Scamming FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried Hit With 25 Years in Prison

Former billionaire and tech wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years on Thursday for defrauding clients around the world out of billions of dollars via his crypto exchange, FTX.

Once a poster boy for the emerging virtual market, Bankman-Fried was found guilty on all charges in November, including seven federal counts of fraud and conspiracy for stealing as much as $10 billion in customer funds, transferring them to another one of his companies, Alameda Research.

The sentencing was significantly less than the one recommended by federal prosecutors, who suggested the 32-year-old be put away for upward of 40 years, or by the Probation Department, which recommended a maximum sentence of 105 years.

“I know a lot of people felt very let down, and they were very let down. I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry about what happened at every stage—things I should have done and said and things I shouldn’t have,” Bankman-Fried told the court moments before his sentencing. “I failed everyone I care about and everything I cared about too.”

In his closing words, Judge Lewis Kaplan noted that Bankman-Fried “knew it was wrong.”

“A man willing to flip a coin as to the continued existence of life on earth. Mr. Bankman-Fried knew that Alameda was spending customer funds on risky investments, political contributions, and Bahamas real estate,” said Kaplan. “The funds were not his to use.”

“People need to feel it’s fair, or we’re back to trial by combat, folks, or something like it,” Kaplan continued. “So punishment must fit the seriousness of the crime. And this … was a serious crime.”

Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, who coined the phrase “alternative facts,” may soon rejoin Team Trump.

Conway is considering an offer to join Trump’s team again, Axios reported Thursday, citing an anonymous person close to Conway. The source would not specify who had offered her a position or what the role even was.

Senior Trump advisers denied that an offer had been made. But Conway, now a Fox News commentator, has recently been front and center, speaking out about multiple contentious issues, including TikTok, abortion, and race. Many Republicans see this as an attempt to make herself relevant and ingratiate herself to Trump, according to Axios.

There is no denying Conway’s ability to deliver a message. Once Trump was elected, she became one of his primary spokespeople and demonstrated a terrifying skill for spinning reality to try to make it seem more favorable to Trump.

“She is the go-to messenger when it comes to hot-button issues,” one source, speaking anonymously, told Axios. “Anytime she talks about a topic, Republicans and Trump’s orbit take it very seriously.”

But that line to Trump’s ear means that even some people who like her don’t want to publicly associate with her, Axios reported.

In recent months, Conway has tried to help the GOP rebrand on abortion, advocating for a 15-week abortion ban as a compromise. Trump later backed this position.

Conway wrote an essay in The New York Times last month decrying “identity politics” but urging Trump to pick a person of color as his running mate. Trump is reportedly considering Senators Tim Scott and Marco Rubio, and former House and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson. He also briefly considered Vivek Ramaswamy.

Conway works for the conservative super PAC Club for Growth, lobbying against the bipartisan bill in Congress to ban TikTok. She recently urged Trump to highlight the app’s usefulness to his supporters, according to Axios. Trump has come out against the bill.

Conway was one of the few people who left Trump’s White House by choice, not because he fired them. She stepped down in 2020 after she and her husband, George Conway, made the country watch their opposing political ideologies battle it out on social media for years. (They divorced last year.) Conway said at the time that her resignation was prompted by a desire to focus on her family.

“In time, I will announce future plans. For now, and for my beloved children, it will be less drama, more mama,” she said, in what may be the cringiest resignation announcement ever.

On Tuesday, conservative leader and Trump ally Matt Schlapp claimed that the sexual battery case against him had been dropped, and that it hadn’t cost the American Conservative Union a dime. But that’s not the whole story.

Sources familiar with the situation that spoke to CNN confirmed that a $480,000 settlement was paid to Carlton Huffman, a former staffer for the 2022 Herschel Walker Senate campaign, through an insurance policy. In the days following the end of Walker’s campaign, Huffman alleged that Schlapp had “pummeled” his crotch while he chauffeured the conservative icon back to his hotel in Atlanta and that his wife had defamed him in an attempt to swipe away the allegations. Huffman originally sought $9.4 million in damages. The workaround settlement got Schlapp the best of both worlds—his accuser’s bought silence and the wiggle room to tell the press that he was off scot-free. But not entirely.

Since the lawsuit was dropped, Schlapp has claimed online that he was “exonerated” and “cleared” of wrongdoing, and that Huffman had “apologized”—a detail that went too far and threatened to breach the agreement’s nondisparagement clause, resulting in a warning from Huffman’s legal counsel and the subsequent removal of those posts from Schlapp’s social media feeds, according to The Daily Beast.

