of dollars.

His first calling was as a plastic surgeon, although he quit the profession just two years out of university in 1992 after despairing at the job.
“All my work seemed like a scam, the exploitation of a whim,” he told an Italian art gallery in 2014. He recounted his particular frustration that one woman could not be talked out of reducing her breasts even though they “fit her perfectly”, as he put it.
As it turns out, “seemed like a scam” may be a fitting description of Devasini’s entire life.
The young doctor turned away from moulding flesh and embarked on a career dealing in electronics. He built a group of companies in Italy that, according to his Bitfinex profile page, and reiterated by Tether in response to questions from the FT, he grew to over €100m in revenue and which he says he sold shortly before the 2008 financial crisis.
Italian company documents cast his business background in a very different light. In 2007, Devasini’s business empire had revenues of just €12m and was subsequently dealt a deathblow by a devastating fire at Devasini’s warehouse and offices in February 2008. The parent company of the group, Solo, went into liquidation in June that year.

In 1996, not long after he had left medicine for business, he paid 100m lira — then around $65,000 — in a counterfeiting settlement with Microsoft. A decade later, in 2007, Toshiba sued another of his entities, Acme, for alleged infringement of its patents for DVD format specifications.

In March 2010, another of Devasini’s companies, a Monaco entity called Perpetual Action Group, was banned from Tradeloop, the online used-electronics marketplace. A month earlier, an American buyer had complained about $2,000 worth of memory chips they had bought from PAG. “[One] box was filled with a large block of wood,” the buyer claimed.
Tether says Devasini sold PAG in 2008 and was not involved with the company after that point, before clarifying that he began winding up the business in late 2009. Tradeloop’s forums in 2010 include messages showing Devasini dealing with the complaint, and messages from an associate saying Devasini had personally packed the boxes.
What an incredibly sketchy character! Is anybody willing to speak up in his defense?
For Bitfinex and Tether’s customers, [Devasini] is ever present.
“He’s responsive 24/7, and he’s not just responsive to crises or unbelievable opportunities, he’s responsive to day-to-day operations,” says Sam Bankman-Fried, the chief executive of FTX, a Hong-Kong based cryptocurrency exchange.

Bankman-Fried says Devasini has “a lot of pride” in what he has built at Bitfinex and Tether. “He’s really grateful for the people that supported him. He’s certainly fairly annoyed at people he sees as . . . shitting on his businesses without real reason for it.”
[Financial Times]
The funny thing about all of the above is that it’s all really obvious. Tether is apparently run by serial scammers. Its books aren’t open. It’s CEO and CFO refuse public interviews. The company’s unofficial spokesman is its CTO, who is just a developer.
If, as it turns out, Tether turns out to be the next FTX on steroids, the implications for the entire cryptocurrency project are existential. Tether is not just the third largest cryptocurrency in existence, its function as the dominant stable coin facilitating transactions means it is one of the major crutches upon which the entire crypto ecosystem stands.
For this reason, crypto experts tell Revolver that “true-believers” in crypto often turn a blind eye to the dark and damning questions surrounding Tether due to the implications this would have on the entire crypto project.
One crypto veteran we spoke to described the Tether situation in rather vivid terms.
“I have a soft spot for thinking kindly of crypto-libertarians, but they all go Ponzi Mindset when it comes to Tether,” he said. “In order to be congruent and confident in the future they need to believe Tether isn’t a burning bag of shit overlayed on top of a flaming diarrhetic volcano. Everything that in retrospect looks super shady and how-did-they-get-away-with-it-for-so-long for FTX is WNBA-tier compared to the 1994-Olympics Dream Team of Schemes that is Tether.”

That’s the defense of Tether from somebody who uses crypto: that Tether is an obvious scam, but with so much crypto speculation going on and so much short-term profit to be had, it’s better to just not think about it.
So, if Tether is so obviously shady, what might explain its stability even as the surrounding crypto ecosystem burns down? Some key fact is missing.
There is, for example, the strange coincidence of Tether being a crypto of choice for a U.S. government-backed rebels in Myanmar.
Myanmar’s shadow government said it would allow the use of the world’s largest stablecoin, Tether, as an official currency, potentially making it easier for it to raise funds and make payments.
The National Unity Government (NUG), which comprises pro-democracy groups and remnants of Myanmar’s civilian administration that was overthrown in a military coup earlier this year, has been seeking to raise funds for its “revolution” to topple the ruling military government.
The military government has outlawed the NUG and designated it a “terrorist” movement.
Tin Tun Naing, NUG’s minister in charge of planning, finance and investment, said in a December 11 Facebook post that the NUG would officially recognise USD Tether, which he said would enable better and faster transactions.
[Al Jazeera]
So it looks like US-backed paramilitary resistance funding is routed through Tether, causing pundits to ask: can stablecoins bankroll democracy?
https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb2ef61c7-6724-4e25-b7d3-3f7c1d5b3e11_892x740.jpeg


Pretty wild, huh? The al-Qaeda affiliated Sunni rebel groups of Syria also just so happen to love Tether.
… BitcoinTransfer is also at the heart of a network providing money to terror groups. In August 2020, the US Department of Justice revealed BitcoinTransfer had acted as a central hub in six terror-funding operations and called for the forfeiture of 155 cryptocurrency addresses linked to the exchange. Other research has also pointed to BitcoinTransfer’s jihadist connections.

BitcoinTransfer itself has processed 36 bitcoin – just over $2 million based on current prices – in 679 transfers since December 2018, according to Chainalysis, a blockchain analytics firm that assisted the US indictment reported last year. Maddie Kennedy, a spokesperson for Chainalysis, says the company has not detected any further funds being sent to addresses associated with BitcoinTransfer since the August indictment. But, in the same period, BitcoinTransfer has ramped up its operations and opened new branches in Idlib while also moving from bitcoin to a stablecoin called USD-Tether. Tether is a cryptocurrency pegged to the price of the US dollar and has the highest volume of any cryptocurrency in circulation.
BitcoinTransfer opened its first store in December 2018. As well as buying and selling cryptocurrency, it runs workshops teaching people how to trade. It opened its second branch in Sarmada, a town in the north of Idlib governorate, in October 2020.

