FTX founder Samuel Bankman-Fried (SBF) has been accused of bilking his customers out of billions of dollars and faced counts of fraud and election law violations. As my colleague streiff wrote, the campaign finance charges against SBF have been dropped (at least temporarily), as well as the charges that he defrauded investors. Not because it’s not provable, but because of government ineptitude, proper procedures were not followed.

This is the second time Bankman-Fried has benefitted from government stupidity (“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”), in June, prosecutors dropped five other counts related to Bankman-Fried’s biblical scale defrauding of investors and customers.

Since the recipients of SBF’s and FTX’s largesse were mostly Democrats, one questions whether this was due to incompetence or oversight. With Biden’s DOJ, it is doubtful that it was either. His colleagues, FTX executives Nishad Singh and Gary Wang, have pleaded guilty and are cooperating with the government’s case.

As I’ve been saying from day 1, what does SBF know…? https://t.co/v43zEhVAY0

— Carol Roth (@caroljsroth) July 27, 2023

As did Alameda executive and SBF’s former girlfriend, Caroline Ellison.

In December, she pleaded guilty to fraud charges and agreed to cooperate with the federal prosecutors investigating her former boyfriend.

His case is speeding toward a courtroom showdown in Manhattan. Two other top FTX executives, Nishad Singh and Gary Wang, have also pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate. In June, after weeks of legal wrangling over the charges against Mr. Bankman-Fried, the judge in the case set a brisk schedule for the run-up to the trial, asking prosecutors to come up with a witness list and produce other final materials. Prosecutors are expected to begin preparing at least some witnesses in August, two people with knowledge of the matter said.

In July, Ellison’s private diaries were leaked to the New York Times, and prosecutors allege that this was SBF’s handiwork. They now want the judge to revoke his bail and put him under a gag order because he tampered with the state’s witness.

Federal prosecutors asked a judge to revoke FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s bail in a Manhattan court filing Friday, claiming that the billionaire had violated the terms of the release and repeatedly tampered with witnesses.

“What the defendant may not do, and what he has now done repeatedly, is seek to corruptly influence witnesses and interfere with a fair trial through attempted public harassment and shaming,” prosecutors wrote.

If granted, the order from U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan would return Bankman-Fried to jail, months after his extradition from the Bahamas and ahead of his expected October trial. Bankman-Fried, whose crypto company sank into bankruptcy last year, faces multiple fraud and money laundering charges over his role in the implosion of the multibillion-dollar exchange.

A federal prosecutor argued in court Wednesday that “no set of release conditions can ensure the safety of the community.”

SBF’s attorneys all but admitted that it was him that leaked the diaries to the NY Times, and in their filing with the court on this matter, claimed that SBF was within his First Amendment right to do so.

In a Sunday filing to the judge presiding over his federal case, SBF’s attorneys Mark Cohen and Christian Everdell insisted that it wasn’t actually bad for their client to leak his ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison’s diary entries to the New York Times even though the DOJ claimed the opposite in its request for a gag order.

“The Government has taken a set of circumstances where nothing improper or impermissible occurred and has unfairly recast the events as a nefarious attempt by Mr. Bankman-Fried to ‘discredit’ Caroline Ellison and ‘taint’ the jury pool,” his lawyers wrote. “But Mr. Bankman-Fried did nothing wrong.”

SBF was exercising his First Amendment rights, the filing claims, when he gave the NYT Ellison’s writings. And anyway, the NYT story “was favorable to Ms. Ellison and negative towards Mr. Bankman-Fried,” the lawyers wrote

As RedState has reported, SBF has been getting the American Oligarch treatment since he was extradited from the Bahamas in December of 2022. The mere fact that he was able to come up with a $250 million bail in the first place despite claiming he only had $100,000 to his name speaks volumes to his connections. Since January, he started a Substack to plead his innocence, has been handled with kid gloves by the legacy media, and some of the charges against him have been either been dismissed or soft-peddled. Is there truly any seriousness in pursuing justice for the people SBF disenfranchised? Biden’s DOJ has shown more fire in targeting pro-life advocates than they are in rooting out corruption in the financial sector, especially when it benefits Democrats.