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FTX Scandal is Tip of Iceberg: How Corruption Flourishes on the Hill & in Executive Residence

By Ekaterina Blinova – Samizdat – 03.12.2022

The FTX scandal is continuing to reverberate through the Capitol’s corridors and Wall Street’s halls. Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the now-collapsed crypto trading company FTX, is facing criminal inquiries, lawsuits, and other legal repercussions. The question, however, is how it all got to this point.

FTX was a Bahamas-based cryptocurrency exchange which allows customers to trade crypto or digital currencies for other assets, such as conventional fiat money or other digital currencies. It was founded in 2019 by American entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and quickly came to prominence, in a short period becoming the fifth-biggest by trade volume in 2022, and the second-largest by holdings.

However, the global crypto exchange abruptly collapsed on November 8, soon after the midterms, with traders withdrawing $6 billion in crypto tokens from the platform in just 72 hours. On November 11, 2022, FTX, FTX.US, Alameda Research, and more than 100 affiliates filed for bankruptcy in Delaware. In just days, Bankman-Fried’s assets plummeted from $16 billion to zero.

On November 12, FTX claimed that it had seen “unauthorized transactions” with around $473 million worth of cryptoassets being withdrawn from the crypto exchange wallets “in suspicious circumstances,” according to blockchain analytics firm Elliptic. Still, Elliptic highlighted that it could not confirm that the tokens had been particularly stolen.

John Ray III, the new CEO of FTX, who is helping clean up the crypto exchange collapse, stated in court documents on November 17: “Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.”

Some US media outlets suggested that the FTX mess might not be stemming from financial errors, but fraud. They referred to Enron, an infamous American energy company from Houston, Texas. Enron resorted to accounting fraud, hid the company’s financial losses in shell companies, and marked future potential profits as actual profits in order to make money at all costs.

“The smartest guys in the room,” former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers told an American broadcaster while comparing Enron and FTX. “Not just financial error but – certainly from the reports – whiffs of fraud. Stadium namings very early in a company’s history. Vast explosion of wealth that nobody quite understands where it comes from.”

Was SBF in Bed With Democrats?

There is nothing new in the fact that some American endeavors have turned out to be apparent scams. What’s disturbing is SBF and FTX’s ties to Washington’s power circles.

“Sam Bankman-Fried was the son of two prominent Stanford University lawyers,” Robert Bishop, a retired Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and business executive, told Sputnik. “Joe Bankman’s specialty is tax law and Barbara Fried, whose focus is feminist legal theory and political progressivism. The parents are big supporters of the Democratic Party. Barbara Fried was the co-founder of Mind the Gap, a Silicon Valley PAC that supports Democratic candidates.”

According to the US corporate media, Mind the Gap funneled over $20 million to Democratic candidates ahead of the 2018 midterms.

For his part, SBF poured over $5 million into Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign and gave Democrats around $37 million for the 2022 midterms, being second only to American-Hungarian mogul George Soros ($128 million). In May 2022, Bankman-Fried pledged to donate “north of $100 million” to Democrats in the 2024 presidential race.

Furthermore, on April 22 and May 12, 2022, SBF met with top Biden adviser Steve Ricchetti in the White House, the Washington Free Beacon, which obtatined White House visitor logs, reported on November 11. SBF’s brother, Gabe Bankman-Fried, also visited the executive residence on March 7, 2022.

It appears that the Democrats had no scruples about taking SBF’s money and never questioned where it came from and whether his business operated legally. In contrast, US federal prosecutors had started to probe the cryptocurrency empire months before its collapse.

“SBF ran FTX offshore, first in Hong Kong and then to the Bahamas to skirt US regulations and governance,” said Bishop. “Nonetheless, he ran afoul since FTX was not a licensed money transmitter in 49 US states. Also, FTX offered up to 8% return on deposits, securities and cyber currencies. That is an authority granted to banks and runs afoul of US Treasury regulations.”

Moreover, FTX’s bankruptcy filing discloses that in the 2021 IRS tax return, FTX lost $3.7 billion, Bishop tweeted on November 20.

