SBF just suggested creating another Ponzi token scheme to payoff the earlier victims of his first Ponzi scheme. đ„
Ht @alifarhat79 pic.twitter.com/XpRvGOy7Nb
— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) December 9, 2022
This is a man-child who has never, ever had to pay for his bad actions ‘mistakes’.
1) I still do not have access to much of my data — professional or personal. So there is a limit to what I will be able to say, and I won't be as helpful as I'd like.
But as the committee still thinks it would be useful, I am willing to testify on the 13th. https://t.co/KR34BsNaG1
— SBF (@SBF_FTX) December 9, 2022
3) I had thought of myself as a model CEO, who wouldn't become lazy or disconnected.
Which made it that much more destructive when I did.
I'm sorry. Hopefully people can learn from the difference between who I was and who I could have been.
— SBF (@SBF_FTX) December 9, 2022
I wanna slap his parents almost as much as I wanna slap him.
Speaking of which, this is a fun / informative read (and not just about ‘couch fungi’, ifyouknowwhatImeanandIthinkyoudo, Judge Garland):
People are upset that PVC or SPF or DMC or whatever his name is hasnât been charged and arrested yet. Iâve been asked to explain, in a diplomatic and respectful way, why this might be.
Itâs because youâre an unserious person with the attention span of a sugared toddler.
— Popehat (@Popehat) December 8, 2022
/2 In our system, blue collar crimes are generally straightforward to prove â you mostly prove they DID IT (like, say, robbing a bank), and donât worry much about their exact mental state.
White collar crimes â or, in this case, unlaundered t-shirt crimes â are different.
/3 White collar crimes generally have more complex and difficult intent requirements. Often you have to prove fraudulent intent or even specific intent to break the law. Thatâs much more complicated than proving the dude robbed a bank.
/4 Itâs ESPECIALLY difficult when youâre dealing with narcissists, manchildren, fanatics, and various immature couch fungi whose mental state is a kitchen junk draw of nonsense and who can plausibly pull off an âIâm just like that, I THINK DIFFERENT.â
/5 So: proving white collar crimes can be hard. When I say that, let me remind you, in a way that is as respectful as God has made me capable, that things are not easy just because you donât understand them. Many things you donât understand are very hard.
/6 So when you say well OBVIOUSLY he committed crime X, when you have not read the statute for crime X and DEFINITELY have not read the jury instructions showing the elements of crime X, and have never had to prove anything in court, you should sit down.
/7 So if proving white collar crimes is so hard, why do the feds have such a good plea and trial win record? Itâs because of their competitive advantage â vast resources they can use to conduct slow, methodical, multi-stage grand jury investigations.
/8 See, when you pull the trigger and charge IMMEDIATELY, you lose all of that competitive advantage. Suddenly youâre stuck proving your case mostly with what you knew the day you decided to charge the person. You can develop more evidence, but itâs harderâŠ
/9âŠin part because youâre not supposed to use the grand jury to gather evidence for something youâve only charged, only for new charges. And because once you charge youâve shown your hand and canât play any of the fedsâ favorite games, likeâŠ.
/10âŠ.âwe know the truth is X, so letâs roll up on this dumb motherfucker and when he lies and says itâs Y, then weâll hit him with a lying to the feds charge and flip him to testify against our real target.â You lose most of the toys in the flip-cooperators toy box.
/11 The feds win cases because they slowly, steadily build a web. They gather evidence, examine it, follow leads, call witnesses and lock in their testimony in the grand jury early, use all that to flip cooperators, apply slow pressure.
/12 If you rush them to pull the trigger, they canât do many of those things. ANd when you have a rich defendant with competent counsel, suddenly youâve got real issues proving up a super-complex white collar case.
/14 pic.twitter.com/K5RHrRwMdj
— Popehat (@Popehat) December 8, 2022
/15 If your goal is âI want to see this bad guy convicted and spend as long as possible in jail, and all his ill-gotten gains located and taken,â then you should want the feds to do what they do best â slowly build a meticulous case.
