Prosecutors seek bail revocation for FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried
Bankman-Fried faces fraud, conspiracy charges from the crypto giant's collapse.
By Aaron Katersky
New indication of the true scope of the FTX cryptocurrency collapseProsecutors say the company could owe money to more than a million people.Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Disgraced crypto executive Sam Bankman-Fried deserves to have his bail revoked and to be detained before he is tried for fraud and conspiracy charges stemming from the collapse of FTX, federal prosecutors in New York said in a new court filing.
Prosecutors balked at Bankman-Fried's sharing with The New York Times excerpts from the personal documents of Caroline Ellison, Bankman-Fried's former girlfriend, who led his Alameda Research hedge fund and who has pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate.
Bankman-Fried considered those private writings of Ellison "detrimental to her" and accused him of sharing them with the newspaper "in order to affect the public's perception of her," prosecutors said.
The defense accused the government of drawing conclusions "without any evidence whatsoever" and relying "heavily on assumptions, unsupported inferences, and innuendo."
Prosecutors accused Bankman-Fried of witness tampering.
"The record here establishes that the defendant went beyond benignly exercising a constitutional right to speak to the press—he took covert steps intended to improperly discredit a trial witness and taint the jury pool," prosecutors said. "[T]he Government seeks the only appropriate relief consistent with the defendant's escalating evasions of his bail conditions: that bail be revoked and the defendant be detained pending trial."
Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty to 13 charges, including fraud, conspiracy and bribery, after federal prosecutors said he misappropriated billions of dollars from FTX before it went bankrupt. Prosecutors allege he used the money to cover losses at his hedge fund, Alameda Research, to buy lavish real estate and to make political donations.
Ellison pleaded guilty in December to two counts of wire fraud, two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering, according to the court documents.
++++++++++++++++++
Sent to me by long time friend, fellow memo reader.
+++
How the Next President Can Unload the Ukraine Failure
Biden tries to salvage more unpopular payola for Kiev by throwing in minor funding for Taiwan
By CHRISTIAN WHITON
The American people have finally had enough with the Washington uni-party sending blank checks to Ukraine’s president—Volodymyr Zelenskyy—and his incompetent, corrupt, authoritarian government. By a ten-point margin of 55-45—the standard definition of a landslide in U.S. politics—a poll just revealed Americans oppose congressional plans to throw more money at Kiev. Such a move would again let the wealthy moochers of Europe off the hook for their own defense and elevate the risk of Moscow using nuclear weapons.
This is a major change in public sentiment. It may be driven by the much-hyped springtime counteroffensive that didn’t start until summer and has failed.
That failure has clarified a reality that should have clear from the onset. As I have said since President Joe Biden committed us to proxy war with Russia, joined instantly by congressional leaders of both parties without debate and later typified by Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell saying, “providing assistance for Ukrainians to defeat the Russians is the number one priority for the United States right now...” the proxy fight with Russia in reality is the “The wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.”
That borrowed phrase from Omar Bradley was meant to illuminate two realities. The first is that we have no vital national interest in Ukraine. All of the justifications for funding the war used by congressmen and the media, both on the Left and Right, have come down to Wilsonian globaloney about preserving a rules-based international order that simply doesn’t exist or NATO solidarity (we pay for and do everything). As the public now grasps, neither the U.S. economy nor our security are threatened by the Ukraine war except in the most abstract and outlandish sense.
The second point is that we must have priorities in our defense—especially with budgets set to shrink as fiscal crisis arrives in Washington over the next 5-10 years—and deterring war with China is more important than again picking up the check for the defense of wealthy European moochers.
Washington hawks of both parties have fantasized that “standing with Ukraine” will impress China’s leadership with our resolve and make it think twice about starting a war in the Pacific. In reality, Beijing is giddy that America is distracted with war in Ukraine, diving us further into debt, and delaying a much-needed transition from a military geared to war in Europe and counterinsurgency in backwaters like Syria to one that can deter Beijing in the vast blue geography of the Western Pacific.
As reported this week by the Financial Times, the latest Biden-Congress Ukraine gimmick is to offer $345 million in what is known as U.S. Foreign Military Financing—essentially handouts—for Taiwan in order to get billions more for Kiev out of Congress. The theory is that the growing number of congressmen who are skeptical about a blank check for the ever-increasing demands of Captain Undershirt in Kiev will be mollified by a small bone thrown in for Taiwan.