Meanwhile, FTX also cooperated with the US-aligned Ukrainian government: FTX helped launch crypto donation platform Aid for Ukraine in March 2022. The initiative was powered by the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, FTX, and Everstake, a decentralized staking provider. FTX set itself as the central clearing house for cryptocurrency donations to Kiev. The endeavor is reported to have collected at least $60 million.

The Gateway Pundit, a US alternative media outlet, alleged that FTX could have been used to launder billions of US aid dollars for Democrats through Ukraine. It was also suggested that FTX’s donations to the Democratic Party could be illegal under Executive Order 13848, which cracks down on foreign interference in an election: FTX, which also ran a lot of affiliated organizations, was housed in a foreign country.

“When stories are too good to be true and offer swift pathways to immediate financial and/or political gain, too many people let their guards down,” Charles Ortel, a Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist, told Sputnik. “Moreover, regulators of markets and of political campaigns/corruption are (purposefully) not equipped to expose and prosecute complex scams. This explains FTX/Ukraine and it certainly explains apparent inaction against the Clinton family and their raft of false-front charities.”

All major American mainstream outlets rushed to rubbish the story of FTX’s money-laundering for the Dems. Still, suspicions persist, since it’s not the first time that the US’ rich and powerful have used questionable and murky schemes to earn money and bolster their influence through “pay-for-play” schemes.

Black Lives Matter Fund Scandal

One glaring example is the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF). In February 2022, the charity found itself in the crosshairs of US state attorneys general over alleged fraud. Indiana, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Virginia have all revoked the BLMNGF’s charitable registration.

For their part, California and Washington threatened to hold the charity’s leaders personally liable for not revealing what exactly happened to tens of millions of dollars in donations amid the George Floyd protests in 2020.

In summer 2020, BLMGNF enjoyed a financial bonanza. However, Ortel and Bishop told Sputnik at the time that the charity’s fundraising activities reeked of fraud, given the financial non-transparency and questionable structure.

Furthermore, Bishop did not rule out that Democratic Party fundraising groups are cashing in on BLMGNF donations. The retired CPA cited the fact that once a netizen pushes a donate button on Black Lives Matter’s official website, he or she is redirected to ActBlue.com, a Democratic and progressive fundraising group.

“I donated to BLM Global Network Foundation to trace the disposition of funds, and it passed through the leftist organization ActBlue’s credit card system,” Bishop told Sputnik in June 2020.

ActBlue then admitted that it took donations and then forwarded them to Thousand Currents, the organization that was meant to raise money for BLMGNF. One might ask why BLMGNF used such a scheme. Bishop suggested that the Democratic fundraising group took a cut of all donations before passing it along.

However, it is not limited to Democrats, Bishop noted: “The Republicans run an equivalent called Winred for collecting and transmitting donations. So far it hasn’t had any major scandals like ActBlue.”

“Nonprofits are another tool that Democrats use to fund elections, election ballot harvesting, and organize and fund protests that support their agenda. One nefarious organization that deserves attention is The Action Network,” the retired CPA said.

Clinton Foundation’s ‘Pay-to-Play’

Yet another questionable Democratic non-profit is the Clinton Foundation – run by Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton – which is suspected of taking money from American and foreign tycoons and even foreign governments in exchange for sweet deals and backing.

Ortel, who has been investigating the Clinton Foundation’s alleged fraud for several years, draws attention to the fact that the charity’s donations have dropped 90% since 2014, after the Clintons lost political influence.

The analyst argued that the Clintons’ fund was neither validly organized nor properly audited. In any other case those flaws would have caused the IRS to shut down the charity at inception, but not the Clinton Foundation, apparently because Bill Clinton had been the US president until 20 January 2001, according to Ortel.

Even though the FBI, the IRS, and the Department of Justice performed wide-ranging investigations into the Clinton charities, they somehow failed to notice obvious flaws, the analyst noted.

Ortel fears that foreign governments could have influenced the US State Department’s decisions during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state: between 2010 and 2013, the foundation got $20 million in funds from mostly foreign governments.

One might wonder whether Clinton Foundation charities were also used for Hillary’s presidential campaigns.

