Judge sends Sam Bankman-Fried to jail over witness tampering
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
"What is clear -- regardless of whether the defendant was the first source for stories regarding Ellison -- is that the defendant, rather than deny his guilt as he correctly now says it is his right to do, shared materials with the press obviously designed to intimidate, harass, and embarrass someone he knows is slated to testify against him, and to provoke an emotional response in potential jurors and color a potential jurors view of that witness."
"In support of its argument, the defense purports to attach an expert affidavit . . . discussing the constitutional considerations implicated by detaining Mr. Bankman-Fried on the current record. (Dkt. 185 at 2). The so-called expert affidavit is, in substance, an amicus brief filed without a request for leave to do so, written by a professor who is affiliated with the law firm representing the defendants father in connection with the Governments investigation."
That's Larry Tribe, once considered an authority on First Amendment issues.
"For example, in an attempt to cast the defendants conduct as protected expression rather than an effort to subvert the integrity of the judicial process, the declarant writes: Mr. Bankman-Fried has a constitutional right -- when sought out by reporters for his perspective on stories they are writing -- to avoid projecting a false image of someone who is media-shy or, worse, someone whose consciousness of guilt makes him shun the media rather than being forthcoming. (Dkt. 185-1 at 8)"
SBF as "media shy". Indeed.
(Idea was what if one starts with the source material, then reads the article.)
https://free.law <--- I have certainly seen worse legal websites than this one
"It's like they don't want us to read the authoritative original."
Job security.
So just like every mass media and social media influencer would do about the same defendant?
Or do those follow the "innocent until proven guilty"?
What happened to make people reconsider that notion?
Also I think it runs deeper than his parents. Wasn't it the top contributor to the democrat party during last election ?
People like to feel that they're in on a conspiracy. I think because it means they're smarter then the others who "can't understand it". Its especially prevalent in technology-enthusiast circles, internet-culture, etc.
Endless validation on the internet reinforces this. If you want to believe the Earth is a simulation you can go find a forum or podcast exactly to that effect. Heck YouTube will put a chain of videos at the top of your recommendations.
That may be part of the reason for conspiracy theories, but I think there's more to it. A lot of people take comfort in the idea that there is some grand order to the world (regardless of it being good or evil). It can be hard to accept the alternative - that the real world is chaotic and that no one is actually in control.
Yet they have been wrong time and time again.
First he was never going to face any consequences because something something connected. Then there were never going to be charges. Then he was never going to see the inside of a jail. etc etc etc
Even more delusional than those that cant see they dont have any clue - are the ones who claim "they only pressed charges because "WE" forced them into it by shining a light on the conspiracy"
People like to feel that people always make the best informed decisions and so there's always "more to it". That's especially so for established professionals or "successful" people.
The idea is if so and so is successful they must be doing things right - at every step.
This is the new favorite reason to let people off the hook. Classifying themselves as ill to distance their own behavior. "It was Jekyll not Hyde".
Even in the so-vanishingly-rare-it-almost-doesn’t-exist-outside-fiction case of someone being found not legally culpable for a crime by reason of insanity, that almost always comes with things like compelled inpatient mental health treatment instead.
The Dan White “Twinkie Defense” was so astounding because for once something like that worked. (One guess as to why it happened to work for him, but here’s a hint: Cops celebrated when the verdict was announced.)
I'm sure his lawyers would love to claim otherwise, but affluenza isn't a real medical condition. The simplest answer is that he's lived his life believing that he can do anything he wants. These "consequences" people talk about are for poor people, not people like him. His behavior makes perfect sense with that in mind.
The government has said it is going to show he was conducting a "political influence campaign" using customer deposits and using "political straw donations" as part of a money laundering scheme.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.59...
If SBF was incapable of orchestrating such a campaign himself, perhaps his parents were assisting him.
At least that's how it works in all the $7.99 paperback thrillers!
Or he's just a crook and trying desperately to avoid consequences of his illegal actions.
An unhealthy mind can be trained to be healthy. Like going to the gym.
Mental illness is chronic and medical and requires medical intervention.
Neither absolve the person of responsibility except in very narrow cases (imho) where a medical issue has impaired cognition in such a way the person committing the crime saw the actions in such a radically opposite way to how society (composed of people with varying mental health) sees those actions.