[A] jihadi [Telegram] trading channel shared content about a range of cryptocurrencies, including Avalanche, Cardano, Fantom, Litecoin and 1INCH, among others. A message sent to the group on March 11 appeared to be soliciting donations to supply Muslim refugees with cryptocurrency wallets and Tether. It linked a Tether address associated with the Tron blockchain. Soliciting charity is a common pattern in jihadi fundraising campaigns. In many cases, crowdfunding campaigns were military operations posing as charities – phenomena referenced in the Department of Justice indictment and that has been widely documented throughout the civil war.
[Wired UK]
The US Government’s history of backing of al-qaeda linked Sunni rebel groups in Syria has always been vexing and complicated. Remember the infamous Wikileaks-released email in which Hillary Clinton acknowledged Al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria? If only there were a mechanism to quietly launder money to these US backed groups with deniability!
https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb6e85555-3c24-4a38-b358-4a4b14165eaa_1262x1546.jpeg


Tether is not just the cryptocurrency of choice for US-backed rebel groups. It has also become a favorite of drug cartels, which, according to some journalists, are deeply intertwined with U.S. three-letter agencies, including the CIA.
Twitter avatar for @DarrenJBeattie

Darren J. Beattie 🌐 @DarrenJBeattie
"Is the CIA working with the Cartels?"

5:41 PM ∙ Oct 12, 2022
 

FTX: CLOSE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM, FAVORED CRYPTO EXCHANGE OF THE UKRAINIAN GOVERNMENT, LOOKS LIKE MONEY-LAUNDERING OPERATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE AND THE LOCKDOWN LOBBY​

Published: November 20, 2022

Link: https://www.blacklistednews.com/art...favored-crypto-exchange-of-the-ukrainian.html

SOURCE: CRYPTOGON

Anything else?
Via: Brownstone Institute:
A series of revealing texts and tweets by Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced CEO of FTX, the once high-flying but now belly-up crypto exchange, had the following to say about his image as a do-gooder: it is a “dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”
Very interesting. He had the whole game going: a vegan worried about climate change, supports every manner of justice (racial, social, environmental) except that which is coming for him, and shells out millions to worthy charities associated with the left. He also bought plenty of access and protection in D.C., enough to make his shady company the toast of the town.
As part of the mix, there is this thing called pandemic planning.

That’s right: there were deep connections between FTX and Covid that have been cultivated for two years. Let’s have a look.
Earlier this year, the New York Times trumpeted a study that showed no benefit at all to the use of Ivermectin. It was supposed to be definitive. The study was funded by FTX. Why? Why was a crypto exchange so interested in the debunking of repurposed drugs in order to drive governments and people into the use of patented pharmaceuticals, even those like Remdesivir that didn’t actually work? Inquiring minds would like to know.

David Henderson and Charles Hooper further point out an interesting fact: “Some of the researchers involved in the TOGETHER trial had performed paid services for Pfizer, Merck, Regeneron, and AstraZeneca, all companies involved in developing COVID-19 therapeutics and vaccines that nominally compete with ivermectin.”
For some reason, SBF just knew that he was supposed to oppose repurposed drugs, though he knew nothing about the subject at all. He was glad to fund a poor study to make it true and the New York Times played its assigned role in the whole performance.
It was just the start. A soft-peddling Washington Post investigation found that Sam and his brother Gabe, who ran a hastily founded Covid nonprofit, “have spent at least $70 million since October 2021 on research projects, campaign donations and other initiatives intended to improve biosecurity and prevent the next pandemic.”
 

The Keystone of Corruption: Ukraine, the FTX Scandal, PrivatBank, the National Bank of Ukraine and Ihor Kolomoyskyi​


Link: https://politicalmoonshine.substack.com/p/the-keystone-of-corruption-ukraine-888

The Keystone of Corruption [second part]:Clear evidence now indicates FTX/Sam Bankman-Fried has ripped off countless people to fund the Democrats' demolition of America​


Political Moonshine
Nov 14




Yesterday’s article entitled The Keystone of Corruption: Ukraine and the FTX Scandal expanded on a mountain of Moonshine work into Ukraine that draws back to 2018 and earlier; even before Moonshine existed and with the work being published at a different website. That article enveloped the FTX scandal that now evidences the now certain Ukrainian money laundering operation that was used to fund the stolen 2022 midterm elections.
Unsurprisingly, the Democratic party was the beneficiary of those funds.

As stated in that succinct article, which is necessary contextual backdrop to what follows,
The corruption is massive and I’ve contended that the Democrats had rigged the global energy sector; not just the one in Ukraine. Moreover, I’ve also contended that the bulk of the corruption is funneling through Ukraine such that it’s serving as the laundering mechanism for it all. That’s what I believe is really happening.Political Moonshine on 01 Jan 20
Political Moonshine on 01 Jan 20
The Moonshine work into Ukraine goes down a primary vector of money laundering operations with the energy sector being the plausible and evidenced conduit. In this exclusive piece from 01 Jun 21 entitled Follow the Money, I wade through a massive but incomplete volume of information and evidence to make the case.
Respective to the timeline and because all of the constructs of enterprise fraud that underpin the deliberate destruction and demolition of the United States – all by design – are reciprocal in their service to one another, we are reminded of illegitimate U.S. President Joe Biden’s highly anomalous, already evidenced and guaranteed to be illegal increase in personal wealth respective to the enterprise fraud construct of the COVID-19 “pandemic.” This is old Moonshine:


We are also reminded of the nebulous nature of all the nexuses representing the lanes and intersections for corruption and crimes that include money laundering operations. This, too, is old Moonshine:


What is not included in the above schematic or broader work, which should be, is PrivatBank: “Established in 1992, AS PrivatBank is a credit institution registered in the Republic of Latvia. Paid-in share capital of AS PrivatBank amounts to 86 349 556 EUR (the decision No. 6-12/38217/1 of the Register of Enterprises of the Republic of Latvia dated 11.03.2016 on registration of the changes in the AS PrivatBank share capital). FCMC license No. 06.01.04.016/219 for credit institution’s activities issued 31.07.1992.” [SOURCE]
PrivatBank was one of the first banks to introduce digital banking [online] and was the first in the nation to align with Google Pay and Apple Pay [CIA and China.]
According to a press release on PrivatBank’s website, “The Financial and Capital Markets Commission has authorised Industra Bank to take over PrivatBank’s customer services and most of its assets and liabilities. The transition will be implemented on 20 August 2022.” We note that the transfer was complete prior to the elections.
Industra Bank is also Latvian. Industra’s information on the transfer of Ukrainian accounts to it can be found here.


Further untangling the PrivatBank and Industra Bank relationship is left for another time due to time and space limitations and noting that a precursory examination reveals that there is much to examine.
A report from the the U.S. Department of Justice provides critical contextual backdrop for the underlying foundation to everything we are examining including direct overlays in the energy sector as I’ve already examined and indicated. This is the historical backdrop that will envelop the rest and right through to cryptocurrency, FTX, the Democratic Party and the 2022 midterms.
‘Over the past 20 years, Ukraine has experienced a form of development referred to as oligarchic pluralism. Many businessmen who amassed huge fortunes buying up mines and factories privatised cheaply after the fall of the Soviet Union have gone into politics. Oil and gas traders have become ministers or heads of major institutions. Former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a leading figure in the 2004 Orange Revolution who was held up in the West as a martyr when she was imprisoned in 2011, made a fortune in the gas industry. A revolving door has developed between business and politics. Some powerful businessmen have played a more discreet role by financing the campaigns of politicians whom they expect to represent their interests. This system, which became the accepted way of doing things under President Leonid Kuchma (1994-2005), assumes constant reconfiguration shaped by the competing interests of the powerful, and their alliances and feuds…
[…]
In acquiring the Odessa refinery, Kurchenko went into competition with Ihor Kolomoyskyi, Ukraine’s third wealthiest man and a major player in the oil market. “The competition was unfair,” journalist Anna Babinets said, “because Kurchenko enjoyed the support of the regime…
In 2016 Ukraine’s international partners supported the decision of the government and the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) to nationalize PrivatBank, at the request of former owners, as the only effective method of protecting the bank’s depositors – the Ukrainian people and businesses – and the stability of the financial system.
Department of Justice Report citing work from published by Le Monde Diplomatique in April 2014


The U.S. Embassy in Ukraine issued this statement pertaining to PrivatBank on 18 Apr 19 [emphasis added]:
In 2016 Ukraine’s international partners supported the decision of the government and the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) to nationalize PrivatBank, at the request of former owners, as the only effective method of protecting the bank’s depositors – the Ukrainian people and businesses – and the stability of the financial system. While this required the injection of about UAH 160 billion in Ukrainian taxpayer funds to restore the bank’s solvency, it secured PrivatBank’s long-term viability, safeguarded the money of millions of Ukrainian citizens, and strengthened the country’s economic health. In light of this, we welcome the reform of Privatbank’s corporate governance, led by an independent Supervisory Board, and the transformation of its business model, which has already resulted in stronger performance and sustainability of the entire banking system. We continue to support the efforts of the NBU to reform Ukraine’s financial sector, including by introducing prudent corporate governance principles, and the Ministry of Finance’s efforts to reform corporate governance in state-owned banks. It is important that the authorities continue their efforts to recover losses from former owners and related parties of failed banks. Ukraine’s international partners will be closely monitoring developments in this area.
U.S. Embassy in Ukraine
We latch onto the 2016 timeline.
What do we know about Ukraine relative to this time?

It’s an old Moonshine topic. In 2014 moving into 2015, the Obama White House including the cohort of Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Victoria Nuland engaged in a color revolution that aligned with the Azov Battalion, which is a patently neo-Nazi military outfit that is directly enmeshed in the current Russia/Ukraine matter that I’ve written a series of articles on that currently stands at 83 deep. That color revolution went down a political continuum that eventually delivered the current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. As long evidenced and contended, he’s their guy.
With PrivatBank nationalized, it becomes an asset of state-ownership for Ukraine. By conducting a color revolution and coup d’etat in Ukraine, the U.S. functionally installed it own point man for Ukraine and PrivatBank. Recall that every Ukrainian president in opposition to Ukraine joining NATO has been promptly dispatched by the U.S. and the Western Empire. The entire series of 83 articles on Ukraine details and evidences this.
This is imperative to understand for several reasons including but not limited to: NATO serving as the agitator and provocateur that continues to encircle Russia thus threatening its sovereignty and national security and Metabiota, which connects the Bidens to U.S. Department of Defense biolabs in Ukraine that directly overlap the enterprise fraud construct of the COVID-19 “pandemic.”
We latch onto the National Bank of Ukraine, Ihor Kolomoyskyi [noting that several iterations of his name are found in the reporting] and PrivatBank and their intricately woven relationships that extend out to others.
Consider the following reporting on Kolomoyskyi and noting the topical and timeline overlays [emphasis added]:
As investigators and authorities now know, one of the most notorious oligarchs out of the former Soviet space oversaw a trans-national money laundering scheme of historic proportions – and used places like Cleveland, in addition to a number of other small towns across the American Midwest, to hide and launder hundreds of millions of dollars.
With no one paying attention, this oligarch, a Ukrainian national named Ihor Kolomoisky, steered one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in world history, and ended up becoming one of the biggest real estate landlords in mid-west America.
[…]
Emerging in newly independent Ukraine, Kolomoisky followed a range of other oligarchs around the region, pocketing formerly state-owned enterprises like steel plants to gas wells at fire-sale prices.
[…]
By the mid-2010s, Kolomoisky was one of the most powerful figures in Ukraine. The oligarch even grew his portfolio to oversee one of Ukraine’s biggest banks, PrivatBank, refashioning himself as a steward of Ukraine’s finance sector. In the aftermath of Ukraine’s 2014 EuroMaidan Revolution, when Russian troops first began pushing into Ukraine, the oligarch then refashioned himself into a supporter of Ukrainian statehood.
[…]
Bankrolling a new militia in central Ukraine, the oligarch said in the third person, ‘A large number of people think Kolomoisky’s great – and the only patriot in the country.’
The Spectator
Who funded the neo-Nazi Azov battalion respective to the aforementioned Ukrainian regime change efforts and the current ongoing matter with Russia?
It was none other than Kolomoyskyi.