As Mark Simon and I discuss in the new podcast episode linked below, this would be a serious disservice to Taiwan. One characteristic that sets Taiwan apart from many other allies is that it pays for its own defense. Unlike Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, and others, Taiwan has long paid America cold hard cash for the arms it acquires. To lose this distinction as an ally that pays for its own military is not worth $345 million and the hawks like Senator Lindsey Graham (R-Hannity) who have advocated this unrequested transformation have no idea what it takes to keep the American public on the side of a cause against tyranny. Taiwan’s assets are that its people will fight if attacked, that its existence shows ethnically Chinese people can have successful democracy, that it funds its own defense, and that it does not seek major U.S. forces to be stationed in Taiwan. The foreign policy establishment understands none of that since it understands little about political warfare or playing the long game against China.
Ukraine now joins Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Somalia in the long list of fumbled interventions by the failure factory in Washington that comprises our national security bureaucracy. Don’t expect reticence or reform from the arrogant brass that has lost every war since 1991. Take five minutes to check out the debate I had on Fox some time back with a smug Air Force general who couldn’t define a clear national interest in going to proxy war with Russia but was incredulous at the idea of not jumping into another war without a strategy, much less a plan for victory
The smug national security establishment could never define a U.S. national interest in Ukraine beyond Wilsonian globalony. Fox News video: https://bit.ly/3CinQ1D
It will take a determined effort by a new president in 2025 to flick the Ukraine booger off of the finger of state before it causes massive damage to American prestige and power. Delay only pushes Moscow closer to Beijing, risks Russia using nuclear weapons, and expedites the transformation of the international economy away from U.S.-influenced financial institutions and the U.S. dollar.
The next president should free us from this distracting and costly liability, but do so in a way that avoids a Bidenesque spectacle like the Fall of Kabul to the Taliban. The experts currently seem to think the worst outcome in Ukraine is today’s stalemate, but it is also possible that Ukraine will collapse in its war of attrition with its much larger neighbor. No new president wants that on his watch.
The answer for the next president is to adapt a modified version of Vietnamization—the Nixon administration’s wildly popular process of ending costly U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and transferring responsibility of defense to the South Vietnamese while also pushing negotiations between the combatants that ultimately led to success in the Paris Peace Accords. The process gave South Vietnam a chance to secure its own survival until a radical post-Watergate Congress abruptly cut off funding for the Saigon government, precipitating its collapse.
Vietnamization allowed a decent interval for America to refocus on rebuilding, national healing, and the eternal necessity that Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, grasped of trying to keep China and Russia from forming a dangerous Eurasian condominium of power.
The next president should make clear that it is time for Europe and Europe alone to fund the defense of Europe, including whatever it wishes to do for Ukraine. This is not 1945 when Europe lay in ashes and poverty and would have succumbed to Soviet domination or occupation were it not for U.S. funds and arms. Today Europe is politically stable as has as many people and as much wealth as the United States. Led by voices in Paris and Berlin, Europe has long preened of a desire for a defense capability that is independent of overbearing Washington. Now it is Europe’s time to fulfill this dream.
The way out for a new president is to end Biden’s de facto Europe First foreign policy and make clear that Europe will have to fund its own defense fully by the end of his first term while Washington reorients the U.S. military to deterring war with China and Iran. To pave the way for this transition, Congress should taper its practice of sending Ukraine more money that we don’t have and tell Europe it must start paying the majority of the war’s cost. Biden and Congress should also leave the separate matter of Taiwan out of the morass to avoid weakening crucial American public support for that free nation, which is actually an asset in our struggle with China.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
This Trump Indictment Imperils the Presidency
His conduct is hard to defend, but a conviction for fraud would set a dangerous precedent.
By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey
The latest indictment of Donald Trump takes the courts and the country into uncharted territory. Special counsel Jack Smith and a District of Columbia grand jury accuse Mr. Trump of conspiring to steal the 2020 presidential election and charge him, among other things, with defrauding the U.S. But Mr. Trump’s status as president when the alleged crimes took place raises questions about whether he can be successfully prosecuted—and, if he is, troubling implications for future presidents.
The president is immune from civil and criminal liability for actions taken in the execution of the office. That immunity is absolute, like the immunity accorded to judges and prosecutors. Courts have allowed only that the president may be subject to subpoena in certain circumstances that don’t impose great burdens on his ability to function as chief executive.
Former presidents can be held liable for personal actions while in office, but only those that fall beyond “the outer perimeter of his official responsibility.” In Nixon v. Fitzgerald (1982), the Supreme Court held that Richard Nixon was immune from a civil damages action in which a former federal employee claimed he was illegally fired as punishment for revealing Pentagon cost overruns. The justices reasoned that absolute immunity for official acts was “a functionally mandated incident of the President’s unique office,” since “personal vulnerability” to suit could warp a president’s decision-making and deter him from performing his duties “fearlessly and impartially.” That’s obviously even truer of criminal liability, so the court can be expected to extend presidential immunity accordingly. (An exception is offenses for which a former president has been impeached and convicted, the prosecution of which the Constitution explicitly authorizes.)
