He claims that his change in political alignment and donations led to the timing of his December 2022 arrest, which he says was meant to silence him ahead of congressional testimony and an important crypto bill.
After this, he started to privately donate millions to Republican campaigns alongside his public Democratic donations. However, his newly aligned donations to Republican causes, he claims, precipitated regulatory attention that soon came knocking.
“In 2020, I was center-left. By 2022—having seen Gensler/Biden’s DOJ on crypto—I was a centrist, and (privately) donated tens of millions to Republicans,” he wrote.
Reports by CBS showed that Sam Bankman-Fried made about $40 million in political donations in the 2022 election cycle. A huge chunk of these donations (about $27 million) was made to “Protect Our Future PAC,” a group that spent $24.2 million to campaign for 19 Democratic House candidates.
Back to the GETTR post, Bankman-Fried contends that his arrest was carefully timed. He says it came just weeks before a crypto regulation bill he had been working on was set for a vote and on the eve of the hearing where he was expected to testify before Congress.
However, the internal SEC messages during the relevant period were destroyed or lost, as former SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s government-issued phone underwent an enterprise wipe that erased all texts between October 2022 and September 2023. The SEC Office of Inspector General confirmed that data on the device was deleted, attributing the wipe to automated IT policy and failure to sync the phone to SEC systems.