Both mental illness and being mentally unhealthy require compassion. Let's face it, anyone whose pursuit of wealth at all costs has this outcome is unlikely to be very happy or feel very good much of the time.
It isn't healthy behaviour
I can't speak to his mental health, but SBF is simply not comparable.
Also the news reported he was installing VPNs so that he could 'watch football online' or something about as stupid.
Specifically, if Sam uses a VPN after having communication restrictions put in place around what he can say, is that inherently suspicious to a court? I would have assumed it is insufficient on its own but could be presented as the means for breaking court order if shown with other supporting evidence.
I'm not a lawyer mind you, so this is just me trying to understand it for myself.
The justice system is designed to defend the innocent, not to aggressively pursue and harass the guilty.
SBF's is living on borrowed time as the cases make it through the legal process.
https://www.bop.gov/resources/pdfs/detoxification.pdf
> Inmates with a dependency on cocaine or other stimulants generally do not require treatment in an inpatient setting. The cessation of this substance does not always cause specific withdrawal symptoms. However, symptoms may be severe enough to require clinical intervention. For most inmates who use cocaine or other stimulants, medications are not ordinarily indicated as an initial treatment for withdrawal or dependence, as none have shown efficacy. Inmates are treated symptomatically.
> SAMHSA recommends that patients withdrawing from stimulants should be monitored closely for depression/suicidality, as well as prolonged QTc intervals and seizures, which may be additional complications of stimulant withdrawal. An EKG is recommended during cocaine withdrawal to monitor for cardiac complications.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/dec/22/sam-bankman...
https://cryptoslate.com/sbf-granted-250m-bail-released-to-pa...
SBF's bail was 250 million dollars. out here in the my world, you have to find a bail bondsman, who commits to covering the entire bail amount, makes sure you have enough assets to cover the entire bail amount, charges you ten percent of the bail amount. You don't get the 10 percent back.
Larry Kramer, former dean of Stanford's law school, pledged to cover 500,000 of it. Andreas Paepcke, a Stanford computer scientist, pledged to cover 200,000 of it.
SBF's parents have a house under a weird agreement where sale of the house is strictly controlled by Stanford University.
SBF's parents pledged to cover the rest of it (I think?)
There is no way SBF's parents are worth 25 million dollars. Or 249 million dollars. Unless SBF parked millions of dollars of FTX profits with them. which just opens more questions.
Source: 10 years in criminal court
Funnily enough, I had my bail revoked last year because I retweeted a posting from the county public defender's office about the serious flaws with house arrest monitoring.
I doubt you'll see movement on, for example, the parents' house, but I could imagine the monetary portion being forfeited.
(Edit: and I've read since posting that there will be no forfeiture here)
But the fact that he’s in custody and isn’t on the run, means there’s more risk politically to forfeit the money than to give it back.
This is the same guy who dialed into tech conferences and made provably false statements after the public collapse of FTX and after his parents (both law professors) had retained counsel. And yet, nobody thought to explain to him how easily he might get caught up on witness tampering and obstruction of justice charges if he continued making public statements.
Is SBF connected at all anymore? At this point, everyone knows he's a fraud (at least in the court of public opinion). There's no money to be gained by helping him; associations to him are toxic; favors are unlikely to ever be repaid. He may have used some of the money he scammed for donations to curry favor, but that only works up until the scam falls apart. What sort of connections are you thinking of?
When you have 100bn you are well connected. When you had 100bn but now have nothing, you are not well connected. Even people you have litterally given 100mil to wont take your phone calls.
people with law degrees do
Or, more likely, his life as he knew it was under threat and he was panicking by following the same script that always worked for him before. But it wasn't NECESSARILY the wrong call.
Playing by the book it's an easy, open and shut case that he loses very badly badly. No other conceivable outcome that way.
His only option is to throw the book out and create as much chaos as possible so prosecutors are faced with the unusual and novel and make mistakes his team can capitalise on.
It's a long shot, sure. He's got nothing else. This lunacy is all 100% rational behaviour on his part.
I don't see how that's very rational at all.
In other words: It's not their delusion at all.
You shouldn't expect them to be good at anything else. They aren't good at anything else.
This is the same guy who tried to make "effective altruism" part of his image. That was a pretty strong signal that the outcome we all witnessed was highly likely.
