Sam Bankman-Fried trial update: Where’s the money?

The SBF trial finished last week with the boy wonder himself testifying, as his attorney Mark Cohen comfortably led the defendant through a benign & naive narrative they are trying to spin to the judge & jury. Below is a courtroom sketch of Mark Cohen, the completely incompetent, ineffective & overpaid defense lawyer for SBF, as depicted by CoinDesk courtroom artist/reporter Nik De.

The SBF trial was paused Monday through Wednesday last week (Oct 23-25), because Mark Cohen was testifying with lots of press, cameras, reporters, etc, in another Manhattan courtroom– specifically in the Donald Trump v. New York fraud trial. That is a civil trial in its punishment & compensation phase, as Donald Trump has already been found guilty of fraud.

DOJ prosecution cross-examination in the criminal trial of SBF is expected to begin Monday (tomorrow), with the trial possibly ending next week, allowing the jury to deliberate a verdict. If convicted, the judge is going to come down hard on SBF, with an appeal highly unlikely to change anything, meaning SBF will need a Presidential pardon to get out of jail. SBF spread a LOT of money around into dark places and Trump loves NFTs, so it could happen. The other murky, unanswered question is, “Did SBF already cut a secret deal?” Its answer is unknowable to the public, but known in inner ruling circles.

Trump pardoned dozens of criminals (pic above) at the end of his Presidency simply because they paid his under-the-table extortion money, or they pledged their undying loyalty to the Donald.

Over $8 billion in customer funds is still missing from the FTX/Alameda fraud. Everyone in crypto assumes SBF has the stolen crypto stashed away in hidden wallet(s) somewhere in dark cyberspace. SBF was allowed plenty of time to do that– as FTX collapsed last November, as he was extradited back to the US from the Bahamas, and surely after he was allowed more-than-generous bail terms by a lenient Manhattan judge who let SBF stay with his parents in Palo Alto, California and work online, even after repeated violations of his bail terms.

Obviously US intelligence was monitoring & scrutinizing SBF’s online activities, but none of this (or its findings & conclusions) have ever been revealed to the public. What was SBF doing online during those months he was out on bail?

Without question, SBF moved massive crypto transfers from the time he was held by the Bahamian police, up until his bail being revoked after he published the personal diary of key DOJ witness (& former girlfriend) Caroline Ellison, who was SBF’s partner in crime. She pleaded guilty, as did a few others at FTX/Alameda, so their prison sentences will be much lighter. But the question still remains, “Where’s the money, SBF?”

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Financial establishment rules in favor of Grayscale in SEC lawsuit

I’ve characterized this Grayscale vs SEC legal battle on social media in the past weeks as Musk (crypto) vs Buffett (traditional finance), which is an oversimplification. The CIA is also big on bitcoin, and that matters.

Bitcoin is used to funnel funds to ISIS militias (formerly Al Qaeda) in Syria & Iraq for the purpose of regime change in Damascus & Tehran, etc. Since the US-German intelligence-backed Maidan coup of 2013-14, large amounts of crypto have been funneled to leading fascists in Kiev. Those were the ‘greater forces’ in play at Jackson Hole last week, which keeps crypto alive– for now.

Every major bank CEO & financial player at Jackson Hole was consulted & listened to while this legal ruling was being decided. It was intentionally kept airtight from the corporate media, which is why you heard no reporting or analysis from any of them the entire time. Rising interest rates & working class interventions loom large over crypto’s long-term future.

If this was a ‘landmark legal decision’ (and it is), then why was there no serious reporting when policy was being debated during these past weeks? It’s because the ruling elites wanted to conspire in complete privacy on this highly sensitive matter. Elite class forces were battling one another to influence this legal ruling, and the corporate media smokescreened it, keeping the public ignorant– until they were told exactly what to say earlier today.

Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder of FTX Cryptocurrency Derivatives Exchange, departs from court in New York, US, on Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022. Bankman-Fried was released on a $250 million bail package after making his first US court appearance to face fraud charges over the collapse of FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange he co-founded. Photographer: Stephanie Keith/Bloomberg

A bitcoin exchange trade fund (ETF) has now been US government approved, that’s what all this means. The crypto industry plan is to have a centralized bitcoin exchange, where different wallet holders, blockchains, bridges, etc, can buy/sell bitcoin & convert into dollars, etc; and (eventually) add ‘ether’ & a few top stablecoins to this exchange. That’s the crypto vision. It’s no longer ‘de-fi’, which divides a segment of crypto purists. That’s the latest in crypto news & analysis.

This essay below was published concurrently in response to the Vatican supporting Russian tsarism.