“Political campaigns are expensive in the United States, especially in major media markets,” Ortel said. “These must be paid for using after-tax funds, and not through tax-exempt charities. But, if regulators are politicized and if donors and candidates know this, then the crooked game goes on and the public is the chief loser. Moreover, politicians can now dole out billions of dollars to donor-owned companies and to donor-connected charities. So there are ample motivations to fund campaigns illegally to be repaid many times over, also illegally.”

Bidens’ Influence Peddling

Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” as well as the Republican congressional investigation described a disturbing picture of influence-peddling by the first son. The bombshell story of Hunter’s laptop, reportedly abandoned by the younger Biden in a Delaware repair shop, was first released by the New York Post in October 2020.

At the time, the story was shredded as “Russian disinformation” by the Democratic lawmakers, US mainstream press, and Big Tech, apparently to save Joe Biden from a potential election defeat. Later, however, forensic investigators and mainstream press admitted that files originating from Hunter’s laptop were genuine and 100% belonged to Hunter.

Damning documents suggest that he not only used his father’s name to get generous gifts, hefty salaries, and top-level positions (in fields he had zero experience in), but also got a “10-percent” or more share, presumably, for Joe Biden, referred to in Hunter’s emails as the “big guy.”

In October 2022, Republican Senator from Iowa Chuck Grassley stated that new whistleblower allegations suggest President Joe Biden “was aware of Hunter Biden’s business arrangements and may have been involved in some of them.” Earlier that month, a team of cyber detectives brought together by ex-Trump aide Garrett Ziegler claimed that they had found at least 459 legal violations by the US president’s son and his associates after a year-long examination of the “laptop from hell.”

BLM, FTX, Clinton Foundation & Hunter’s Schemes Just Tip of Iceberg

“A safe assumption is that actual frauds such as BLM and FTX are but a tiny fraction of total frauds,” Ortel said. “As a guess, total frauds are perhaps one hundred times greater if not even larger, just in the US, not considering worldwide scams. In context, unregulated globalism is a gigantic scam in that it benefits a small handful of insiders while punishing most workers in high cost nations.”

According to the Wall Street analyst, “major powers might wish to empower competent professionals as bounty hunters to expose and then seize corrupt payoffs wherever these occur and then use net proceeds for truly sensible government pursuits.”

“Instead, criminal grifters see that it is far easier to steal using fake charities than it is to make lawful money in the for-profit world. So the crooked games continue and the swamp rats get bolder and bolder, for now,” Ortel concluded.

December 3, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | 2 Comments

The collapse of FTX is an embarrassment for globalists

By Lucy Wyatt | TCW Defending Freedom | November 23, 2022

The spectacular crash of FTX, discussed in TCW yesterday, is developing into a scandal of epic proportions. On Friday November 11 FTX filed for bankruptcy, owing in excess of $3.1billion to more than a million customers, including major institutional investors such as BlackRock and Sequoia Capital. After a brief two and half years of trading, FTX’s rise and fall has left many with more questions than answers. Not least because the scandal is revealing more than just a loss of money, exposing much that the globalists might prefer to remain hidden.

There are two schools of thought. One is that FTX, the world’s second biggest crypto exchange, was run by youthful MIT graduates who got out of their depth. The second is that FTX may have been set up as a scam from the beginning. Without doubt, FTX had the fingerprints of the globalists all over it. It was once heavily promoted by the World Economic Forum, with its own page on their website describing FTX as a ‘cryptocurrency exchange built by traders, for traders’ and its founder regularly attended Davos gatherings. The key question that needs answering is cui bono, who benefited from FTX’s activities? Knowing that might give some clue as to its purpose.

Certainly, in respect of the age of those running the company, FTX was ideal. Globalists have a penchant for youth (vide WEF’s Young Global Leaders programme). Having the young nominally run things is a useful ploy. They attract other young who then form armies of ‘wokeists’ to play the role of useful idiots, as we see in Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil.  Youthfulness also creates its own tyranny in the sense that it cannot be challenged without appearing to stand in the way of ‘progress’. Thus the adults in the room become so overawed by the presence of these wunderkind that they forget to ask the obvious questions, such as ‘how much help did you have to get started?’

In the case of the Swedish doom goblin, we are supposed to believe that she spontaneously started skolstrejk för klimatet. Yet curiously she has moments when she appeared incapable of answering questions about climate without a script.