/16 If what you want is instant gratification, go buy a bag of fucking Doritos, would you? /end
As the saying has it: I feel like I need a cigarette, and I don’t even smoke.
Spanky
#16 should become a rotating tag.
oldster
Popehat is one of the things I will very much miss when Twitter goes down for good.
UncleEbeneezer
Amen! Â Also applies to Sedition and large Conspiracies to Obstruct. Â There is good reason why DOJ started with the cases they did to work their way up the chain. Â Same goes for Alvin Bragg who passed on indicting Trump for fraud, waited for the Trump Org trial and now may have enough evidence to charge Trump as an individual.
Alison Rose
That third tweet from SBF made me roll my eyes so hard, I saw my own brain. What a little putz.
Burnspbesq
That Popehat thread ⊠word. Should be tattooed on the eyeballs of the âGarland isnât doing anythingâ crowd. Including some jackals.
Burnspbesq
In other news, your law degree is still useful after youâve retired. It gets you out of serving on juries.
Sanjeevs
https://twitter.com/hugolowell/status/1601318497073569792?cxt=HHwWgICp5Yusg7ksAAAA
Great start by the Special Prosecutor. Failed at hurdle 1.
Maybe just maybe Trump should have been treated just like any other citizen who walked off premises with classified documents.
Chetan Murthy
@Burnspbesq: My argument that Garland isn’t doing anything isn’t based on Jan 6. It’s based on the absolute lack of action on charging Trump for the crimes that Mueller found and documented. For which the statute of limitations was allowed to expire.
kalakal
That twitter exchange with Ran Neuner ( who he – ed ) is profoundly disturbing. Not only are they both idiots is the sheer depth of delusion and contempt for others. They’re acting like it was all just a simple mistake, a momentary lapse that ruined an otherwise sound business rather than a multi billion ponzi scheme that involved some serious criming.
Sandia Blanca
I want to adopt “things are not easy just because you donât understand them. Many things you donât understand are very hard.” as my new motto.
patrick II
Laws regarding white-collar crimes are complex, in part because aggressive profit seekers walk the edge of the law and are always seeking loopholes. Deciding when someone actually stuck his big toe over the line is nuanced and there are probably a hundred comparative instances that weren’t quite illegal making it tough to prosecute.
M31
oh man the comments on the first tweet about creating new Ponzi tokens, “well it’s just like the US Govt creates more dollars”
NO IT’S NOT YOU PUTRID LIBERTARIAN IT’S JUST FIAT WAHH WAHHH WAHHHH FANBOY
it would be like that if those Ponzi tokens had a huge government with an army of 1) accountants 2) tax collectors, and 3) actual armies behind it
BUT IT DOESN’T SO SHUT YOUR PIE HOLE
frosty
@oldster: All of AL’s posts are what I’ll miss if Twitter hits the shitter. She does such a good job of curating good stuff!
UncleEbeneezer
@Chetan Murthy: Simplest answer is that Garland took one look at those figured they were unlikely to succeed, one look at the shitload of 1/6 crimes that actually can get convictions and decided to pursue the latter because DOJ has staffing/resource limits like any other org.
Burnspbesq
@Chetan Murthy:
Thatâs bullshit, and you know it. The two bullshit OLC opinions, which should be reconsidered and withdrawn, were (and remain) in full force and effect. Trump was bullet-proof until 1/21/21. Feel free to explain how you would have gotten a grand jury empaneled, beat back all the bullshit claims of executive and attorney-client privilege that would have been raised by prospective witness, and complete the presentation within the time remaining.
And also, take all the time you need to show us the admissible evidence you would use to prove every element of those purported offenses beyond a reasonable doubt. Weâll wait.
Chetan Murthy
@Burnspbesq: My *point* was that after 1/21/21, he could have charged. And since Mueller had done all that investigating (and all his prosecutors were pretty clear that they’d left behind copious and detailed evidence and briefs) it wouldn’t be starting from scratch. And yet he did nothing.
