Convicted crypto con artist Sam Bankman-Fried now knows the consequences for his crime of stealing billions from unsuspecting investors. On Thursday, a federal judge sentenced SBF to 25 years in prison.
Still unknown is the status of the millions in political donations he doled out, mostly to Democrats.
Two Democratic causes, Sen. Maggie Hassan’s reelection bid and the New Hampshire Democratic Party, were among the top 10 recipients of SBF’s ill-gotten gains during the 2022 election cycle. And now that Bankman-Fried is behind bars, both are choosing to remain silent regarding their handling of his stolen funds.
While Bankman-Fried’s attorneys had sought a five-to-seven-year sentence for the disgraced crypto-mogul, U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan was unmoved.
“He knew it was wrong, he knew it was criminal, he regrets he made a very bad bet about the likelihood of getting caught,” Kaplan said, according to reports from the Manhattan courtroom.
Bankman-Fried was convicted in November of stealing $8 billion from customers of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange and other companies owned by the 32-year-old California tech guru. In addition to the prison sentence, SBF was ordered to pay $11 billion. He plans to appeal.
Bankman-Fried claimed he was engaged in “effective altruism,” using his massive personal wealth accumulation to fund what he considered the greater public good. Part of that “good” was funding left-of-center politics, including Democratic candidates.
In New Hampshire, Hassan’s 2022 Senate reelection campaign received the biggest boost. Federal Election Commission records show that during the waning days of July 2021, Hassan and her associated political action committees (Granite Values PAC and Maggie Hassan Victory Fund), hauled in $31,600 from Bankman-Fried’s FTX organization.
Her campaign raked in another $12,900 in October 2022 through three donations made by an associate of Bankman-Fried’s named Nishad Singh.
Singh later told federal prosecutors he served as a “straw donor,” meaning Bankman-Fried made donations to Hassan and others in Singh’s name through his Alameda Research hedge fund. Singh recalled he was informed by Bankman-Fried in September 2022 that Alameda owed an outstanding $13 billion debt to customers.
Nevertheless, donations to Hassan and other Democrats in Singh’s name kept pouring in ahead of that November’s midterm election.
FEC records list Singh maxing out at the then-individual limit of $2,900 in separate donations to Reps. Annie Kuster and Chris Pappas as well, along with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen. Singh’s name is also listed alongside a $5,000 donation to the New Hampshire Democratic Party. too.
Bankman-Fried, meanwhile, steered $20,780 in Alameda funds to the state party between July 2021 and October 2022.
After the collapse of SBF’s crypto empire and the intervention of law enforcement, FTX’s new management asked the candidates and organizations who received those donations to return them so victims could be made whole.
Many politicians, including Pappas, have done just that. Failed Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke returned a $1 million donation in 2022, for example.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.) donated his $5,800 in campaign contributions to charity, and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) reports he gave his FTX donation to a West Virginia food bank.
But what about Sen. Hassan? What about the New Hampshire Democratic Party?
Hassan has refused to respond to dozens of media requests from NHJournal on the subject, and she has declined to release any FEC documents showing the final disposition of the stolen campaign dollars.
Hassan’s Senate communication director, Laura Epstein, told the Union Leader last February the senator would be returning her share to victims of Bankman-Fried’s scheme — but with a catch.
“Contributions made towards Sen. Hassan’s 2022 campaign have already been spent. As additional funds are raised, the campaign will set aside the amount of those contributions to be returned to victims,” Epstein said.
In other words, Hassan said she would ask her donors to pay back the stolen money she accepted.
Did she actually do it? When contacted Thursday, Hassan again declined to respond. As of April 2023, she had given just $5,800 of the money to a victim fund set up by the U.S. Marshals Service.
“Hassan appears to have held onto the $20,800 that Bankman-Fried gave the Maggie Hassan Victory Fund. The fund helps raise money for Hassan’s campaign and her political action committee, Granite Values PAC,” the Washington Free Beacon reported.
The state Democratic Party, meanwhile, had previously indicated it would wait for “instructions from the proper authorities relating to the possible return of the funds.”
Like Hassan, Buckley and his communications teams have refused to release any documents or respond to multiple requests for comment regarding the current status of the SBF donations.
Following the sentencing, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams decried Bankman-Fried’s “deliberate and ongoing lies demonstrated a brazen disregard for customers’ expectations and disrespect for the rule of law, all so that he could secretly use his customers’ money to expand his own power and influence.”
“The scale of his crimes is measured not just by the amount of money that was stolen, but by the extraordinary harm caused to victims, who in some cases had their life savings wiped out overnight,” Williams added.