Back in the USA, Mark Zuckerberg apparently built Facebook on the back of some Harvard campus networking in 2004, even though coincidentally the Pentagon had begun work on something similar called Lifelog. Facebook, of course, has the great advantage in terms of collecting data that its users voluntarily provide so much detail. This summer, as if to emphasise the close ties with intelligence services, Zuckerberg confessed to Joe Rogan that Facebook had followed FBI guidance over the Hunter Biden laptop affair and in effect ‘shadow banned’ the story. Even before that, the shine had come off Zuckerberg as his holding company Meta has continued to lose value; now 11,000 employees have been sacked. 

Then we have FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried (aka SBF or as some are calling him ‘less bankman; more fried’ and even ‘Sam Bankster Fraud’), the 30-year-old founder of the crypto exchange.

SBF ticked a lot of boxes for the globalists. He was part of the ‘Effective Altruism‘ movement which claims to be about ‘doing good better’. Which meant that he could use some of his $16billion net worth on not-for-profit charities dear to the globalists focused on planet-saving projects. In July 2021 he set up the FTX Foundation which spawned a number of initiatives such as research into stopping future pandemics; FTX Climate, a fund for research into climate change; the FTX Future Fund with areas of interest such as Artificial Intelligence and the risks from bioweapons, and FTX Community, concerned with poverty, animal welfare and community outreach. All good philanthropic stuff, the sort that globalists like.

Institutional investors were reassured by SBF’s collaboration with Congress to develop regulation for the crypto sphere. With such high moral standards and lots of virtue-signalling – saving the planet, working to improve regulation around crypto, hanging out with Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, what could possibly go wrong?

Unfortunately for investors, as bankruptcy proceedings are currently revealing, SBF and his colleagues were involved in an unethical and fraudulent operation. Little did investors realise that SBF was in effect running a Ponzi scheme which secretly reallocated client funds out of FTX into Alameda Research, SBF’s trading company, as collateral to cover risky trades. Because there was no oversight (FTX lacked a board of governance) and no one asked hard questions, FTX ran out of liquidity and became insolvent.

It could be said that SBF’s absence of moral boundaries was reflected in his unconventional lifestyle living in the Bahamas in a polyamorous set-up with several of his colleagues. His supposed girlfriend who was running Alameda Research, Caroline Ellison, is on record describing it as being like an ‘imperial Chinese harem’. He also had no problem being a slush fund for the Democrat Party, being the second largest donor after George Soros; or being involved in financing Ukraine. FTX helped the Ukraine government to set up a crypto donations website, ‘Aid for Ukraine‘, which has led to accusations of US tax money sent to Ukraine being cycled back to the US via FTX.

Those who believe that FTX was a deliberate scam from the start point to SBF’s work with Congress as the main reason for FTX’s creation. It suited those who regard the decentralised nature of crypto as a threat to centralised financial controls to have a Trojan Horse insider who could work to undermine the crypto space. Even crashing FTX helps their cause as now all crypto is tarred with the Ponzi accusation and, having lost money, institutional investors will stay away from the space. At the end of the day, these are all power games. SBF may well have been a victim of larger forces. He served his purpose and had his fun in the sun.

Meanwhile we should all be more wary of wunderkinder. Not least the World Economic Forum, which has deleted FTX from its website and doesn’t seem keen to discuss the matter further. I wonder why?

November 24, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , , , , | 2 Comments

The Covid/Crypto Connection: The Grim Saga of FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried

By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Browstone Institute | November 18, 2022

A series of revealing texts and tweets by Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced CEO of FTX, the once high-flying but now belly-up crypto exchange, had the following to say about his image as a do-gooder: it is a “dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us.”

Very interesting. He had the whole game going: a vegan worried about climate change, supports every manner of justice (racial, social, environmental) except that which is coming for him, and shells out millions to worthy charities associated with the left. He also bought plenty of access and protection in D.C., enough to make his shady company the toast of the town.

As part of the mix, there is this thing called pandemic planning. We should know what that is by now: it means you can’t be in charge of your life because there are bad viruses out there. As bizarre as it seems, and for reasons that are still not entirely clear, favoring lockdowns, masks, and vaccine passports became part of the woke ideological stew.

