Very shady.
When Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux was gearing up last spring for a primary battle against Georgia Democratic incumbent Rep. Lucy McBath, Bourdeaux’s campaign team flagged an alarming article inIt reported that Sam Bankman-Fried, a twentysomething cryptocurrency billionaire, was making his foray into politics as a Democratic big-money player—and he was starting with a seven-figure campaign to re-elect McBath and defeat Bourdeaux.
The collapse of Bankman-Fried’s company, the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, has revealed that his deluge of campaign cash wasn’t just shady—it may have been stolen. Federal prosecutors for the Southern District of New York allege that Bankman-Fried directed “tens of millions” in illegal campaign contributions using the money customers had deposited in FTX’s platforms to grow their savings, not fund political campaigns.
The list includes Rep. Shontel Brown and soon-to-be Reps. Robert Garcia , Jasmine Crockett , Maxwell Alejandro Frost , and Morgan McGarvey , all of whom received at least $900,000 in outside spending from Protect Our Future PAC. Come January, there will be a caucus of lawmakers on Capitol Hill who, if they don’t owe their seats entirely to Bankman-Fried, at least saw their paths to power paved with stolen, illegal campaign contributions.
In two especially contentious Democratic primaries, the candidates who were on the other side of Bankman-Fried’s spending have watched with outrage—and a dash of validation—as the onetime crypto baron has spectacularly unraveled. In the end, Bankman-Fried did not spend more to unseat Bourdeaux. He did not need to: McBath was the beneficiary of another $2 million in outside backing from Everytown For Gun Safety, the organization where she previously worked. Bourdeaux, meanwhile, got $0 in outside backing.
“It was pretty early on that we’d heard whispers of this crypto billionaire dude,” Allam said in an interview with The Daily Beast. “At that time, we were just hearing about them as the crypto bros, they had created a PAC and they’d started investing in some races.” As was the case with McBath, Foushee also benefited from the involvement of other outside groups. Her biggest backer wasn’t Bankman-Fried but instead AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel organization, which spent over $2.1 million supporting Foushee through a PAC called United Democracy Project.
Allam suggested Democrats should have thought more carefully about Bankman-Fried’s influence, even if it wasn’t clear yet the extent of his potential wrongdoing.
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