Chetan Murthy
@Burnspbesq:
IANAL, but I don’t have to be: several of Mueller’s prosecutors are on the record as saying that the evidence they assembled was pretty conclusive. And no, I don’t know the evidence, b/c most of it never saw the light of day.
Look: you can believe in GarlandMas. Go ahead, man. I’m not gonna get fooled a third time.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Jeepers, it’s almost as if this could apply to cases that are far more important than crypto-boy
Another Scott
@Sanjeevs:
Thread.
FWIW.
(via Popehat)
Cheers,
Scott.
Jeffro
DougJ (as the Pitchbot) just linked to a Politico piece about how the RWNJs’ best and brightest are switching from “originalism” to “common good constitutionalism” since the former is tied to ridiculous arguments about what the founders would want (which – wunderbar! – always seems to align with what the RWNJs want) and the latter is just…what the RWNJs want.
(neither of which are what the majority of Americans want, much less are tied to case law, precedent, etc, of course)
You have to give it to the MAGAts: at least they’re straight-up about what they want and don’t sugar-coat it anymore. Â “Originalism? Â What a waste of time! Â I’d rather make the argue that courts can tell Americans what to do about basically any issue, provided that what they’re telling them is the right-wing position.”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
hoo boy
Chetan Murthy
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: You use a computer, the actual working of which you know nearly nothing about, and yet you use it in full confidence that it will work daily. You take drugs every day without knowing their actual composition, etc, etc, etc.
It’s called *relying on expertise* and it’s how modern scientific and technical society works. The expertise I’m relying upon is Mueller’s former prosecutors, who told us quite explicitly that there was evidence to charge the bastard.
Geminid
@Burnspbesq: I think that in Georgia a law degree and even former bar membership do not keep people off of juries. At least, my Atlanta friend served on a jury deciding a civil case a couple years ago.
Warren told me about it while we were talking about the Fulton County Prosecutor’s criminal investigation of election fraud by Trump and others. He said the judge that heard the civil case happens to be the one overseeing the Fulton County grand jury. I believe his name is McBurney. Warren was impressed, thought the judge was very careful and very neutral (as he should be).
livewyre
@Chetan Murthy: I’ll defer to Kanefield’s commentary on former prosecutors. As tempting as it is to take a brave stance ahead of the laggards and layabouts at the DOJ, it can’t hurt to be aware of some of the actual procedures and tradeoffs that are being made and why they don’t feel gratifying. There really are things for non-experts like you and me to know about it.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Chetan Murthy: the FDA doesn’t drag twelve randos in off the street to approve or reject a new drug, among whom the dumbest one could reject a life-saving drug in spite of overwhelming evidence because the scientist presenting the evidence reminded him of the middle school English teacher who embarrassed him once
“charges” mean dick-all if they don’t lead to a conviction
geg6
@Chetan Murthy:
The Trump criming is a target rich environment. Â As any good prosecutor would, he has chosen the ones with the most evidence. Â Much of that evidence having been right there for us all to see. Â IANAL, but Iâm thinking the Russia stuff is too tainted and that it would be difficult to prosecute comparatively. Â All of the election shenanigans and stolen docs stuff is easy to understand for normies and there is a ton of evidence, such as recordings and the fruit of searches, that also is not complicated to explain to a jury. The Russia stuff is convoluted, involves national intelligence that may not even be explained in a public trial and already has a narrative set in the public, regardless of how wrong that narrative might be.
livewyre
In more general terms, it strikes me as selling short the whole idea of rule of law if we treat it as a series of (Latin) incantations that a sufficiently powerful sorcerer of law can pronounce in order to make justice be done by force of will. Which, of course, if it doesn’t happen, becomes taken as if said will was cowardly or treacherous the whole time.
If we want more justice, we need a better process, not purer personalities. Otherwise, what’s the point of having law instead of nobility?
Geminid
@Jeffro: I always thought that “Originalism” was just a dressed up version of “Strict Constructionism.” That theory was discredited in the 1960s and 70s when it was used too often to justify segregation and other racist institutions.