This is particularly strange because covid restrictions have been proven, over and over, to harm all the groups about whom woke ideology claims to care so deeply. That includes even animal rights: who can forget the Danish mink slaughter of 2020?

Regardless, it’s just true. Masking became a symbol of being a good person, same as vaccinating, veganism, and flying into fits at the drop of a hat over climate change. None of this has much if anything to do with science or reality. It’s all tribal symbolism in the name of group political solidarity. And FTX was pretty good at it, throwing around hundreds of millions to prove the company’s loyalty to all the right causes.

Among them included the pandemic-planning racket. That’s right: there were deep connections between FTX and Covid that have been cultivated for two years. Let’s have a look.

Earlier this year, the New York Times trumpeted a study that showed no benefit at all to the use of Ivermectin. It was supposed to be definitive. The study was funded by FTX. Why? Why was a crypto exchange so interested in the debunking of repurposed drugs in order to drive governments and people into the use of patented pharmaceuticals, even those like Ramdesivir that didn’t actually work? Inquiring minds would like to know.

Regardless, the study and especially the conclusions turned out to be bogus. David Henderson and Charles Hooper further point out an interesting fact: “Some of the researchers involved in the TOGETHER trial had performed paid services for Pfizer, Merck, Regeneron, and AstraZeneca, all companies involved in developing COVID-19 therapeutics and vaccines that nominally compete with ivermectin.”

For some reason, SBF just knew that he was supposed to oppose repurposed drugs, though he knew nothing about the subject at all. He was glad to fund a poor study to make it true and the New York Times played its assigned role in the whole performance.

It was just the start. A soft-peddling Washington Post investigation found that Sam and his brother Gabe, who ran a hastily founded Covid nonprofit, “have spent at least $70 million since October 2021 on research projects, campaign donations and other initiatives intended to improve biosecurity and prevent the next pandemic.”

I can do no better than to quote the Washington Post:

The shock waves from FTX’s free fall have rippled across the public health world, where numerous leaders in pandemic-preparedness had received funds from FTX funders or were seeking donations.

In other words, the “public health world” wanted more chances to say: “Give me money so I can keep advocating to lock more people down!” Alas, the collapse of the exchange, which reportedly holds a mere 0.001% of the assets it once claimed to have, makes that impossible.

Among the organizations most affected is Guarding Against Pandemics, the advocacy group headed by Gabe that took out millions in ads to back the Biden administration’s push for $30 billion in funding. As Influence Watch notes: “Guarding Against Pandemics is a left-leaning advocacy group created in 2020 to support legislation that increases government investment in pandemic prevention plans.”

Truly it gets worse:

FTX-backed projects ranged from $12 million to champion a California ballot initiative to strengthen public health programs and detect emerging virus threats (amid lackluster support, the measure was punted to 2024), to investing more than $11 million on the unsuccessful congressional primary campaign of an Oregon biosecurity expert, and even a $150,000 grant to help Moncef Slaoui, scientific adviser for the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed” vaccine accelerator, write his memoir.

Leaders of the FTX Future Fund, a spinoff foundation that committed more than $25 million to preventing bio-risks, resigned in an open letter last Thursday, acknowledging that some donations from the organization are on hold.

And worse:

The FTX Future Fund’s commitments included $10 million to HelixNano, a biotech start-up seeking to develop a next-generation coronavirus vaccine; $250,000 to a University of Ottawa scientist researching how to eradicate viruses from plastic surfaces; and $175,000 to support a recent law school graduate’s job at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “Overall, the Future Fund was a force for good,” said Tom Inglesby, who leads the Johns Hopkins center, lamenting the fund’s collapse. “The work they were doing was really trying to get people to think long-term … to build pandemic preparedness, to diminish the risks of biological threats.”

More:

Guarding Against Pandemics spent more than $1 million on lobbying Capitol Hill and the White House over the past year, hired at least 26 lobbyists to advocate for a still-pending bipartisan pandemic plan in Congress and other issues, and ran advertisements backing legislation that included pandemic-preparedness funding. Protect Our Future, a political action committee backed by the Bankman-Fried brothers, spent about $28 million this congressional cycle on Democratic candidates “who will be champions for pandemic prevention,” according to the group’s webpage.