More from The Spectator [emphasis added]:
When a new government rose in Kyiv…new reformers swept into power…And when they began looking into PrivatBank’s books…Billions were missing.
Immediately, the government rushed a $5.5-billion bailout to PrivatBank, trying to patch this gaping hole in one of the country’s biggest banks. And then they began looking for the disappeared funds – and discovering the money buried in places they never expected, like Cleveland.
As both Ukrainian investigators and American authorities have detailed, Kolomoisky allegedly oversaw a multi-year, multi-national money laundering scheme meant to loot billions from unsuspecting Ukrainian depositors. On paper, PrivatBank made it seem that a wide range of loans were being fully repaid. In reality, though, those loans never came back to the bank – but instead ended up in entities overseen directly by Kolomoisky. Using shell companies and offshore accounts, much of that money ended up in the US.
The funds ended up in office buildings in Cleveland and Texas.
It ended up in steel mills in Kentucky and West Virginia. It ended up in manufacturing plants in Michigan and Illinois. Small towns, steel towns, factory towns – the money Kolomoisky allegedly pilfered ended up drenching blue-collar America.
According to those on the receiving end of the funds, Kolomoisky’s network pledged the money would be used for new investments, for the kinds of economic revitalization the region had long needed. Years later, it was clear that revitalization would never come.
The Spectator
This is why we follow the money. Here, it makes sense to start in Cleveland, Texas, Kentucky, West Virginia, Michigan and Illinois to follow that money upstream and downstream; perhaps to beneficiaries of donations. Perhaps these U.S. beneficiaries – the [shell?] companies and corporations in receipt of Kolomoyskyi’s funding, made donations to the campaigns of Democrats.
I’d like to pull on that entire string but we don’t have the time or space to do it here. We do have time for this published 14 Dec 20: Ukraine Oligarch’s Troubled US Steel Plant Has Been Quietly Mining Bitcoin: Report, “The Kentucky-based CC Metals & Alloys steel plant owned by Ukrainian billionaire Ihor Kolomoisky is mining bitcoin as other activities have stopped, according to a report.” This sets the table for cryptocurrency respective to our broader examination.
Forbe’s summarizes Kolomoyskyi succinctly [1-6 quoted directly from the source]:
  1. With fellow Ukrainian billionaire Henadiy Boholyubov, Ihor Kolomoyskyy founded PrivatBank in the early 1990s.
  2. He served as the governor of his native Dnipro region from March 2014 until March 2015, when he was fired by then-president Petro Poroshenko.
  3. In 2016, Ukraine’s government nationalized PrivatBank, after an investigation suggested large-scale fraud over a period of ten years.
  4. In Dec 2017, the High Court of London ordered a freeze on some $2.5 billion worth of assets held by Kolomoyskyy and Boholyubov.
  5. Kolomoyskyy was sanctioned by the U.S. State Department in March 2021 for corruption under his watch at the Dnipro region.
  6. An ally of President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose “Servant of the People” TV show once ran on Kolomoyskyy’s TV network, Kolomoyskyy has been quiet since Putin invaded.
Vis-a-vis Kolomoyskyi, we latch onto Petro Poroshenko.
Petro Poroshenko was Ukraine’s 5th president serving from 2014-2019 and is a central node to the entirety of Ukrainian matters
; including the aforementioned color revolution.
It was the call to Poroshenko that served as the basis for President Trump’s first impeachment once the impeachment was transitioned from fraudulent “Russian collusion.”
It was a call to Poroshenko from Joe Biden when Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. aid to the nation if the prosecutor into the Hunter Biden/Burisma matter were not replaced.
Critically, Poroshenko was a proponent Ukraine’s inclusion in NATO, began the process of Ukraine joining the European Union and from 2007-2012, he headed the Council for the National Bank of Ukraine, which came to oversee the nationalization of PrivatBank. Poroshenko has also previously served as the Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2009-2010, thus putting him in bed with Hillary Clinton, who served as Secretary of State from 2009-2013.
Poroshenko also served as the Minister of Trade and Economic Development in 2012. Reverting back to Follow the Money and the Moonshine energy sector work, this fully envelops the Biden’s and Burisma.
When did the Bidens begin their inroads into Ukraine with Burisma?