So the reactionaries rebranded it and ginned up so much bogus legal theory around the new doctrine of “Originalism.”
twbrandt (formerly tom)
I just find it interesting that (almost) all the lawyers and former AUSAs with experience in these areas are saying things are going along pretty much as expected. Itâs the non-lawyers who are screaming for blood.
different-church-lady
It’s like he’s trying to invent an entirely new category of sociopath: the caring sociopath.
different-church-lady
@Chetan Murthy:Â â
Gravity is kind of like that too.
Jeffro
@Geminid: I think we are talking about the same thing, come ’round again.
“I want what I want, so in order to legally justify it…”
Strict Constructionism: “The U.S. should always reach back to the way things were back when the country was founded (and rich white men were in charge) which aligns with my worldview so um, yeah, that’s what we’re going with here”
Originialism: “We’re going to pretend to be deep, well-grounded thinkers here, and talk about the Founders’ intent (which, what do you know, jibes with my worldview!)…”
Common-Good Constitutionalism: “We’re going to just go with what aligns with my worldview here, regardless of what it means from an authoritarian perspective. Â Because I want an authoritarian perspective, as long as it aligns with my worldview.
It’s just endless ways to justify minority rule – ie, their worldview – all the way down!
Kent
According to what I read in the NYT, only 2% of FTX customers were American and the company itself was based in the Bahamas even though the primary owners and operatives were all American.
So basically you have these young American tech douches who have cheated a shitload of foreign customers, many of whom are probably drug cartels looking to launder money, and Russian/Latin American/African/Chinese oligarchs looking to do the same.
Somehow I think this is going to sort itself out without the intervention of the US government. There has to be some very pissed and very unsavory individuals who are unhappy that these douchy Americans have stolen all their money. Because that is the correct word for it….stolen.
It usually doesn’t end well for people who steal from the cartels and Russian oligarchs.
different-church-lady
Hey folks, there’s nothing wrong with gut-level feelings, as long as you own up to which organ it is that’s creating your assertion.
Geminid
@geg6: My impression was that Mueller and his team were stymied because they could not break Roger Stone. Stone departed the Trump campaign in June of 2016, for no apparent reason. He likely became the “cutout” between Trump and the Russians. As people noted when Mueller’s report came out, the report showed a lot of suspicious evidence but failed to close the circle between the criminal Russian interference and Trump. Roger Stone was the missing link.
Geminid
@Kent: It could be the Russians are the ones who stole all that money from FTX. I don’t think those billions just vanished into thin air. Somebody must have them; an apex predator, so to speak
Alison Rose
@different-church-lady: It’s usually my pancreas.
Ohio Mom
@Geminid: The most compelling reason I have for agreeing with you is that of course Roger Stone would do something to make it impossible to connect all the dots.
When I was young, I had no patience for spy-type movies because it seemed preposterous to me that such people existed. But now I am older and wiser.
schrodingers_cat
@Burnspbesq: IANAL but do these DoSomethingers not see that if the case against Trump is not watertight that would be a boon to him politically.
Qrop Non Sequitur
Only if you fail to accept that unique solutions to severely complicated math problems have intrinsic value.
Kent
No, the story as I understand it is that FTX and Sam Bankman Fried set up a parallel trading operation which they funded by stealing billions of customer money from the main FTX exchange. And then when they lost most of the money doing stupid risky trades the money was gone and the whole house of cards collapsed.
It would be like if your local bank took everyone’s deposits then transferred all the money into a trading account where they gambled it all on tech stocks, derivatives, short selling Tesla, and god knows what else. And then everyone’s money disappeared through bad trades.  Banks are actually regulated so that bankers can’t do that. But crypto is completely unregulated and it wasn’t even an American company so oh well. Bygones….
SpaceUnit
@Alison Rose:
I’m going with spleen.
CliosFanBoy
Pro hint for you younger married guys. When your wife says “Your ex-girlfriend sent us a Christmas card” don’t reply “Which one??”
Starfish
@geg6: Agreed on the Trump criming being a target rich environment.
Popehat is one of the people I miss most since I left Twitter.