The common type of white collar criminal remains in silence and follow orientations from their very well paid lawyers. And it is a pretty proven strategy that leads to minimal or no relevant punishment. If SBF was a common criminal in this sense, he possibly could leave all of this judged not guilty by the justice.
It’s not as if people are saying he’s going to be studied because he’s fascinating. I don’t think he ever tried to cultivate the image that he’s idiotic bordering on the pathological, because that discrepancy seems to be study-worth.
It’s like on one side, there are Musk actions, some call them insane and idiotic, but they can be explained away, theoretically, and then there’s SBF where even the most adamant supporter would just stand there, open-mouthed.
It's a status thing as much as the crime. Who he had access to and what knowledge everyone involved could have had to detect it earlier. If that is real idk but that's the pitch
Crypto is a bit unique though. Not many markets would have tolerated this behaviour.
> Judge Kaplan: He subscribed from the Bahamas and used a VPN as if he were in the Bahamas when he was in Palo Alto and could have watched it on public TV. It shows the mindset. All things considered I am going to revoke bail.
Why do you think that was such a strong signal?
A common Warren Buffet quote passed around : "We look for three things when we hire people. We look for intelligence, we look for initiative or energy, and we look for integrity. And if they don't have the latter, the first two will kill you, because if you're going to get someone without integrity, you want them lazy and dumb"
Our universe's Sam Bankman-Fried has been caught witness-tampering, which you only do if you think you are going to get away with it.
Being caught witness-tampering is going to lead to an early start to his jail time, yes. But you understand that it's going to lead to additional jail time, right? It's a crime and a really serious one. It will be seen as aggravating behaviour, so extra time, perhaps extra charges, not a head-start.
Edit to add: it's entirely possible in a legal sense for the primary charges against him to collapse entirely and for him to still see extra time, not just time served, for witness tampering. Because witness tampering is a crime even if what the witnesses saw turns out to be something the state declines to prosecute.
[0] unless he is both sorely misinformed and poorly advised
Actually possible, given the billboards lol
I'm a very cynical old git, but even I have been amazed by the limited bounds of my imagination which is forever defeated by this story.
Saying that, I do get the feeling he is now being scapegoated quite hard, and that probably serves to motivate his latest stupidities, but FTX required collective and not only individual madness. That must not get lost in all this.
Sam Trabucco might end up as the equivalent of Lou Pai from the Enron scandal. Left just in time before the whole thing came crashing down and escapes all criminal charges.
I think this either conflates crypto with FTX, or alternatively, SBF being on trial with being scapegoated.
The other execs admitted they did something wrong and are pleading guilty. This is individual madness
Look at the programmer who put in the code that was something like TRADE_IS_ALLOWED = HAS_POSITIVE_BALANCE || TRADER_IS_ALMEDA.
Just because they're pleading out doesn't mean they are/weren't crazy.
They plead guilty because they were granted deals that involve testifying against SBF, and sang like canaries.
But the feds have every intention of nailing Sam as hard as possible. There will be no plea bargaining for him. So it's either fight it in court, or take the max sentence. What we're seeing here are the last acts of a desperate man who knows he's screwed either way.
SBF's parents deeply need investigation here - they are both law proffs at stanford.
THere is not a chance they dont have dirty fingers in his dealings - where are their political donations from the money SBF/Alameda.
I hate how we talk about high level financial crimes (Trump org, Biden Org, Holmes, SBF, etc - and we fail to ever look at their children, parents, siblings, etc in their bubble for similar investment windfalls, or donation channels/ammounts.
-
@lotsofpulp (I love pulp BTW, grew up with huge orange trees)
The "we" is not just some no-face prosecutor, its everyone - but "proof" that they arent looking into it is, have you ever seen a Pelosi, Biden, Kushner child with massive grift based on their familial insider trading knowledge that was exposed.
Take Kushner as the primary example. So, we know that he received billions (not just from Qatar), we know that his family has a history of real-estate fraud, and everyone just ignores all of this.
This isnt a political comment : its a comment against the financial frauds that are so massive throughout and we do 'surface-level' looking into it.
--
I cant believe I have to outline this for some....
That said, we do know that he committed several additional offences, including the ones described in this article, while under house arrest at their residence. That alone should warrant further investigation and call their conduct into question, along with their standing in the legal community.
