It’s a bit of a truism in journalism that any headline that ends in a question that can be answered with “yes” or “no” will usually be answered with “no.” A few weeks ago, however, I asked “Is Sam Bankman-Fried Going to Jail?” and in a rejection of that truism, the answer was “yes.”
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The narrative
Sam Bankman-Fried went to jail last week after a federal judge revoked his bond.
Why it matters
We now know the judge really is somewhat fed up with Bankman-Fried’s actions, reading out a 20-minute order walking through why he believed the FTX founder’s bond should be revoked before actually doing it. This sets the stage for the next phase of his pretrial work: preparing for trial from behind bars.
Breaking it down
Sam Bankman-Fried looked down for several long seconds last Friday in the moments after federal Judge Lewis Kaplan announced he was revoking the FTX founder’s bail. A few feet behind him, his mother Barbara Fried looked emotional while his father Joseph Bankman stared straight ahead.
Bankman-Fried has indeed gone to jail barely two months ahead of his trial on seven different charges, including securities fraud, wire fraud, commodities fraud and money laundering.
In revoking the bond, Judge Kaplan walked through a 20-minute summary of the facts as he saw them, including both Bankman-Fried’s reach-out to FTX.US general counsel Ryne Miller – who is expected to be a witness at trial – and the more recent diary episode.
“Defendant has proposed a benign reading of [the Signal message]. It’s one I didn’t share then and it’s one I don’t share now,” Kaplan said. Later, addressing the Times report, he said “it’s now undisputed the defendant spoke to a Times reporter and entertained the reporter on the virtual eve of the article’s publication.”
The virtual private network incident came up as well, with the judge saying that while alone it wasn’t necessarily a violation of his bond terms, it spoke to a dangerous mindset.
“[Bankman-Fried is willing] to risk crossing the line in an effort to get right up to [the line], wherever it is,” he said.
Bankman-Fried’s lawyers have appealed…
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