[☕️ SUPERHEROES ☙ Thursday, December 15, 2022 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠 Trump teases announcement; Biden drives Saudis to our enemies; celebrity and royal SADS deaths; Australia leads the war against SADS; no bail for Bankman-Fried and testimony leaks; freed covid docs. Jeff Childers]
...🔥 Sam Bankman-Fried, notorious founder of collapsed crypto exchange FTX, was scheduled to testify Tuesday before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services. But late Monday afternoon, he was arrested in the Bahamas, at the request of the U.S. government.
On Tuesday, Newsmax ran a story headlined, “FTX Founder Denied Bail in the Bahamas.” Whoops!
Bahamas Chief Magistrate JoyAnn Ferguson-Pratt denied bushy-headed Sam Bankman-Fried’s petition to be released on bail, citing a “great” risk of flight — you don’t say — and ordered the former FTX CEO to be holed up with the Caribbean nation’s department of corrections until February 8th.
Sam, 30, protested the decision, telling Chief Magistrate Ferguson-Pratt that he couldn’t go to jail, mostly because he is vegan, and also because he’s ‘depressed.’ His Stanford law professor mother, Barbara, laughed when prosecutors described Sam as a ‘fugitive’. Sam also denied that he’d ever done anything wrong, and told the court he was planning to tell Congress that he could repay all of the people who have lost money ‘tomorrow’ if his assets are unfrozen, despite previously filing for bankruptcy.
Sam will be visiting with a nice facility known as Fox Hill, the Bahamas’ only prison. The UK Daily Mail described the jail as being well-known for overcrowding and unsanitary conditions, even describing it as a “third world hellhole.”
But politicians breathed a sigh of relief at Bankman-Fried’s timely arrest on Monday, which helpfully prevented him from testifying before Congress on Tuesday. The SEC’s criminal complaint, also filed the day before his scheduled testimony also helpfully gives Sam a new Miranda defense against any self-incriminating testimony — a defense which didn’t exist before the complaint had been filed.
It’s surprising how aggressively DOJ prosecutors moved to stop Sam from making any self-incriminating statements in his sworn Congressional testimony, which would have been admissible and likely extremely useful to prosecutors at trial, had they just waited one more day. Normally, prosecutors LOVE letting criminal defendants talk.
Not this time. Shut up, Sam!
During the Congressional hearing, which proceeded without the benefit of Sam’s testimony, the court-appointed Chapter 11 restructuring officer testified that the multi-billion-dollar company was using QUICKBOOKS to keep track of its finances.
I didn’t know that the data entry forms in Quickbooks even had room for numeric entries in the billions. It’s laughable, of course. But note that Quickbooks is well-known for allowing users to change entries without any audit trail.
So. https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/superheroes-thursday-december-15