I don't know if it's willful ignorance or what, but most people can't grok the fact that children do not develop in a vacuum. They are in most cases a reflection of their parents' traits and values. Worse for SBF, it is entirely plausible that they had a direct hand in enabling his fraudulent behavior. They were politically-connected Stanford lawyers. It would be foolish to dismiss the possibility of them opening doors and providing cover for their son.
Perhaps an extreme comparison, but I feel the same exact way about adolescent school shooters. We are so quick to absolve and sanctify the parents as if their child's violent tendencies emerged suddenly and spontaneously.
If there is any hesitation in going after the parents of an accused individual, it is that.. they are parents. The sins of a child are not those of the parent and vice-versa, at least in my book. We have our own scorecards as it were.
But.. if there is proof of wrongdoing? No problem.
SBF seems like the sort of person to flaunt their “success” to side skirt questions. For those around him, I think they believed it more than anyone, because the world was revering him an undisputed genius. His parents pride, and background, probably put blinders on any signals of nefarious activity. They were also watching billionaire investors dump money into FTX assuming they weren’t total fucking idiots… but they were.
Smart, wealthy people, are often children of luck more than ability and unable to discern between to two because their entire existence inextricably interweaves the two. Look no further than the demigod status American oligarchs have despite being examples of capitalisms inefficiencies (there’s no cream to skim in perfect capitalism which is the real source of their immense wealth).
It probably shouldn't be surprising that the good old fall guy spectacle works though - Lee Harvey Oswald was a resounding success.
Who is “we”? If you mean prosecutor, do you have a source that they fail to look at the networks of those they are prosecuting?
SBF: steal money from Wall Street, best not do anything
I fear it will. so long as we keep being all confused between individual things (actions of persons) and systemic truths (actions of institutions). e.g. "Putin be Bad"... uhm, he's just the face of a large government.... he does not exist in isolation.
We need all crypto executives to begin sizing up jumpsuits for their role in creating unregulated crypto companies that do nothing other than scam people.
The wheels of justice turn slowly, but they still grind these scammers into jail. This is just the start.
"August 10, 2023 -- Bittrex settles with SEC for $24 million"
"August 7, 2023 -- Bitsonic CEO arrested for allegedly stealing $7.5 million"
"August 7, 2023 -- Rumors swirl that Huobi executives have been arrested, exchange is insolvent,"
"August 7, 2023 -- Worldcoin warehouse in Nairobi raided by authorities"[1]
Crypto companies are running out of safe havens for unregulated activity. SBF was arrested in the Bahamas. Mainland China shut down most of the Bitcoin miners. Britain finally decided that the Financial Crimes Authority, not the Gambling Commission, had jurisdiction over crypto. The SEC and the CFTC stopped feuding and decided to just handle it as ordinary crime. Cyprus stopped being the safe haven for financial crime within the EU. There's still Bulgaria and Israel, and maybe Russia, but operating in those countries has its own problems.
https://www.news.gov.hk/eng/2022/10/20221031/20221031_102428...
These people have very rigid mental models of the world, as they tend to not question their own understanding.
> The final straw, according to prosecutors, was Bankman-Fried leaking private diary entries of his ex-girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, to the New York Times. Ellison pleaded guilty to federal charges in Dec. 2022.
> The government added that Bankman-Fried had over 100 phone calls with one of the authors of the Times story prior to publication – many of which lasted for approximately 20 minutes.
It seems someone at The NY Times is very sympathetic to him.
Has their coverage of him been positive? I've not read any of it so I don't have a clue, but in a hypothetical situation where you're a journalist at NYT who thinks he's a guilty & idiotic asshole, if he wanted to call you and start chatting away wouldn't you still take the calls and accept any documents he leaks to you despite not being sympathetic to him?
It feels like to make the claim in your last sentence you need to show one or more articles that paint him sympathetically since his arrest, not just the fact that one or more journalists haven't refused to speak with him?
Allowing him to speak at DealBook summit after he lost customer funds: "The DealBook Summit included Sam Bankman-Fried, who said he was “deeply sorry” about the collapse of FTX. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Andy Jassy and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine also spoke." [2]
In general you don't give a storytelling platform to your enemies. Ever seen a NYTimes article titled "Vladimir Putin: In His Own Words"?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/20/technology/ftx-caroline-e... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/20/technology/ftx-caroline-e...
