The disgraced founder and former CEO of the bankrupt crypto exchange FTX will now spend at least the next two months behind bars after a judge revoked his bail on Friday afternoon.
Sam Bankman-Fried had previously been under house arrest in his parents' home in Palo Alto, Calif., following release on a $250 million bond.
However, the Justice Department has since accused Bankman-Fried, who had limited access to a cellphone and the internet from his parents' house, of tampering with witnesses once the New York Times wrote a story on Caroline Ellison, former head of Bankman-Fried's crypto hedge fund Alameda, using previously unpublished, private Google documents.
Judge Kaplan: The defendant is remanded.
— Inner City Press (@innercitypress) August 11, 2023
AUSA Sassoon: This should not change the trial date. We'll stick to all deadlines.
[US Marshals move in - SBF takes off his jacket and tie, leans down to take off his shoelaces
The sudden revocation of Bankman-Fried's bail comes less than two months before his trial is set to begin on Oct. 2. The Justice Department, which levied eight charges, alleges the former crypto heavyweight conspired to commit wire fraud, lender fraud, and securities fraud. Prosecutors have asked Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan to schedule a subsequent trial on five other charges for early 2024.
Since the U.S. government successfully extradited the former crypto billionaire in December from the Bahamas, where FTX was based, the government alleges in a filing advocating for his incarceration that Bankman-Fried has repeatedly tried to "corruptly influence witnesses and interfere with a fair trial through attempted public harassment and shaming."
In January, the government said Bankman-Fried wrote to a top FTX lawyer over the messaging app Signal and said he'd "really love to reconnect and see if there’s a way for us to have a constructive relationship, use each other as resources when possible, or at least vet things with each other.”
After prosecutors caught wind of Bankman-Fried's contact with the lawyer, they successfully pushed Kaplan to further limit the conditions of his bail, preventing him from reaching out to former employees at FTX and Alameda as well as limiting his access to the internet, among other restrictions.
Then, in July, the New York Times published the story on Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda who also dated Bankman-Fried. Prosecutors allege Bankman-Fried leaked the documents to the Times, a fact he's never directly disputed. His lawyers have said he was merely flexing his First Amendment right to speak with the press.
Kaplan disagreed.
