Campaign-Finance Charges Are Back on the Menu

I didn’t really have anything prepared to write about this week, but the Department of Justice is on it. Prosecutors told the judge overseeing Sam Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial that they intend to fold campaign-finance allegations into a wire fraud charge, after announcing they would have to drop the campaign-finance charge itself due to treaty obligations with the Bahamas.

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The narrative

We are back in court on Friday as Sam Bankman-Fried learns whether he will have to report to jail ahead of his trial that’s scheduled for October.

Why it matters

This hearing could provide a view into Judge Lewis Kaplan’s thoughts on Bankman-Fried’s activities over the past few months, as well as hint at what we may see when the trial itself begins.

Breaking it down

First off: Please allow me to quote myself:

“That doesn’t mean the U.S. Department of Justice is letting the FTX founder off on alleged criminal conduct, however — and campaign-finance charges could still be tried later.”

Well now we know that the Justice Department does indeed want to bring the campaign-finance allegations, and it’s not going to let not being able to charge the specific statute be a barrier to doing so.

I suspect there are about 196 reasons why the Justice Department might want to dive more deeply into this specific set of allegations.

Bankman-Fried’s team hasn’t yet responded to this week’s letter from the Justice Department, but we are going to hear from them later on Friday when the former FTX CEO shows up in court to learn whether he will be sent back to jail ahead of his trial in October.

Obviously, I’ve written about this before, and so I’m not going to get too deep into it now, but here are the highlights: Bankman-Fried is accused of violating his bond conditions in trying to tamper with multiple witnesses as well as of other shady behavior. The Justice Department says that he has abused his privilege in being allowed to spend his pretrial time at his parents’ home, and therefore, it wants to put him back into custody.

The defense claims that Bankman-Fried has done nothing improper, although his lawyers admitted that he did indeed share his…