It was in 2012 when Poroshenko was the Minister of Trade and Economic Development. It all fell under Poroshenko’s purview. Poroshenko knows where all of the bodies are buried, so to speak. The following images are extracted from the Marco Polo report on the Biden laptop:











As overlapping the Obama/Biden/Clinton/Kerry/Nuland coup d’etat and color revolution in Ukraine that eventually led to Zelensky’s ascension to the Ukrainian presidency, who was it that made that possible? Kolomoyskyi.
Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s now President, would not be where he is today without Kolomoisky. As an actor and entertainer, Zelensky had worked for Kolomoisky’s media network — which then gave him form support when he stood as a candidate. Zelensky was seen as the Kolomoisky candidate: he appointed one of Kolomoisky’s lawyers as an adviser, and held meetings with the controversial oligarch even as he campaigned as the ‘anti-oligarch’. In early 2021, Zelensky reportedly breached his own Covid lockdown rules to have a birthday party in Kolomoisky’s Kyiv apartment.
The Spectator
As you can see, this deeply enmeshed and entangled rat’s nest is “all in the family.”
With this backdrop under our belts, we extend the examination further into cryptocurrency and then onto the startling revelations detailed in yesterday’s article which are recapitulated by this image:


*Image source
We begin here with this 19 Mar 22 press release:
Ukraine’s largest bank in terms of assets, Privatbank, has prohibited its clients from transferring funds in Ukrainian hryvnia, the national fiat currency, to exchanges trading cryptocurrencies. The temporary ban has been introduced on March 16.
According to a statement, quoted by the crypto news outlet Forklog, the measure stems from a resolution issued by the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) on Feb. 24, the day when Russia launched its military invasion of the country.
Although it does not specifically mention crypto-related transactions, the document regulates the operation of the banking system under martial law and introduces stricter rules for bank operations. For example, cash withdrawals were limited to 100,000 hryvnia (approx. $3,400) daily and the hryvnia’s exchange rate was fixed.
Bitcoin.com
At the same general time and as indicated in yesterday’s article, FTX enters the picture respective to cryptocurrency, Ukraine and the Russia/Ukraine matter noting the National Bank of Ukraine and its established ties to Poroshenko, Zelensky and by default, Kolomoyskyi:
The Ukrainian government launched a new crypto donations website on Monday, streamlining its multimillion-dollar effort to turn bitcoin into bullets, bandages and other war materiel.
Aid for Ukraine,” which has the backing of crypto exchange FTX, staking platform Everstake and Ukraine’s Kuna exchange, will route donated crypto to the National Bank of Ukraine
, Everstake’s Head of Growth Vlad Likhuta told CoinDesk. Ukraine’s crypto-savvy Ministry of Digital Transformation is also involved.
The country’s collective efforts have already raised some $48 million in bitcoin (BTC), DOT, ether (ETH), SOL, tether (USDT) and other cryptocurrencies, according to the website. Other estimates place the amount closer to $100 million, but totals vary with market swings and exactly which websites are included.
CoinDesk
A succinct 21-point list recapitulates the findings and enmeshment of FTX as presented in yesterday’s article and now we expand on that with new and augmenting evidence.
Some have questioned the legitimacy of the original claims and work due to a lack of reliable and redundant resources. That hurdle has been cleared. Consider the following from the New York Post respective to FTX and it’s former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried:
Amid all the jubilation and gloating by Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer and pals over the Democrats’ better-than-expected showing in the midterms comes a disturbing story that may explain something about how they won such a curious election.
Biden’s second-biggest donor, cryptocurrency billionaire wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried, a k a SBF, saw his business file for bankruptcy days after the election, but not before pumping $40 million into the Democratic Party to spend on “get-out-the-vote” and other shadowy ballot-harvesting mechanics for the midterms.
[…]
A more unlikely billionaire you could not find — and of course his money was built on thin air. A math genius with poor social skills, SBF reportedly lived in a “polycule” — a polyamorous relationship with multiple people — in a luxury penthouse with about 10 co-workers in the tax haven of the Bahamas, where his collapsed crypto exchange FTX was headquartered.
[…]
Now Reuters is reporting that between $1 billion and $2 billion of customer funds have vanished from FTX, conveniently after the Democrats safely spent his money.
At last report, SBF and his mysterious co-founder, Gary Wang, were being held “under supervision” by Bahamian authorities after reportedly planning to flee to Dubai, according to fintech publication Cointelegraph.
[…]
He was the most famous millennial adherent of a cult known as “Effective Altruism,” which originated at Oxford University, found fertile ground in Silicon Valley — and now has gone down in flames along with him.
EA is a disguised form of socialism, because all the “good” that is done just happens to match up perfectly with the left’s obsessions, whether climate change, social justice, equity, banning meat or his favorite, “pandemic preparedness.”
[…]
SBF certainly “impacted” the midterms, funneling his millions into the Democratic National Committee and Democrat-friendly PACs such as Protect Our Future and Guarding Against Pandemics.
He donated to committees aligned with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer
to help Democrats win races.
He lavished his largesse on “pro-crypto Democrats” like New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who was sponsoring a bill to lock the Securities and Exchange Commission out of regulating the crypto market.
He also visited the White House, meeting with top Biden adviser Steve Ricchetti on April 22 and May 12, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
No wonder the Biden administration has been weak on regulating the crypto market. It was the goose that laid the golden egg.
[…]
The sinister neo-socialists at the World Economic Forum (WEF) loved SBF so much, they made FTX a “corporate partner” — but that page on the WEF website has vanished in the last 48 hours, leaving an error message.
Venture capital firm Sequoia was a big backer, investing over $200 million in SBF, a lot of which he then invested back in Sequoia, whose chairman and managing partner Michael Moritz is a big donor to the Dems as well as to anti-Trump hate group the Lincoln Project, and reportedly is a neighbor of Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco.
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried in the Bahamas as customers’ billions go missing in company collapse
Six weeks ago, Sequoia hired a freelance writer, Adam Fisher, to write a puff piece on SBF, depicting him as a “future trillionaire … I don’t know how I know, I just do. SBF is a winner … I couldn’t shake the feeling that this guy is actually as selfless as he claims to be.”
The article, which was replaced on Sequoia’s website over the weekend with a somber note to investors, describes how SBF wowed Seqouia’s partners into giving him $1 billion during a Zoom meeting throughout which he played multiplayer online video game League of Legends.
The New York Post
Pause for a second and scroll back up to the second Moonshine graphic at the top. Do you see Sequoia? Like I said, a rat’s nest.
The Reuters article referenced by the NYP summarizes Bankman-Fried in already familiar and evidenced fashion [1-5 is quoted directly from the article]:
  1. FTX founder Bankman-Fried secretly moved $10 billion in funds to trading firm Alameda – sources
  2. Bankman-Fried showed spreadsheets to colleagues that revealed shift in funds to Alameda – sources
  3. Spreadsheets indicated between $1 billion and $2 billion in client money is unaccounted for – sources
  4. Executives set up book-keeping “back door” that thwarted red flags – sources
  5. Whereabouts of missing funds is unknown – sources
It’s clear for Americans to see if they will simply remove their heads from places the sun does not shine:
  1. A pandemic was faked to steal an election
  2. An election was stolen to remove a sitting U.S. president
  3. A second election was stolen to preserve power
  4. A plan is being executed to systematically destruct and destroy the United States [Cloward-Piven]
Clear evidence now indicates that a manipulated, doughboy, nerd who is clearly on the spectrum for autism, Asperger’s or something similar, has ripped off countless innocent and perhaps not so innocent people to fund America’s destruction with a money laundering operation threading through one of two epicenters of Joe Biden’s corruption – Ukraine – and right into the pockets of Democrats and traitors. And it appears to all be made possible, at least in-part, by someone few people know about: Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi.
Moonshine had Ukraine exclusively dialed on money laundering drawing back to no later than 2018. We’ll continue to report on this story as it continues to develop.
*Thank you to members of Marco Polo for their contributions to this article.