“It’s not exoneration,” a source told CNN, “if you paid the guy off.”

When reached out for a statement by CNN, Schlapp passed along not just his own words but also Huffman’s, the language of which had been coordinated via a private agreement between the two parties.

“From the beginning, I asserted my innocence,” Schlapp told the outlet. “Our family was attacked, especially by a left-wing media that is focused on the destruction of conservatives regardless of the truth and the facts.”

Huffman’s subsequent statement chalked up his initial allegations to a “complete misunderstanding” that he said he regrets. “Neither the Schlapps nor the ACU paid me anything to dismiss my claims against them,” he added.

Lev Parnas, a former associate of Rudy Giuliani, has delivered perhaps the most damning blow yet to Republicans’ effort to impeach Joe Biden: a video of Giuliani being told the president is not guilty of corruption.

Parnas, a Ukrainian American businessman, has become one of the most outspoken critics of the Biden impeachment inquiry. Parnas helped Giuliani get in touch with Ukrainian officials during the latter’s efforts to find incriminating evidence on Biden and his son Hunter. One of those officials was former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

Parnas shared a video on social media Wednesday night that showed him and Giuliani speaking on the phone. Parnas, who dubbed the clip “THE VIDEO THE REPUBLICANS DONT WANT YOU TO SEE,” identifies the man on the phone as Shokin.

“Was there any specific act that any of these people performed?” Giuliani asks. “Did they get a kickback? Did they get a bribe?”

“No,” Shokin replies.

Shokin was fired in 2016 for corruption. Three years later, Donald Trump and Giuliani started a conspiracy theory that the Biden family accepted a $10 million bribe to remove Shokin to stop a probe into Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company that Hunter was working with at the time. Republicans have also repeatedly claimed that Biden, while serving as vice president, said the United States would withhold aid money to Ukraine unless Kyiv fired Shokin. Both these claims have been repeatedly debunked by U.S. intelligence, the former Ukrainian president, and the owner of Burisma.

But that hasn’t stopped Republicans, including Giuliani, from continuing to accuse the Bidens of corruption. That allegation forms the entire basis of the impeachment inquiry.

Parnas has repeatedly said there is nothing to those allegations, a statement further bolstered by the video he shared Wednesday night. In fact, according to Parnas, the impeachment effort is really based on Russian disinformation.

Parnas’s accusation is backed up by the arrest of former FBI informant Alexander Smirnov. Smirnov alleged that Biden and his son accepted bribes from a Ukrainian oligarch, sparking the impeachment investigation. When the Justice Department charged Smirnov with providing false information to the FBI, he reportedly admitted that his story had been fed to him by a Russian intelligence operative.

Former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark made a major slip-up on Wednesday, admitting during a disciplinary hearing to save his law license that he had one client in mind while dodging questions on the basis of attorney-client privilege: former President Donald Trump.

“Mr. Clark, you asserted a number of times attorney-client privilege,” prompted a committeewoman for the D.C. bar, Patricia Matthews. “For whom were you the attorney?”

“For President Trump, the head of the executive branch, the sole head, the unitary head of Article Two, the executive branch of the United States government,” Clark replied.

That was, however, more than Clark’s attorney expected him to share, thereafter urging his client to plead the Fifth in an attempt to avoid incriminating himself further.

“I would respectfully request my client to invoke questions about the basis for attorney-client privilege because those answers would be intimidating to them as well,” said Harry MacDougald, Clark’s attorney. “So respectfully, I would ask him to invoke.”

But the singular defense only made Clark more combative as the hearing went on. At one point, he accused the hearing’s lead investigator, Hamilton Fox, of attempting to humiliate him, reported Politico.

Clark stands accused of attempting to engage in dishonest conduct on behalf of Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. That included Clark’s suggestion to send a letter to Georgia officials, underlining a DOJ investigation into the voting process in the state and suggesting that they should void President Joe Biden’s win. Clark also held multiple meetings with Trump that violated proper DOJ procedure, actions that the lead investigator described on Tuesday as “essentially a coup attempt at the Department of Justice.”

Clark is charged alongside Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and more than a dozen others in an alleged racketeering conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. He has also been identified—but not charged—by federal prosecutors in Trump’s D.C. trial as part of a larger scheme to help Trump retain power.