I think you get the idea. This is all a racket. FTX, founded in 2019 following Biden’s announcement of his bid for the presidency, by the son of the co-founder of a major Democrat Party political action committee called Mind the Gap, was nothing but a magic-bean Ponzi scheme. It seized on the lockdowns for political, media, and academic cover. Its economic rationale was as nonexistent as its books. The first auditor to have a look has written:

“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.”

It was the worst example of a phony perpetual-motion machine: a token to back a company that itself was backed by the token, which in turn was backed by nothing but political fashion and woke ideology that roped in Larry David, Tom Brady,  Katy Perry, Tony Blair, and Bill Clinton to provide a cloak of legitimacy.

Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, and Sam Bankman-Fried in the Bahamas April 2022

And you can’t make this stuff up anymore: FTX had a close relationship with the World Economic Forum and was the favored crypto exchange of the Ukrainian government. It looks for all the world like the money-laundering operation of the Democratic National Committee and the entire lockdown lobby.

I will tell you what infuriates me about these billions in fake money and deep corruptions of politics and science. For years now, my anti-lockdown friends have been hounded for being funded by supposed dark money that simply doesn’t exist. Many brave scientists, journalists, attorneys, and others gave up great careers to stand for principle, exposing the damage caused by the lockdowns, and this is how they have been treated: smeared and displaced.

Brownstone has adopted as many in this diaspora as possible for fellowships as far as the resources (real ones, contributed by caring individuals) can go. But we cannot come anywhere near what is necessary for justice, much less compete with the 8-digit funding regime of the other side.

The Great Barrington Declaration was signed at the offices of the American Institute for Economic Research, which, apparently, six years prior had received a long-spent $60,000 grant from the Koch Foundation, and thus became a “Koch-funded libertarian think tank” which supposedly discredited the GBD, even though none of the authors received a dime.

This gibberish and slander has gone on for years – at the urging of government officials! – and Brownstone itself faces much of the same nonsense, with every manner of fantasy about our supposed power, money, and influence swarming the darker realms of the social-media dudgeons. In fact, the actual Koch Foundation (probably unbeknownst to its founder) was funding the pro-lockdown work of Neil Ferguson, whose ridiculous modeling terrified the world into denying human rights to billions of people the world over.

All this time – while every type of vicious propaganda was unleashed on the world – the pro-lockdown and pro-mandate lobby, including fake scientists and fake studies, were benefiting from millions and billions thrown around by operators of a Ponzi scheme based on cheating, fraud, and $15 billion in leveraged funds that didn’t exist while its principle actors were languishing in a drug-infested $40 million villa in the Bahamas even as they preened about the virtues of “effective altruism” and their pandemic-planning machinery that has now fallen apart.

Then the New York Times, instead of decrying this criminal conspiracy for what it is, writes puff pieces on the founder and how he let his quick-growing company grow too far, too fast, and now needs mainly rest, bless his heart.

The rest of us are left with the bill for this obvious scam that implausibly links crypto and Covid. But just as the money was based on nothing but puffed air, the damage they have wrought on the world is all too real: a lost generation of kids, declined lifespans, millions missing from the workforce, a calamitous fall in public health, millions of kids in poverty due to supply-chain breakages, 19 straight months of falling real incomes, historically high increases in debt, and a dramatic fall in human morale the world over.

So yes, we should all be furious and demand full accountability at the very least. Whatever the final truth, it is likely to be far worse than even the egregious facts listed above. It’s bad enough that lockdowns wrecked life and liberty. To discover that vast support for them was funded by fraud and fakery is a deeper level of corruption that not even the most cynical among us could have imagined.

Jeffrey A. Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, is an economist and author. He has written 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press.