-End-
 

It's who you know: The intricate web linking FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, Dems and DC establishment​

Calls to hold FTX and its now-disgraced founder accountable continue to mount, but it remains to be seen whether Bankman-Fried's political donations and connections can help him avoid maximum punishment.

Link: https://justthenews.com/accountabil...-bankman-fried-and?utm_source=justthenews.com

By Aaron Kliegman
Updated: November 21, 2022 - 11:27pm
The collapse of cryptocurrency giant FTX has revealed an intricate web of donations and connections to the country's political establishment — Democrats and Republicans, regulators and academics — centered around the company's now-bankrupt founder, Sam Bankman-Fried.
This extensive network, held together through political donations and personal relationships, exposes potential conflicts of interest in the coming investigations into Bankman-Fried and has raised questions about whether the former crypto mogul will be held accountable for alleged wrongdoing.
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), for example, has been pictured meeting with Bankman-Fried on multiple past occasions, both smiling with their arms around each other. She also traveled in April to the Bahamas, where FTX is based and Bankman-Fried lives, to discuss cryptocurrency among other agenda items. In December, she appeared to blow a kiss at Bankman-Fried as he was leaving the Capitol building after testifying before Congress.
Last week, Waters announced the House Financial Services Committee, which she chairs, will hold a bipartisan hearing next month to investigate the collapse of FTX and the broader consequences for the digital assets marketplace.
Nine members of the committee — seven Democrats and two Republicans — received a collective total of over $300,000 in political contributions from Bankman-Fried and others at FTX, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Waters was asked if Democrats who received campaign cash from FTX should give it back. "Well, I don't want to get into that," she told Fox Business. "As a matter of fact, both sides, Democrats and Republicans, have received donations. So, thank you."
House Oversight and Reform Committee member Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), meanwhile, argues that FTX's high-dollar political donations were to wield influence.
"The oversight committee is to root out fraud and abuse — this is one of them," he told the "Just the News, No Noise" television show on Monday. "Yes, it should have had a red flag on all the dollars going in."
After the GOP takes control of the House in January, the committee plans to aggressively investigate FTX's implosion, Norman confirmed. "It's pretty unbelievable what happened," he said. "And you know, for [Bankman-Fried] to do this — we're going to get into that again and try to find out who's involved, try to get some records, and try to unravel it because it's a tremendous loss to the taxpayers."
An estimated one million FTX customers and other investors are facing combined losses worth billions of dollars due to alleged misuse of the money by company leadership. A recently filed court document showed FTX owes its 50 biggest creditors nearly $3.1 billion.

