Sam Bankman Fried Corruption Was The Most Bipartisan Thing That Happened In Congress In Decades

Would SBF Have Allowed Tom Emmer To Move To Nauru?

Crooked members of Congress— from McCarthy, Tom Emmer and George Santos to Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries and Josh Gottheimer— took bribes from Sam Bankman-Fried. Members of Congress gobbled up hundreds of millions of stolen dollars— one in three members were on the take. So how do you put him in prison but not them? Slowly, slowly, slowly charges have been dropped and more of the case has just disappeared. Last month, the NY Times reported that “the prosecutors said they would proceed to a trial in October without pursuing five of the 13 charges against Bankman-Fried— a set of accusations that the government added to the crypto mogul’s indictment in the months after he was extradited from the Bahamas in December. Among those charges was a bank fraud count, as well as an allegation that Bankman-Fried bribed a foreign government.” Nothing about a domestic government.

I doubt they’re going to charge him with bribing members of Congress. That’s not the way the system works. He’s not even in jail. He’s at mommy-and-daddy’s house, co-conspirators, who probably won’t get charged with anything. And the brother… anyone hear much from him since he gave Maxwell Frost the million dollars he needed to win in Orlando? No, he was busy trying to buy the sovereign nation of Nauru.

When I was a kid, I was a stamp collector. I remember Nauru; I remember lusting after Nauru stamps. I never had one. I pretty much stopped collecting stamps when I was 17 when I went away to college. I still have my 3 volume Supreme Global albums but I haven’t opened it more than 4 or 5 times since before Nauru became independent and started issuing their own stamps 1968. Before that their stamps were stamps of the German Marshall Islands and then over-printed Australian and British stamps. I wanted to buy Nauru stamps for my collection but couldn’t afford it, Sam Bankman Fried wanted to buy Nauru, the country. It’s a small country— just Vatican City and Monaco are smaller and there are between 10,000 and 12,000 residents. It’s mostly uninhabitable because of phosphate strip mining by the colonial powers.

Last week, CNBC reported that Gabe Bankman Fried, the FTX lobbyist was trying to buy the country “to create a fortified apocalypse bunker state”… you know, in case the world economy collapses. “Gabe Bankman-Fried,” wrote Rohan Goswami, “was looking at buying Nauru in the ‘event where 50%-99.99% of people die’ to protect his philanthropic allies and create a genetically enhanced human species, according to the suit filed Thursday by attorneys from Sullivan & Cromwell, which is seeking to recover billions of dollars following the collapse of FTX.”

Bunker life is a well-documented fixation among tech billionaires, particularly those who identify as doomsday preppers. There’s also a fascination with buying large estates in the Pacific and even owning small islands there.

In his years running FTX, the elder Bankman-Fried brother touted a philanthropic lifestyle called effective altruism and established the philanthropic arm with that in mind. Devotees of effective altruism work to maximize their income so they can give away their money in a fashion they see as most beneficial to humankind.

Gabe Bankman-Fried was FTX’s most visible presence in Washington, D.C., and was connected to bipartisan charitable donations that ran into the hundreds of millions. Along with an unnamed philanthropic officer of FTX, he considered buying Nauru, in part to foster “sensible regulation around human genetic enhancement, and build a lab there.”

A representative for Nauru confirmed the island nation was not and has never been for sale.

Nauru, with a population of about 12,000, is a little over 2,100 miles away from Brisbane, Australia. It was there that FTX lawyers allege the Bankman-Fried team sought to establish an emergency base for itself and a select group of “EAs,” or effective altruists.

In addition to serving as a haven in case of apocalypse, “probably there are other things it’s useful to do with a sovereign country, too,” according to a memo between the younger Bankman-Fried and the philanthropic advisor, which was noted in the suit.

In their own reporting, Quartz noted that “In the late 1990s, Nauru turned into a haven for money laundering. In 1998, some $70 billion was illegally transferred from Russian banks to accounts of banks chartered in Nauru to evade taxes. At the time, money laundering was not a criminal offense in the country. But in 2002, the US Treasury designated Nauru a money-laundering state, leading to the closure of the Bank of Nauru in 2006. Quite an appropriate spot for Bankman-Fried, then. The Delaware court filings label him a serial money launderer, and they augment filings from March, in which prosecutors charged Bankman-Fried with 13 similar offenses. In total, he is accused of swindling $8 billion of his customers’ funds. Bankman-Fried’s choice of Nauru aside, his anticipation of a mega-catastrophe raises more practical questions than answers. His philosophy of choice, effective altruism, encourages its members to accumulate a lot of wealth, so they can distribute it to the less privileged people around them. As the fall of FTX showed, though, the movement was riddled with smokescreens and ethical pitfalls. Bankman-Fried’s plans with both FTX and Nauru were selfish: make a few people very rich illegally, and use that money to hunker down on their own island, set their own rules, and escape a global calamity even as the world outside burned on.”