If the NYT is his friend, I would hate to see what his enemies have in mind for him.
> US prosecutors have not said Trabucco was involved in any wrongdoing even as he worked in Alameda's C-suite with several execs who are now facing a slew of charges. [1]
hmm
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Trabucco
[1] https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/meet-sam...
It's more likely (and all but certain) that persons involved with him or his ventures have meaningful influence at the NYT. Sympathy has little meaning in the presence of structural interests.
The only reference to the phrase I can find is [1], where SBF's lawyer appears to be contrasting the case with another that has been submitted for reference/comparison:
[SBF's lawyer Mark] Cohen: In one of the cases, the defendant offered a bag of cash to the witness. We don't have that here.
[1] https://matthewrussellleeicp.substack.com/p/extra-bankman-fr...
No, unless the terms prohibit VPN use.
> Is that a reasonable argument you could make in a court?
Even if it were a civil offense against the website owner in question, yes, it would be a reasonable argument to make in court in a hearing over adherence to your bail conditions if it wasn't a violation of your bail conditions (which generally include “don’t commit any crimes” as well as any special conditions, but generally don't include “don’t commit any torts”.)
> Judge Kaplan: This defendant tries to go right up to the line - his use of the VPN to watch a football game over an account he wasn't authorized, there it is..
> Judge Kaplan: He subscribed from the Bahamas and used a VPN as if he were in the Bahamas when he was in Palo Alto and could have watched it on public TV. It shows the mindset. All things considered I am going to revoke bail.
https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/169008001856562790...
https://twitter.com/al_mu7ami/status/1690124304447344641?s=2...
As soon as the entire thing broke I expected him to be on a plane to Dubai like the 3AC founders. He didn't and kept insisting he could fix it. He was actively seeking to raise funds. It was baffling, who would give $ to someone that just liquidated billions? Why would he stick around? He likely has many millions hidden in a variety of wallets. I am not sure he fully understands what he has done and why it is wrong. This could be narccissm, could be something else. With that said, he broke a million laws and cost regular people billions. He probably needs to go to jail.
I always saw him, Vitalik and to a lesser extent Cobie [in a different way] and Hoskinson as part of the crypto brain trust. He was definitely the sketchiest of them though.
One example: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-frie...
Not if you reject the premise that he's "highly intelligent", though this would mean questioning the hallowed Hacker News axiom of "rich = smart".
In 1978, San Francisco supervisor Dan White went into city hall and shot killed mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk.
At trial, he claimed diminished capacity because of a blood sugar imbalance because he ate some Twinkies. The jury ended up acquitting him of premeditated murder, and instead found him guilty of the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinkie_defense
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscone%E2%80%93Milk_assassina...
> To be That Guy™, the Twinkie Defense isn’t just some dumb meme. It was literal defense used in double murder trial.
It is a dumb meme that has evolved around a misleading name a reporter gave to the defense at that trial, which has morphed into an myth about the nature of the defense that you now repeat as fact, despite linking sources explaining that it isn't.
> At trial, he claimed diminished capacity because of a blood sugar imbalance because he ate some Twinkies.
No, he didn't, as your own first source notes. His recent switch from being a health food nut to eating junk food (the context in which Twinkies were incidentally mentioned) was brought up as one of several external behavioral indicia of the longer tern mental breakdown the defense claimed he was going through, not its cause. And that longer term breakdown was context for the acute break they (and the psychiatrists called as expert witnesses) claimed White experienced that was the center of the diminished capacity defense.
https://www.sfgate.com/health/article/Myth-of-the-Twinkie-de...
A better summary is the defense presented an argument that Dan White was massively depressed (Vietnam combat vet, just lost his job), and eating massive amounts of Twinkies was 1 of the symptoms of his depression.
Dan White's lawyer appeared on an episode of Star Trek https://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/11/us/melvin-belli-dies-at-8...
I think it can occur for both failure to appear and other violations of bail conditions, but I don’t know, on practice, how common forfeiture is for violations of other bail conditions.
2. Generally speaking, you only lose your bail money if you don't show up to court when a judge tells you to.
- This.
- The Supreme Court just stopped the deal that would have let the Sackler family, the OxyContin pushers, off the hook personally.
