Secret Back Channel Between FTX and White House Closed the Day After FTX Filed for Bankruptcy
By Joe Hoft
A secret back channel between FTX and the Biden White House shut down the day after FTX filed for bankruptcy.
In November TGP reported that billions were sent to Ukraine from the US. Ukraine took some of this money and invested it in FTX. FTX took millions of dollars and invested them in US politicians.
The far-left Washington Post reported on March 3 that Ukraine was dealing in crypto.
The Ukrainian government has gathered more than $42 million in cryptocurrency donations since Saturday, plus digital artwork including a limited edition worth roughly $200,000, according to blockchain analytics firm Elliptic. The challenge is how the country cashes in on these assets to fund its war needs.
Amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the CEO of FTX, Sam Bankman Fried has come forward to help a crypto donation project. He humbly announced that FTX will be supporting the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance and other communities in collecting crypto donations for the country. The Ukrainian government has received over $60 million in crypto donations from all over the world.
FTX’s CEO, Sam Bankman Fried highlighted that the war in Ukraine has been dragging on. The country is in full need of humanitarian help and access to global financial infrastructure. He also called attention to sanctions and crypto during this kind of situation. He indicated that crypto exchanges should enforce sanctions announced by the government seriously.
This was all laid out in our post.
Now we’ve learned that FTX and the Biden White House participated in a back channel that was closed the day after FTX went bankrupt.
This all came from a report at far-left Politico. They reported on Thursday that Democrat operative and close advisor to Bankman-Fried named Sean McElwee had a direct backchannel setup with the White House.
McElwee is a well-known progressive activist who started the “Abolish ICE” movement and in 2018 founded Data for Progress, a progressive think tank with an emphasis on influencing public policy through polling. DFP quickly embedded itself into the top layers of the Democratic firmament. More recently, McElwee became a close political ally and adviser to FTX founder SAM BANKMAN-FRIED. (They were connected through Shor, according to a friend of both men.)
McElwee had easy access to the White House and the press. And he made sure they had access to him. He kept an open Slack channel at DFP that became a rolling conversation between McElwee, Biden administration officials and some well-known reporters — a kind of JournoList for the early 2020s.
On Nov. 12, the day after FTX filed for bankruptcy and SBF resigned as CEO, McElwee abruptly shuttered the Slack channel. Six days later, he and Data for Progress began negotiating his exit from the firm he had built.
At the time, the reported reason for the rupture was that McElwee’s well-known penchant for betting on the outcomes of elections created a conflict of interest for a polling firm. A slew of 2022 DFP polls had a GOP bias, and activists on Twitter — as well as some prominent Democrats pinging reporters — asked whether McElwee was cooking DFP’s polls to affect races and cash in.
Sources at DFP insist that this would have been highly unlikely, and that their polls had a GOP bias because of an oversampling of respondents via SMS. In the wake of this, DFP recently adopted a previously unreported “Gambling and Wagering Policy” that prohibits employees from betting on anything related to DFP projects or clients.
The McElwee-DFP breakup was ugly, but the two sides were trying to negotiate an amicable separation agreement and a severance.
Then on Dec. 13, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York unsealed an eight-count indictment against SBF. The first seven counts, which were about financial crimes, garnered the most attention. But it was the eighth count that turned heads in Washington, alleging a straw-donor scheme in which SBF funneled corporate money to candidates and committees through third parties. And SDNY alleged that SBF had help: SBF “and others known and unknown,” the indictment says, made contributions “in the names of other persons.”
Bonchie at Red State shares:
To say there are a lot of red flags with this situation is to understate things dramatically, and the questions surrounding the administration’s involvement become obvious with this news. What exactly was McElwee, operating as an advisor to Bankman-Fried, passing along to the White House? What exactly was the White House telling McElwee? Were they coordinating donations? Discussing messaging? Trading favors and influence? Or was there something even more sinister going on?
So far, Democrats have done their best to distance themselves from the man who was their second-largest donor in 2022, but these relationships aren’t going away just because the mainstream press ignores them. Having a secret backchannel with the White House is a big deal, and people deserve to know what their government was doing coordinating with a scam artist like Bankman-Fried.
We subsequently learned that over $20 billion awarded to Ukraine this past year is unaccounted for.
Maybe the missing billions are not related to FTX at all. We don’t know. But we do know that Biden gave billions to Ukraine. Ukraine was involved with FTX and FTX donated millions to Democrat candidates. They may have talked about this on their back channel.
