The jungle primary to fill Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat is March 5th— 22 days from yesterday. Adam Schiff has been leading right from the start. But who’s he going to face in November? Progressives are hoping for the miracle it’s going to take get advance Barbara Lee to that slot. Short of that, it’s between Katie Porter and GOP sex predator Steve Garvey. Porter just got a big break. A different kind of predator just attacked her, the crypto crooks.
Yes, Sam Bankman Fried is in prison— as are Ross William Ulbricht (Dread Pirate Roberts) from Silk Road, Kyle Nagy, Braden Karony and Thomas Smith from SafeMoon, Do Kwon from TerraForm Labs, Charlie Shrem from BitInstant, Alex Mashinsky from Celsius, Su Zhu from Three Arrows Capital, Mark Karpeles from Mt Gox, Nathaniel Chastain from OpenSea, Faruk Fatih Ozer from Thodex, Anatoly Legkodymov from Bitzlato, Roman Storm from Tornado Cash, Ben Armstrong (BitBoy) and Joshua David Nicholas (Bitcoin Rodney) from EmpiresX— but crypto’s corrupt fraudsters and deceitful swindlers are still out there, still bribing politicians and still working to manipulate government bodies-- like the U.S. Congress. Corrupt members of Congress from both parties have sold their souls to crypto. Katie Porter hasn't.
Three crypto SuperPACs (Fairshake) are, according to a report from the NY Times by Shane Goldmacher, “making their first big bet of the 2024 election cycle: trying to crush Representative Katie Porter, a Democrat running in next month’s California Senate primary. The biggest new crypto-focused super PAC, Fairshake, began reserving television and digital advertising across California in a multimillion-dollar buy late on Monday, and it could be a major player in the race’s final three weeks.” The 3 PACs, affiliates of Coinbase, Ripple Labs and Andreessen Horowitz, have put together an $80 million warchest.
The group is planning a blitz of anti-Porter advertising and had begun booking time in markets statewide on Monday.
It is not exactly clear what about Porter has drawn the crypto industry’s ire other than her record as a progressive who favored regulating the industry to better favor consumers and made the grilling of a financial chief executive a viral moment a few years ago.
The crypto financiers behind Fairshake and its two affiliated groups, Protect Progress and Defend American Jobs, are fairly open about their agenda: to ensure a favorable set of regulations as the federal government considers how to regulate the crypto industry and to use political spending to get it.
Brian Armstrong, the chief executive of Coinbase, who personally gave $1 million in September, told Axios that same month: “Money moves the needle. For better or worse, that’s how our system works.”
Armstrong said at the time, “If you look at like the oil and gas lobby or the banking lobby— I mean they’re spending, I don’t know, in the order of $100 million a year.” Interestingly, the statement from Fairshake cited some of those same industries as supporting Porter.
The new crypto mega group and its affiliates have attracted prominent Democratic and Republican consulting firms.
…On Capitol Hill, Porter has been a close ally of Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, who was once her professor at Harvard Law School. Warren has been an outspoken critic of the lax regulations around cryptocurrency, and Porter once signed onto a letter with Warren to Texas regulators about crypto, according to the crypto news-tracking site Bitcoin.com.
Fairshake was bribing House Financial Services Committee chair Patrick McHenry (R-NC) when he suddenly announced that he is retiring. They’re also spending on Shomari Figures, a Democrat running for the new House seat in Alabama and on his campaign website he “plays up the importance of supporting crypto, writing that he would work to ‘embrace the new landscape around digital assets, like cryptocurrency, to stimulate innovation and technological advancement.’” A statement like that got Maxwell Frost (D-FL) a million dollars from Bankman Fried last year. So far they’ve spent $750,000 on Figures.
Yesterday, in an e-mail to her supporters, Porter said that “A crypto super PAC just started running $3 million dollars worth of TV ads attacking me. This super PAC has already raised 80 million dollars which they plan to spend meddling in elections to advance their own agenda. Their massive warchest means they have the ability to make additional buys against us and really change the outcome of this race. For context, this ad buy is almost as much money as we raised in total in Q4 2023. It’s about half the amount we’ve spent on TV ads so far…Simply put, this flat-out-false, misleading ad threatens to drown out our message and keep me out of Congress for good… These crypto billionaires don't want a strong voice for consumers in the Senate, because they fear anyone who calls out corruption and greed.”
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"Suddenly"?!? Howzis different than Fried a couple of years ago?
Has the same stink to it as in 2008 when wall street (and the CxO caste thereof) showered obamanation with money in exchange for his vow to never send any of them to prison for the trillions in fraud that led to the crash.
IF crypto was real money and those ponzi scheme houses were actual, you know, financial institutions, that is.
corruption is like that, though. real money or imaginary money or stolen money... it's all the same.
Not that long ago, americans were, perhaps barely, smart enough to NOT invest in pet rocks or beanie babies or furbies... yesteryear's version of crypto... but with tangible symbols.
I still wish Porter had stayed in the House. This Senate race only serves to remove at least two acceptable Democrats from the House, just so one of them get to call themself a senator.