- Hunter Biden's no-jail plea deal was rejected, and he goes to trial.
- Trump goes to trial, too.
Just finished a couple shows about it. I wonder how much of Dopesick and Painkiller are true. If even 1/4 of it is, the entire family should be in prison for the rest of their lives, and that's being lenient.
Paused, and is reviewing an appeal after a court approved the deal.
> - Hunter Biden's no-jail plea deal was rejected, and he goes to trial.
It wasn't really rejected, there was no deal at all. The two parties didn't have the same understanding of a key term of the deal, the judge pointed it out, and then the parties weren't able to agree on that term.
> The Supreme Court just stopped the deal that would have let the Sackler family, the OxyContin pushers, off the hook personally.
Note, they didn't stop the deal. They temporarily paused it while they hear the case later this year. [0]
> Hunter Biden's no-jail plea deal was rejected, and he goes to trial.
Wasn't directly rejected, the judged asked questions which gave answers that hunters team felt they didn't agree to, including that he is still the subject of ongoing investigations. [1]
> At one point, Noreika asked whether the investigation was ongoing, to which Weiss responded that it was but said he could not share any further details.
> Noreika also raised a hypothetical, asking whether Biden could face charges of failing to register as a foreign agent and whether the agreement blocks his prosecution on such a charge. The defense said it believed the agreement would prohibit him from being charged, and the prosecution then disagreed.
> Clark was overheard telling a prosecutor, "Then we'll rip it up," most likely in a reference to the plea deal, as they discussed the disagreement during a brief break before he eventually relented.
[0]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-purdue-pharma-set...
[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/hunter-b...
If he doesn't show.......
The bail amount is the penalty for violation; while in the state systems it tends to have a simple mathematical relationship to the price the defendant pays for a bond (often regulated to around, or sometimes fixed at exactly, 10%), in the federal system it is more fluid.
And one of whose first acts as things broke was to publicly fire his lawyers for telling him to shut up about it instead of digging his own grave with social media posts.
"The USD is going to go to zero someday so I might as well steal everyone's USD today"
He's looking at the rest of his life in prison. Rational for him may be much different than you or I can comprehend?
It's clear that SBF doesn't look at business/legal logic as an objective "thing" with special givens and nomenclature to which one must adhere, as many of us do. He sees it more as a unique series of isolated situations with their own unfolding logic. He is taking the puzzler's approach. (Is this related to his being raised by people with legal experience? The most experienced in a given field are often the least likely to give the most definite/standard answers...things "tend to depend")
But, for that same reason, he'll also tend to entrap himself for lack of look-ahead knowledge relating to precedent and legal practice. Broad precedent and ethics are essentially off one's radar, if one really leans into the "I can solve it myself" logician style.
That's a huge risk for someone like him: He's going to look like he's trying to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, of what it means to be a defendant in a risky position. People with basic knowledge will be left utterly confused as to why he keeps messing up, this person who is apparently kind of a genius in a way?
Yet it's still clear that his executive logic is extremely resilient and active. This is not the type of personality to go "based on legal history, I'm a jerk and I'm screwed, might as well give up." In fact I'd guess that his natural openness to various ideas would prevent him from making definite moral conclusions about his choices.
He is probably going to keep grinding at this position of his until some chain of things starts to work out.
Some might make the _moral_ or _predictive_ conclusion that he should do otherwise, but this is a _rational_ person in the sense of attention to the typical social bell curve. In that particular bell curve, it's _irrational_ to not defend yourself and fight for yourself, especially if you think the public record is completely off, wrong, etc.
His answer to "why don't you head over to Google for even better legal assistance" might just be, "I'm learning and analyzing my way through this from first principles, and for that I need my own brain, some logic, and a bit of luck."
In the end, you don't necessarily need the look-ahead knowledge, especially with the right people on your side...even though it can _really_ help to not make these kind of obvious blunders in that direction.
(This is looking at personality and his actions in that context, not so much a good/bad moral analysis)
This is a remarkably generous framing. Is there some reason the SBFs of the world are "puzzlers" and the hundreds of thousands of other people in prison are just criminals?
Oh well, hate the puzzle, not the puzzler.
There's no logical reason to do this. I think the answer is that no matter how smart he may be in some areas, he has emotions like anyone else which sometimes lead him to do stupid things. I think many of his decisions are also rooted in a copious amount of pride which leads him to think he will get away with anything.