Tsarist Russia was a brutal absolute autocracy, dating back to the mid-9th century. Historically, Napoleon couldn’t conquer Russia, so it remained a backwards, in-bred monarchy, in an era when the rest of Napoleonic Europe formed into bourgeois representative republics, or what we now call nation states. Germany was the last of these 19th century powers, formed in 1871 through wars, revolutions, and finally counter-revolution– like all the rest.

All the tsars were hated by the peasants throughout its history, from Russia/Ukraine, all the way to Siberia, where dissidents (industrial workers, revolutionists, etc) were exiled as criminals. This eventually led to the Russian Revolution of October 1917, when the Bolshevik Party galvanized workers in St. Petersburg, the industrial capital of Russia, and led a workers’ revolution which turned a broken 3rd-rate world power (about to be carved-up by imperialism after WW1), and transformed it into a powerful workers’ state!

It also ended the Great War, as each imperialist nation ceased its European-theater hostilities, and turned their militarism on the newly-formed Soviet government in Moscow, along with a propaganda & police campaign targeting perceived revolutionary threats in their own countries– see J Edgar Hoover. US imperialism (& the rest) aided the Whites who were led by tsarist generals, admirals, fascist Black Hundreds & other terrorist/anarchist scum. Trotsky formed and commanded the Red Army, the fighting force of the oppressed workers & peasants, which defeated the tsars reactionary forces backed by imperialism. The political leaders of the Russian Revolution were Lenin & Trotsky, who after this bloody Civil War from 1918-22, were politically isolated and eventually killed by reactionary forces in the apparatus– led by Joseph Stalin.

That is a brief history of the formation & early political degeneration of the USSR. The Vatican unapologetically endorses Russian tsarism because BOTH are remnants of feudalism & the Middle Ages, which makes for sticky politics in 2023.

The intention of Lenin & Trotsky was for this to be the FIRST workers revolution, followed by others in Europe– particularly Germany with its powerful working class & industrial might. Revolutionists, Karl Liebknecht & Rosa Luxemburg, were murdered by Wiemar secret police immediately after WW1, while Adolf Hitler was enabled– even after his failed coup attempt in November 1923. Hitler scribed his racist anti-socialist manifest Mein Kampf in prison, and then on release for good behavior, established the Nazi Party which terrorized Europe, exterminated 6 million Jews, and attempted to annihilate the Soviet Union in WW2. This wasn’t just one madman who got out of control. Hitler, like Trump, is historically cultivated by powerful reactionary forces to do its dirty work in defense of capitalist inequality in times when liberal reforms aren’t possible.

Lenin died in January 1924. It was always Trotsky’s suspicion (which he could never prove), that Stalin poisoned him. Trotsky formed his internationalist Left Opposition in 1923, to counter Stalin’s reactionary ‘socialism in one country’ theory he presented as gospel in 1924– after Lenin’s death. Stalin was better than Trotsky at forming murky alliances with reactionary politicians, since that’s who he was. Bourgeois subterfuge & laying traps was how Stalin hijacked the Bolshevik Party and defeated Trotsky to attain complete political leadership of the Communist Party. Many of the best Bolsheviks had died in the Russian civil war, and by 1929 with his Left Opposition politically isolated by a reactionary bureaucratic apparatus, Trotsky was exiled by Stalin. Trotsky would never return to the Soviet Union. He was murdered by an agent of Stalin (with help from J Edgar Hoover FBI agent, Sylvia Ageloff) in Mexico City in August 1940 at the outset of WW2 in Europe.

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Is Sam Bankman-Fried now an agent of US Intelligence?

The conspiracy theory that SBF is now an agent of US intelligence is supported by the facts and his actions since pleading “not guilty” in a Manhattan courtroom. The DOJ normally takes no prisoners in its prosecutions, unless a secret deal has been reached.

From a historical perspective, the DOJ investigations of Donald Trump have been as restrained a legal action as you will ever see, because he’s so connected to right-wing militias (which intelligence agencies view as an asset), but the DOJ still went after him to some extent for his malfeasance. SBF has the same criminal credentials, but with even more value to US intelligence, so he’s been treated with kid gloves by the DOJ & the corporate media because they’re all tied-in to the CIA Democrats.

The dictatorship of finance capital can be clearly observed in crypto. SBF & Co. have surely made secret deals, as they are being integrated into US intelligence to help move dark money to Ukraine, etc. Thus, none of the defrauded customers will see a penny of the $5B in assets the US government has claimed to have recovered (so far) in the FTX fallout.

Republicans have now setup a new committee to bail out this distressed “asset class” known as crypto, and as a result of this activity, bitcoin has moved up by ~$2K in the past few days.

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