New York Times puff piece on FTX fraud ignores Democrat connection

A puff piece by the New York Times on now-bankrupt FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried ignored the disgraced former billionaire’s connection to the Democratic Party and Ukraine. 

FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange valued at $30 billion up until last week, filed for bankruptcy after an article in CoinDesk reported that much of the company’s capital was in the form of FTT, the company's proprietary cryptocurrency. Following the report, users demanded $6 billion in withdrawals, sending the company into a liquidity crisis. Rival crypto exchange Binance, who had been in talks to acquire FTX, announced it was backing out of the deal after seeing the company’s books.   

Bankman-Fried, who was worth over $15 billion, lost his entire fortune in two days.  

But more than being a 30-year-old billionaire, Bankman-Fried was one of the Democratic Party’s largest megadonors, second only to George Soros. Since founding FTX in 2019, Bankman-Fried has donated over $40 million to Democratic campaigns and causes, including key lawmakers in the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), who are charged with regulating the crypto industry.  

In May, Bankman-Fried said he was willing to spend over $1 billion to keep Democrats in the White House in 2024. 

Another one of Bankman-Fried's projects was Aid for Ukraine, an organization set up by the Ukraine government to accept donations in cryptocurrency. Bankman-Fried's FTX converted those donations into fiat currency, ostensibly by storing the cryptocurrencies on its own exchange.   

But none of Bankman-Fried's high-profile connections with the government – which included donations to officials charged with regulating his company – nor his connection to the hot-button issue of Ukraine was mentioned in a recent New York Times interview with the former billionaire. The article did reference that Bankman-Fried “donated to political campaigns.” 

Nor, for that matter, did the Times discuss with Bankman-Fried his pending investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department and extradition to the United States from the Bahamas. 

Instead, author David Yaffe-Bellany used the “wide-ranging interview” to focus on the disgraced Democratic megadonor’s personal life, discussing such topics as how much sleep Bankman-Fried is getting.   

“But in a wide-ranging interview on Sunday that stretched past midnight, he sounded surprisingly calm. ‘You would’ve thought that I’d be getting no sleep right now, and instead I’m getting some,’ he said. ‘It could be worse,’” wrote Yaffe-Bellany, who said Bankman-Fried's fall from grace was because “his ambitions exceeded his grasp,” leaving out any mention of fraud. 

FTX was also listed as a partner company of the World Economic Forum, who scrubbed FTX from its website after the scandal hit, though this, too, was ignored by the Times article. 

In fact, out of four articles on the FTX debacle published by the New York Times, only one contains mention of Bankman-Fried's donations to the Democratic Party, buried near the end of the article.