Waters and Norman's committee colleagues were hardly the only ones to whom Bankman-Fried and fellow FTX executives donated.
Bankman-Fried was the second biggest Democrat donor (trailing only George Soros) and sixth biggest individual donor of the 2022 midterm elections, giving about $40 million to candidates and outside groups, according to OpenSecrets.org.
FTX, meanwhile, was the third largest contributor, with Bankman-Fried, co-CEO Ryan Salame and Director of Engineering Nishad Singh pouring $70 million into the midterms.
Bankman-Fried has insisted his contributions were benign and not meant to influence lawmakers or federal regulators. Critics have countered the money was meant to buy political clout.
Taking into account past elections, Bankman-Fried has donated more than $46 million in total, the vast majority of which has gone to Democrat candidates and liberal groups, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets. Salame gave $23 million, all to Republicans and conservative groups, while Singh contributed $14 million, all to Democrats and liberal groups.
Between the three, an estimated $57 million went to Democrat candidates and groups, while roughly $22 million went to Republican candidates and groups.
Bankman-Fried gave to a bevy of Democrats, from Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) to Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.). His biggest donation by far this election cycle was $27 million to Protect Our Future PAC, a Democrat group.
Plenty of Republicans also received his money, including Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). His biggest right-wing check was a $105,000 check to the Alabama Conservatives Fund. Salame, meanwhile, gave $2.5 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, which is connected to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
In 2020, Bankman-Fried gave more than $5 million to Joe Biden's presidential campaign.
Following the shocking collapse of FTX, many lawmakers have said they'll give their money from the crypto exchange to charity.
FTX had been one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges until it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protections earlier this month. Bankman-Fried, who had been a billionaire, also filed for bankruptcy and resigned as CEO.
"Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here," wrote newly appointed FTX CEO John Ray in a court filing. "From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated, and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented."
The companies' total liabilities are estimated at more than $10 billion.
Bankman-Fried is facing allegations that he secretly transferred billions of dollars from FTX to another one of his firms, Alameda Research, which also filed for bankruptcy. He hasn't been charged with a crime, but Fox Business correspondent Charles Gasparino reported that the Manhattan U.S. Attorney is looking to prepare charges by the end of the year over the FTX scandal following disclosures of SBF's alleged misuse of customer funds. Legal experts told Axios that the main criminal risk facing SBF is fraud charges.
The Justice Department, Securities and Exchange Commission, and Commodity Futures Trading Commission are all investigating the collapse, according to multiple reports.
As the alleged wrongdoing was happening, Bankman-Fried wasn't the only one with his last name to give big money to politicians. His parents, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried (both Stanford law professors), and brother Gabe Bankman-Fried gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democrat candidates and actively worked with left-wing organizations, Fox News reported.
Until last week, Barbara Fried led Mind the Gap, a group that helped raise significant sums of money for Democrats, receiving funding from Silicon Valley. She reportedly resigned from her post in the aftermath of her son's own resignation.
Joseph Bankman, meanwhile, drafted and endorsed tax legislation for Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Another striking connection concerns Sam Bankman-Fried's ex-girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, who ran Alameda Research. Her father, Glenn Ellison, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, worked with Gensler when they both taught at MIT.
Critics have lambasted Gensler, a former campaign finance chair for Hillary Clinton, for not spotting trouble with FTX earlier than its final collapse this month.
"It's not like there were no warnings that something funny may have been going on at the empire of Bankman-Fried," wrote John Berlau, senior fellow and director of finance policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. "Short seller Marc Cohodes tweeted on August 1, tagging the SEC, that 'something is very wrong at FTX.' Cohodes also told the Hedgeye TV webcast on October 11: 'Nothing here fits. Everything reads like it's a complete scam. This thing is dirty and rotten to the core.' Given short sellers' track record of predicting implosions at Enron, the subprime mortgage market, Chinese stocks, (and now possibly ESG-themed companies), the SEC should have given these warnings its clear attention."
Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) tweeted that "reports to [his] office allege" Gensler was "helping" FTX and Bankman-Fried "work on legal loopholes to obtain a regulatory monopoly." Emmer's office didn't respond to an inquiry to elaborate.
When asked on CNBC earlier this month about the FTX implosion, Gensler pointed his finger at the crypto community more broadly, saying, "This is a field that is significantly noncompliant" with SEC rules.
Berlau accused Gensler's SEC of being distracted by "woke agenda items" and "apparently neglecting its core function of investor protection from fraud and deception."
Despite all that's happened in the last two weeks, Bankman-Fried is still trying to secure a multibillion dollar deal to bail out FTX.
"I think we should be trying to get as much value to users as possible," he told CNBC. "I hate what happened and deeply wish that I had been more careful."
Bankman-Fried has been vocal since declaring bankruptcy, posting on social media that he's "sorry" and "should have done better." He's also reached out to a couple journalists for interviews, saying "it could be worse" and he "didn't want to do sketchy stuff."
Meanwhile, Bankman-Fried was scheduled as of late last week to speak at an exclusive conference hosted by the New York Times alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and other prominent figures.
The DealBook Summit, sponsored by Accenture, will be held at Jazz at Lincoln Center in Manhattan on Nov. 30, and the fee to attend is $2,499, according to DealBook Summit's website.
The New York Times didn't respond to an inquiry to determine whether Bankman-Fried is still scheduled to speak.
 

NEW FTX FILING PULLS BACK THE CURTAIN ON SAM BANKMAN-FRIED’S MASSIVE INFLUENCE-PEDDLING OPERATION​

Link: https://theintercept.com/2023/01/30/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-lobbying-pr/?utm_medium=email

A bankruptcy filing revealed new information about how the crypto exchange spent money on consultants, think tanks, and business relationships.​

Lee FangKen KlippensteinDaniel Boguslaw
Lee Fang, Ken Klippenstein, Daniel Boguslaw
January 30 2023, 4:19 p.m.

A FILING IN FTX’s bankruptcy proceedings is shedding light on the true extent of the crypto-trading powerhouse’s influence-peddling operation. Last week, FTX filed its creditor matrix, a document that lists former vendors and investors to the company.
The list includes nearly a dozen public relations experts — specialists who generate positive spin in the media on behalf of clients — as well as political consultants, think tanks, and trade groups.
Sometimes, the money went directly to political operations; Majority Forward, a dark-money group designed to elect Senate Democrats, received cash. In some cases, the hired guns, such as PR firms, were paid directly for their services. In others, the groups that received donations maintain that they are independent, but had interests aligned with FTX.
The filing, for instance, listed a donation to the Center for a New American Security, a prominent national security-focused think tank in Washington, D.C., that has worked to shape crypto regulations.

The filing offered a look under the hood of FTX’s intricate maze of influence. On the heels of its meteoric rise as a crypto exchange, FTX quickly began to spend extraordinary amounts of money to buy prestige and friends in high places. Now that the firm stands accused of siphoning off billions of its investors’ dollars — with its disgraced founder Sam Bankman-Fried charged with fraud in the matter — increased scrutiny is falling on powerbrokers’ dealings with FTX.
The relationships of many of the entities listed in the bankruptcy filing and FTX were already known — the company complied with lobbying disclosures for some of its consultants — but the creditor matrix shows the crypto giant also retained several previously undisclosed professional influence peddlers.
One seasoned political hand tied to FTX without any disclosures is former New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson. His firm, Cojo Strategies, is featured in the FTX vendor list. Another is Susan McCue, a former aide to Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., who has advised many Senate Democrats and played a role in the leadership of several Democratic super PACs and dark-money outfits. Her firm, Message Global, is in the filing.
Other consulting firms with a finger on the pulse of power are sprawled through the creditor matrix, which runs over 116 pages. Another creditor, Patomak Global Partners, a firm that specializes in influencing financial regulators, is led by Paul Atkins, a former Securities and Exchange commissioner. Atkins’s company touts its roster of former government officials as providing “a telescope to anticipate trends on the horizon to help position our clients for long-term success.” (Neither Johnson, McCue, nor Patomak responded to requests for comment.)