The critical legal question, then, is whether Mr. Trump’s alleged offenses fall within the “outer perimeter” of his responsibilities as president. The courts have only started to grapple with this issue. In Thompson v. Trump (2022), Judge Amit Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia held that Mr. Trump’s contacts with local election officials after the 2020 election weren’t official acts. That case, which involved a civil action against Mr. Trump by plaintiffs alleging injuries suffered during the Jan. 6, 2021, riots, could be reversed by the D.C. Circuit or the Supreme Court.
Whatever the higher courts make of Judge Mehta’s conclusion, he made a key analytical error in reaching it. He fell into the trap of relying on Mr. Trump’s motivation, in the guise of his “purpose,” which was to preserve his “incumbency.” But the justices in Nixon made clear that the determination of whether a president was acting in his official capacity couldn’t be based on either motivation or the legality of his actions, as that would “subject the President to trial on virtually every allegation that an action was unlawful, or was taken for a forbidden purpose.” The court also noted that the president’s discretionary authority under the Constitution is so broad that “it would be difficult to determine which of the President’s innumerable ‘functions’ encompassed a particular action.”
Mr. Smith fell into the same trap. His focus vis-à-vis Mr. Trump is very much on whether he honestly believed the election had been stolen from him. The proper question is whether the actions he allegedly took after the 2020 election fall objectively within “the outer perimeter of his official responsibility.”
The strongest argument that they don’t is that supervision of state election officials, the selection of presidential electors, and the vice president’s role in counting those votes aren’t ordinarily presidential responsibilities. But it isn’t so clear that, in a case where voting irregularities were reported in the media from numerous critical states—even if incorrectly—the president has no official role in investigating and addressing those claims.
The selection of presidential electors is in part a matter of federal law. The Constitution vests this task in the state legislatures under the Electors Clause, which governs presidential elections. Because the states had no such authority before the Constitution, this critical power is substantially federal in character.
In Moore v. Harper (2023), the Supreme Court recognized that a parallel constitutional provision, the Elections Clause—which divides authority for setting the rules of congressional elections between the state legislatures and Congress—was sufficiently federal in nature to justify the high court’s review of state court decisions involving these rules, even though it ordinarily has no authority to scrutinize a state court’s interpretation of state laws.
It was Mr. Trump’s constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” He had no power to direct state officials’ actions, but urging them to ensure the integrity of federal elections could fall within the outer bounds of his responsibility. He has no authority to direct the vice president’s discharge of his constitutional duties as Senate president, but his exhorting or pleading with the vice president to take certain actions is arguably within the bounds of his authority. Presidents do it routinely when the vice president is called on to cast a deciding Senate vote.
Judge Mehta adopted an unduly crabbed legal test for what constitutes an official presidential action. He asserted that “a sitting President has no expressly identified duty to faithfully execute the laws surrounding the Certification of the Electoral College.” But the Take Care Clause, which is a key component of presidential duties, is broadly framed to include ensuring compliance with all federal laws, including the Constitution. Moreover, the clause is only a subset of the power conveyed to the president by the Vesting Clause, which provides that the “executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States.
Pursuant to that broad authority, a president may communicate with, cajole and even browbeat officials over whom he has no supervisory authority, urging them to pursue policies that he believes are in the national interest. Many presidents take such actions; both Mr. Trump and President Biden, for instance, pressed states to follow federal Covid-19 recommendations. Wise or not, those were undoubtedly official actions.
The indictment of Mr. Trump means that the Supreme Court will almost certainly be called on to determine the scope of a former president’s immunity and whether Mr. Trump’s actions after the 2020 election fell within the outer reaches of his official responsibilities.
Mr. Trump’s conduct may be hard to defend, but the stakes here are far greater than his fate. One can easily envision a future president using military force, sending weapons to another country, engaging in a major diplomatic endeavor or authorizing a prosecution based on what opponents believe—perhaps rightly—are self-serving lies. Under Mr. Smith’s theory, he could be charged with defrauding the United States.
The specter of such prosecutions would cripple the ability of all future presidents to perform their constitutional responsibilities vigorously and fearlessly. That’s why we have presidential immunity in the first place.
Messrs. Rivkin and Casey practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington. They served at the Justice Department and the White House Counsel’s Office in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.
Let's Talk About 'The Weather' 
++++
|
|
No comments:
Post a Comment