Galaxy Brains: Masterful gambit, sir
Your post seems like a pretty long winded way of saying he is a fool. It's not hard to understand that when you are facing a federal criminal trial, you shouldn't make the judge mad.
Here's a video from someone (who I don't know) from late March: https://twitter.com/sidtriv/status/1641641533240905728
Aha! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWMnbJJpeZc&ab_channel=TheWo...
Personally I always thought it extremely likely he would get a prison sentence, but I think you're being premature to act like people who didn't think that have already been proven wrong.
I think a lot of people still predict that he will be set free from any wrongdoing after the trial because of his massive donations and money laundering for the political class.
If SBF had done the "normal" white collar criminal move of hiring a really expensive team of lawyers and doing what they told him, he'd be free as a bird.
But I guess SBF isn't your "normal" white collar criminal - he's a special kind of stupid.
He's become his own worst enemy it seems.
unless the theory was about collusion in the executive branch and white house, then you still have an independent judiciary
For the record the guy is guilty as sin but so is everyone in crypto.
I anticipate the former president doing this a lot in the next year. Any time the right move is to do nothing, he will find a way to do literally anything.
You can see it in people with unmedicated ADHD for instance, who prefer the stimulation of something toxic (a fight, drama, etc.) To boredom, even fully aware of the consequences of starting a fight.
It's a lucky thing that the other low-profile prisoners in the Metropolitan Detention Center have no need to prepare their defenses.
It does something to you when it's July 4th and you look upon the Statue of Liberty, who is looking past you, through a federal detention window.
Just because she fully cooperated and tells a sad story doesn't mean she isn't guilty.
You do realize that Caroline Ellison has already pled guilty[0] and worked out a deal with Federal prosecutors, yes?
Releasing her diary won't change that plea or the deal she made with prosecutors.
As such, I'm not clear how SBF doing so will make any difference whatever for her. If you'd expand on that, I'd be much obliged.
[0] https://abcnews.go.com/US/sam-bankman-frieds-girlfriend-ftx-...
I mean all this guy's co-conspirators have been bought off by the prosecution to testify against him. I can't help but feel like his action's are at least understandable. Unless he's supposed to save all his ammo for the actual court case and attack the credibility directly there. I'm obviously not a lawyer but I didn't realize such subtle actions were considered witness tampering... wouldn't we want to know all the details about a witness? If there's real reason to be worried about someone's credibility wouldn't we want to know about it?
Without knowing better, I'd probably be fighting tooth and nail in whatever way possible to not by martyred alone while my co-conspirators walk with a slap on the wrist because that's how criminal justice works, whether I deserved it or not.
EDIT: just to be clear, I'm not making any statement as to whether I agree or disagree with SBF or whatnot. I am just trying to understand what actually happened here and surprised that speaking with journalists falls under witness tampering. TIL.
Yes, that is how he could attack the credibility of a witness without ending up in hot water. He would have to introduce it into evidence, and hazard the court rejecting it. If it was accepted, then yeah, they could tell the jury about Ellison feeling like she may not be cut out the run Alameda (for all the good that would do, I suspect not very much).
If you try to bypass this process unilaterally, then the court isn't going to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Do not bother reading comments in this thread.
The hot takes are already ridiculous, and I honestly don't know why I either bothered to start reading, nor why I bothered to point out the flaws in 4 different comments already.
I can't actually imagine what interesting things could be commented about it at this time that isn't just rehashing people's opinions of him that've been said a thousand times already, so I'm closing the thread and won't be coming back to read the inevitable 1000 comments that are coming.
I'm just leaving this comment here in the hope that, if others agree enough to upvote it, maybe some of you will be spared wasting time like I just have.
The ridiculous hot takes are why I start reading!
On the other hand, I'm very open to the idea that stealing someone's diary and publishing it is itself illegal. I'd want to know more there. Also, what I personally believe to be an overly-expansive definition of witness intimidation is pretty standard and he should be held to the same rules as others. So while I think the justice system generally needs to change on this, I think the judge is correctly applying the normal practice here as they would to anybody else.
It doesn't matter what the intent is. She's a witness and trying to pull this shit is a huge no-no, as the judge rightly ruled. He should have known better.