| Bankman-Fried
Trial Trabucco
On Signal on
Final Day
While BlockFi
Cries Crypto
Creeps
by
Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Book
Substack
LITERARY SDNY,
Oct 13 -- Thirteenth day of
October and on the stand in
the SBF trial trial was the
former CEO of the now-bankrupt
BlockFi, Zac Prince.
They'd lent a
billion dollars to FTX and
Alameda and lost $650 million
of it when the dust so quickly
settled.
SBF's lawyer
Cohen, in another meandering
cross examination, asked if he
hadn't known that FTT was
illiquid.
But how was that
the point? Had he known that
FTX was taking customers
deposits and letting Alameda
use them, to make huge "loans"
to Sam and the
others?
Speaking of
Sam(s), where was Sam
Trabucco? It emerged -- Kurt
Wheelock spotted -- that Sam
Trabucco, who supposedly left
Alameda in August 2022 before
the sh*t hit the fan, was
still on a four-person Signal
chat on D-Day, November 5,
2022, the one in which Ellison
said she'd offer to buy all of
CZ's FTT at $22.
Some
replied that maybe he'd just
been left on the chat. That
seemed unlikely, given that
only four people were on it:
Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline
Elison, Ben Xie and.. Sam
Trabucco.
Then
others argued that Sam
Trabucco, at least in the part
of the chat the prosecutors
had put into evidence, had not
"said" anything. But he should
have been and will should be
indicted not for his role on
November 6 but for his active
involvement in the China
bribe: conspiracy to violate
the FCPA. It was open and
shut.
Prosecutorial discretion, Kurt
was finally told. But he'd
seen this before, when they
went after those who paid
bribes in the UN but not those
who took them, who remained
there, all the way to the
top.
Kurt's
view was that while
prosecutorial discretion might
knock down in court a defense
of selective prosecution, it
was something that had to be
looked at, in detail.
These were
offices that wielded power,
power to put people in prison
or to allow some criminals to
go free. But to cover them,
journalistically, people
needed access and that led to
a certain kind of
stories.
To say
they were appointed by the
party in power was just the
start of it. The issue has
come up in the Ghislaine
Maxwell case, when Kurt and
others had derided the narrow
prosecution, others being
allowed to get away. But this
was different
More on this on
Substack here
More book sample
on Substack here.
Extended on Patreon here.
Book here
***
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