November 18, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , | 2 Comments

How are FTX crypto exchange, DNC corruption and ’Ukraine aid’ connected

By Drago Bosnic | November 18, 2022

On October 11, FTX Group, the world’s second largest cryptocurrency exchange, filed for bankruptcy in the United States. The company’s CEO Sam Bankman-Fried resigned, leading to a mind-blowing collapse of one of the top entities in the cryptocurrency industry. The company said that Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, “will remain to assist in an orderly transition.” John J. Ray III, the lawyer who oversaw the liquidation of Enron, took his place. The fall of FTX sent shockwaves throughout the cryptocurrency market, as many became wary that a similar crash could happen to other companies in the industry. However, in the immediate aftermath of the crash, it became clear that there is an unexpected connection between FTX, the Democratic Party and the so-called “Ukraine aid, fueling speculation as to what might have caused the crash.

According to a report by The Epoch Times, back in March, the Kiev regime established a crypto donations website, allowing it to convert cryptocurrencies into fiat money that would then be deposited at the National Bank of Ukraine. The goal was to raise $200 million, of which $60 million was collected by October. The money was to be used to procure assets for the Neo-Nazi junta forces, including digital rifle scopes, medical supplies, field rations, fuel, military clothing, etc. The initiative, called “Aid for Ukraine,” gained the support of FTX, staking outfit Everstake, and the local Kuna exchange. It also has the direct support of the Kiev regime’s Ministry of Digital Transformation.

“At the onset of the conflict in Ukraine, FTX felt the need to provide assistance in any way it could. By setting up payment rails and facilitating the conversion of crypto donations into fiat currency, we have given the Central Bank of Ukraine the ability to deliver aid and resources to the people who need it most,” Sam Bankman-Fried said in a statement in March. “We are grateful for the opportunity to work with Sergey [Vasylchuk] and the Everstake team as they continue to work tirelessly in helping Ukrainians as they suffer from this conflict,” the former FTX CEO concluded.

The move seems to have become a perfect opportunity for the corrupt officials in both Washington DC and the Kiev regime to funnel much of the “Ukraine aid” funds back to the US. While it’s not entirely clear if reports that the Neo-Nazi junta officials ‘invested’ in FTX are accurate, there are credible issues regarding the possibility that the Kiev regime was using the funds donated through FTX to funnel money back to the DNC coffers. The fact that Sam Bankman-Fried was the second-largest Democratic Party donor in 2021-2022, donating nearly $40 million, makes this possibility even likelier.

The Epoch Times report further states that in the first half of 2022, the former FTX CEO donated $865,000 to the Democratic National Committee, $66,500 to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, and $250,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In addition, Sam Bankman-Fried made multiple visits to the White House, where he met with White House counselor Steve Ricchetti on April 22 and May 12, according to the visitors log. On May 13, he also met with Charlotte Butash, a policy adviser to the White House deputy chief of staff. Mark Wetjen, the head of policy and regulatory strategy at FTX, who served as a commissioner on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) under former US President Barack Obama, also attended some of the meetings.

The connections between FTX, the Kiev regime and the DNC are quite clear and raise a lot of questions. Billionaire Elon Musk was also puzzled by the revelation. As one Twitter user aksed whether FTX was being used to launder money for the Democratic Party, Musk replied it was “a question worth asking.” On November 14, Alex Bornyakov, the Kiev regime’s Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation, dismissed the claims, although he failed to explain how exactly they were a “false narrative”.

“A fundraising crypto foundation @_AidForUkraine used @FTX_Official to convert crypto donations into fiat in March,” Bornyakov tweeted. “Ukraine’s gov never invested any funds into FTX. The whole narrative that Ukraine allegedly invested in FTX, who donated money to Democrats is nonsense, frankly.”

However, Fox News political commentator Jesse Watters thinks the evidence, although not conclusive at the moment, cannot be ignored and that the DNC’s motives to send billions of dollars to the Kiev regime are not so altruistic after all.

“Democrats send money to Ukraine, Ukraine sends money to FTX, and FTX sends money to the Democrat’s campaigns. I don’t know if this is war profiteering or money laundering, I don’t even know, but it needs to be investigated.” Watters said.

Although cryptocurrency experts agree that the scheme most likely wasn’t the primary reason for the downfall of FTX, the consequences of the scandal cannot be ignored and will most likely cause further issues on cryptocurrency markets. It’s also yet another indicator of how corruption is hidden behind the “aid for Ukraine” narrative.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

November 18, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Deception | , , , , | 2 Comments