Think Tank Crypto Regulations​

The donation to CNAS — a powerful think tank with ties to both political parties but known for staffing national security roles in Democratic administrations — came at a time when the organization advocated for crypto regulations with a light touch.
“To compete in the digital-economy race with China, the United States must foster a more innovative fintech environment,” CNAS fellow Yaya J. Fanusie said in testimony to the Senate Finance Committee on July 14, 2021. “If U.S. securities regulation does not evolve to account for the new technical and entrepreneurial capabilities offered by blockchain technology and broadcast data transmission, the United States could be hamstrung in a data revolution that is only just beginning.”

MOST READ​



A Biologist Fought to Remove Grizzlies From the Endangered Species List — Until Montana Republicans Changed His Mind​

Ryan Devereaux



Elon Musk Caves to Pressure From India to Remove BBC Doc Critical of Modi​

Murtaza Hussain, Ryan Grim



The Crackdown on Cop City Protesters Is So Brutal Because of the Movement’s Success​

Natasha Lennard

CNAS also maintains a task force on crypto, on which FTX formerly served as a member. The task force corresponded with national security-focused government officials, offering policy advice that reflected the crypto industry’s contention that digital tokens on the blockchain pose a low risk for terror financing.
A readout of a CNAS meeting with the Treasury Department’s Brian Nelson, the undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, included a summary of the discussion and noted that the official “recognized the work of many in industry to engage in constructive dialogue and support government efforts to mitigate the misuse of virtual assets for money laundering.” The use of crypto for “illicit activities remains below the scale of traditional finance,” Nelson said.


FTX Creditor Matrix Filed in Bankruptcy Proceedings116 pages

CNAS’s task force is co-chaired by Sigal Mandelker, who used to hold Nelson’s position at the Treasury before resigning in 2019 to enter the private sector. Mandelker now serves as general partner of Ribbit Capital, an investor in FTX. Mandelker spoke at SALT’s Crypto Bahamas conference last summer. The invite-only conference for “leading players in the crypto and traditional finance industry” also featured talks from Bankman-Fried, former President Bill Clinton, and ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Mandelker’s talk at Crypto Bahamas was on maintaining permissive crypto regulations.
“The instinct of government is often to focus on risk and not to put as much emphasis on opportunity,” she said. The true risk regulators should be wary of, Mandelker continued, was “shutting down [crypto] innovation.” (Mandelker did not respond to a request for comment.)
“CNAS received a $25,000 donation from FTX in 2022 in general support of CNAS’s independent research on national security,” Shai Korman, CNAS’s director of communications, told The Intercept. “FTX was also a member of the Task Force on Fintech, Crypto, and National Security. FTX is no longer a member of the task force, and CNAS has returned the donation in full.”

PR, Law Firms, and Video Games​

FTX once enjoyed a near-mythical status in the media, with splashy cover stories and gushing news articles lauding the crypto powerhouse and Bankman-Fried, its youthful leader. Such coverage rarely emerges organically, and FTX hired an army of public relations firms to burnish its image.
Among them was M Group, a New York-based public relations powerhouse known for its Rolodex of elite journalists. Others under the employ of FTX included TSD Communications and Full Court Press Communications.
The creditor list includes Rational 360, a public relations firm led in part by former White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart. Emails obtained by Matt Stoller, the director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, show that Rational 360 pressured activists and political influencers to speak out in favor of a bill that would move crypto regulatory authority to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. While the Securities and Exchange Commission handles many enforcement actions against crypto firms, the CFTC is seen as more friendly to crypto interests and has fewer disclosure requirements.
Powerhouse law firms also feature heavily in the most recent bankruptcy disclosure. One firm listed is Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, which represented Russia in a $3 billion bond dispute against Ukraine before it shuttered its Moscow office last year. Buckley LLP, another large law firm based in Washington that appeared on the FTX creditor list, announced earlier this month that it would merge with the San Francisco-based Orrick to create a combined firm with a total of nearly $1.5 billion focused on “forward-looking regulatory and enforcement advice” in the fields of finance and tech.
Among FTX’s listed creditors were a handful of nations — though the contours of the financial relationships remain unknown. Nevertheless, the list of countries reads like a who’s who of nations with lax financial regulations: The British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Isle of Man, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, the United Arab Emirates, Seychelles, and Switzerland all appear in the filing.
In addition to national banks and powerful firms in the corporate PR world, the creditor matrix also details luxury restaurants like Carbone in Miami and the luxury Margaritaville resort in Nassau.
The North America League of Legends Championship Series, a property of a premier video game event franchise, is also listed in the creditor matrix. Bankman-Fried, notorious for playing the video game “League of Legends” during pitch meetings with investors, arranged a $96 million sponsorship deal with Riot Games. In December, as the extent of FTX’s deception unfolded, Riot announced it would attempt to cut ties with Bankman-Fried.
The entertainment relationships provided, in some cases, an additional channel for political access. The creditor list includes the talent agency WME, with a memo mentioning actor Larry David, a celebrity endorser of FTX who appeared in a now-infamous Super Bowl commercial promoting the crypto exchange.
WME itself is owned by Endeavor, an investor in FTX that owns 38,000 shares of the company. Endeavor is also run by Ari Emanuel, the brother of Rahm Emanuel, President Joe Biden’s ambassador to Japan.
Editor’s Note: In September 2022, The Intercept received $500,000 from Sam Bankman-Fried’s foundation, Building a Stronger Future, as part of a $4 million grant to fund our pandemic prevention and biosafety coverage. That grant has been suspended. In keeping with our general practice, The Intercept disclosed the funding in subsequent reporting on Bankman-Fried’s political activities.
 
Back
Top