SBF has not been willing to shut up. He is going on every stupid podcast that will have him and bragging about how incompetent he was. I guess selling the incompetence may make it look like he had less intent. It is all ridiculous.
Ken
That first tweet — “Our crypto project failed, so let’s pay off the creditors with a new crypto project!” — makes perfect sense when you accept the premise that crypto generates something of value. Perhaps that will help convince people of the idiocy of the premise.
WaterGirl
@CliosFanBoy: ha!
Roger Moore
@oldster:
He’s available on Mastodon/Fediverse at @[email protected]
Anne Laurie
Part of my fascination with the SBF saga — the American government is expending vast amounts of time & energy to rescue this two-bit fraudster from his probably-unsavory ‘victims’. Which is the only possible lawful option, because SBF is an American citizen, and abandoning him to a well-deserved ending at the hands of foreign criminals would set a terrible precedent.
But if my taxes are paying to save this chubby little grifter from his own misdeeds, I want to at least see him humiliated in every possible forum on his way to a U.S. penitentiary!
Qrop Non Sequitur
Crypto enthusiasts don’t talk about crypto in terms of a speculative investment, but an alternate currency. For some of them, this alternate currency will undermine the US government, an apparently desirable outcome.
We banned alternate currency somewhere around the gilded age. Why aren’t we just shutting all of this down?
Geminid
@Ohio Mom: Trump is no Professor Moriarty, but he has the low cunning of a career criminal and he learned long ago to get people like Roger Stone to do his dirty work.
SpaceUnit
@Qrop Non Sequitur:
I can’t answer that question but I’ve noticed that most of the many douche-bro libertarians in my life that used to wear me out with talk about returning to the gold standard (because a currency had to be based on something real) went all in on crypto.
Go figure.
Geminid
@Kent: Well, maybe the beneficiaries of those risky trades were just a bunch of randos. But maybe they were not. Some entity or entities may have been watching that money as it was moved around and looted it through apparently arms-length deals.
Or, maybe the deals were not actually arms-length. There is a lot to find out here and some of the explainations that seem true now may end up proven wrong.
kalakal
@Qrop Non Sequitur: Ah, that’ll be it, a serious blindspot of mine
NotMax
“I could’a been a contender. I could’a been somebody. Instead of a bum, which is what I am.”
//
Shalimar
@Burnspbesq: I was on a jury in Florida 6-7 years ago. Walmart shoplifting case. Poked several obvious holes in their evidence and we acquitted. Haven’t been called since.
LeftCoastYankee
Late to the show, but this:
sums up the whole conservative mindset. Chef’s kiss. Give me a smoke. Put it on a billboard, etc.
Ken
@Qrop Non Sequitur: I volunteer at Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders, and I’m working on an 1834 book called “Illustrations of Political Economy“. That era had plenty of alternate currencies — any bank could issue “banknotes” which people could circulate, and which when presented at the bank could be exchanged for gold or silver coin. Bank runs, leading to bank failures, were common.
Crypto’s alternate currencies have been faithfully reproducing that feature. As many have quipped, they are speedrunning the development of the banking system.
different-church-lady
@Ken: The only answer to any further of his ideas should be, “YOU JUST ‘LOST’ MORE MONEY THAN ANY OTHER HUMAN BEING IN HISTORY SIDDOWN AND SHADDUP!!!”â
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Shalimar: Â I was on a jury twenty-odd years ago. We eventually acquitted, but I was struck by how hard it was to explain to the two last hold-outs that the burden of proof was on the prosecutors. “Well, I’m not sure he’s guilty, but I’m also not sure he’s innocent”
different-church-lady
@Anne Laurie:Â â
You’re right: instead of just abandoning him, we should hand him over.
different-church-lady
@Ken:Â â
If you want to know why there’s a rule for something, all you have to do is suspend it for a while and you’ll find out.
