The US
Department of Justice has responded to claims by FTX Founder Sam
Bankman-Fried’s lawyers that prosecutors are dumping “millions of pages” of
discovery materials or potential evidence on the embattled crypto entrepreneur
less than six weeks before his criminal trial billed for October 3. In a letter sent on Friday to Judge Lewis
Kaplan, who is presiding over the case, Bankman’s legal team had claimed that
prosecutors produced “an additional 4 million pages of discovery” without plans
to make them available to the former FTX CEO for review.
In another
letter sent yesterday (Monday), the lawyers further claimed that US prosecutors
also produced another 3.7 million pages of discovery. They noted that producing
these materials while Bankman-Fried is currently under detention at the
Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn, “is plainly inadequate” and violates
the former FTX boss’ right to participate in preparing for his defence. They,
therefore, urged the court to stop prosecutors from using evidence produced
after July 1 during Bankman-Fried’s trial.
However, in
a new letter addressed to Judge Kaplan on Monday, Damian Williams, the US
Attorney for the Southern District of New York, urged the court to dismiss the
request, noting that the potential evidence was gathered from Bankman-Fried’s
Google accounts and he and his legal team have had access to them for
months.
“The
defendant’s representations are distorted to the point of being misleading,”
William said. “The 4 million pages referenced in the defendant’s August 25,
2023 letter are materials that the government obtained from Google in response
to a search warrant for the defendant’s own Google accounts.”
To buttress
this point, Williams noted that Bankman-Fried shared details from the Google
accounts with the New York Times when he exposed personal details about
Caroline Elision, his former romantic partners and the ex-CEO of FTX’s sister
trading firm, Alameda Research. The Attorney the 3.7 million pages of evidence
claimed to have been produced by the prosecuting team “constitutes a
duplicative subset of prior productions.” He added that Bankman-Fried’s legal
team “is literally double counting to inflate the amount of discovery the Government
has produced.”
