INSIDE SBF: In Bankman-Fried Trial Hobnobbing with Bill Clinton and Saudi Crypto Creeps Venue

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by Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Book Substack

LITERARY SDNY, Oct 17 -- Seventeenth day of October and Nishad Singh was on the cross. It wasn't pretty.

On direct he'd presented himself as a true believer in effective altruism, who had been interested in Anthropic to make a donation, not an investment.  

 But when SBF's lawyer Mark Cohen asked him if he'd ever made a donation, Singh quickly said No. And if he'd been so concerned about stolen money, why had he used it to buy a big house in Washington state days before FTX's bankruptcy?   

The question was, even if the jurors concluded that the cooperators were also corrupt, could it make SBF not guilty? 

Court art by Elizabeth Williams courtesy to Inner City Press

 When at last the cross of Singh was over, the prosecutors put on the stand an agent to explain cell site locations. But it was more than that: to prove that SBF had been in Manhattan, or the SDNY generally for venue, they showed the jurors invites to Sam from his flak Natalie, the one on whom Going Infinite had relied.

  Here was Sam setting up to meet with some Saudi investment chieftain at a fancy Manhattan restaurant. With NYC Mayor Eric Adams at the Osteria from which he was said to run the city. 

   There was a meeting with Kathy Hochul, to go along with the previous day's exhibit of the FTX get-overs joking that they only supported her to keep Zeldin (misspelled) out.

  New York State's crackdown on crypto hadn't stopped, so what had the misuse of all this stolen money won for them?

  Really it was just for face time with celebrities: the other exhibits, once obtained, showed that the tequila Sam put stolen money into was that of Kendall Jenner, not George Clooney. Online they were calling these details tea.

  Then there was Sam meeting with Bill Clinton at his aging corporate-heavy Clinton Global Initiative, on the margins as they say of UN General Assembly week. A corrupt trifecta...

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