Sam Bankman-Fried is going to talk himself right into jail - The Verge
“Defense lawyer Mark Cohen did his best. Unfortunately for him, the cross-examination was conducted by Sassoon, who looks like someone who uses ‘summer’ as a verb, and often appears deceptively timid, with her hands held close to her chest. In her cross, she simply unhinged her jaw and ate Bankman-Fried.”
In the ongoing #SBF trial, Nishad Singh's testimony reveals his haziness on key conversations, providing a potential breakthrough for Bankman-Fried's defense.
Defense attorney Mark Cohen questions Singh's memory of events and challenges his assertions about luxury living and Alameda's borrowing practices.
Singh's cross-examination is expected to continue for several hours, with law enforcement official Richard Busick set to testify afterward.
Also introduced as an exhibit yesterday: the document in which Sam Bankman-Fried recaps a dinner party hosted by super-networker Michael Kives (with Michael Lewis tagging along, btw), to whom SBF paid $200MM, and wanted to give $1B for VC
According to Lewis, Chris Rock, Kate Hudson, Jerry Jones (Dallas Cowboys owner), Stan Kroenke (LA Rams owner) and at least two other Kardashians were also there.
Conversation in the "donations processing" signal chat reveals that Sam Bankman-Fried donated $1 million to Beto O'Rourke, then went back on it. They discussed pressuring the campaign into returning $900k, and pretending the donation was an error to "minimize PR issues for all"
They also spoke about making "dark" donations to political candidates, such as Senator Patty Murray (D-WA)
SBF at one point said that he made public donations to Dems and dark donations to Repubs for optics reasons, but it looks like the dark donations were cross-party
Kind of incredible to see Keenan Lantz (executive director of Guarding Against Pandemics) talking about encouraging people to talk to him about campaign finance rules and offering access to his compliance people in a chat where they were blatantly flouting these rules