Ruckus
@Chetan Murthy:
who told us quite explicitly that there was evidence to charge the bastard
Evidence to charge may not be the same as evidence to convict. As others have said at this level of criming one needs a very solid case, all the ducks in a row, all the i’s dotted, all the criminals known, because any less and it is likely to get thrown out of court or found not guilty. It isn’t a traffic ticket that is easier to pay than fight. Very few people at this level will not be well and highly represented and therefore every t has to be crossed and every i dotted and zero questions are left unanswered, all are answered correctly. This is big boy law, not average joe law.
And yes it is frustrating as hell but this is major league law.
Martin
I think the underlying problem with white collar crimes isn’t just not wanting to hold our betters accountable, but that we’ve completely and utterly fucked up the concept of ‘property’ in this country. You steal a car, it’s clear you’ve taken property. You repossess a car incorrectly, not so clear. That was 2008 in a nutshell. What was stolen? The house? The mortgage on the house? The collateralized debt obligations holding that mortgage? The credit default swaps on those debt obligations? The swaps on those debt obligations? You make this sufficiently abstract and it’s no longer clear what is and is not property, what is and is not a crime. Crypto is just 2008 on steroids. Is a token property? Says who? Is a derivative based on that token property? Again, says who?
If your employer steals your labor, man, it’s a real crapshoot if a court will even recognize that, not because courts don’t recognize labor, but because it’s become so convoluted if it’s your labor or theirs. But if you steal a pen from your employer – open and shut.
Shalimar
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I had the same problem. The defendent and another guy were accused of shoplifting $1800 worth of electronics in their pants. I’m pretty sure the loot included much better quality cameras than the crap Walmart used at their entrance, but this one woman insisted she could 100% positively identify this one guy from the extremely grainy images.
Cops also got the license plate of the car, which led them back to a woman 50 miles away who identified the defendent as a coworker she didn’t know very well who she had loaned her car to for a week. I’m not sure what the real story was there, but it sounded just as likely she was framing him to protect someone else as telling the truth.
geg6
@Geminid:
Agreed. Â They just couldnât get the smoking gun.
Martin
@schrodingers_cat: The case can’t be watertight. That’s the problem.
The real problem is that the courts are so unpredictable regarding their treatment of him personally or former presidents in general that it’s impossible to build a watertight case. You can’t control for variable Alito.
Bill Arnold
@Geminid:
Yep. Fucker deserves to have his soul, what is left of it, eaten, slowly. (I’ve observed him slip up a few times.)
James E Powell
@Kent:
This is the start of pitch for a Netflix series you’re hoping to develop.
Who do you see playing the young American tech douches?
So it’s a psychic, political, thriller comedy with a heart. *
* – Opening scene of The Player. I will never stop loving it.
Bill Arnold
@different-church-lady:
We should auction off the rights to the hand-over.
Bill Arnold
@geg6:
Dirty secret is that COMSEC(/OPSEC) based on commercial equipment like iPhones and Signal was reasonably secure except versus device seizure (and even then can be made resistant). in that timeframe. (And even now, if one is not immediately a target of investigation and can be hit with targeted attacks from the likes of NSO group’s paid phone hacking.)
Stone was reasonably disciplined. Old school (pre-tech) so he certainly slipped up some. Russians (and their contractors) would have filled in COMSEC gaps if they were competent.
lowtechcyclist
I keep coming back to the role of intent in white collar crimes. You can do all sorts of bad, illegal shit, but if it can’t be proven that you had been fully informed about the law you were breaking, and you really meant to do that, then you’re magically off the hook.
How many hundreds, possibly thousands, of times in my life have I heard the phrase “ignorance of the law is no excuse”? Yet if (to steal from Woody Guthrie) you’re robbing with a fountain pen, rather than a six-gun, that sure seems to go out the window.
In the case of TFG and the Mar-a-Lago documents, I’ll be damned if I can understand why NARA repeatedly informing TFG, undoubtedly providing the relevant statutes each time, that the documents weren’t his and he was legally required to return them – why that doesn’t legally suffice to slam the door on any question of whether he knew he was violating the law, and fully intended to continue to do so.
Hell, I’m sure he was well informed even before he left office that the records or other materials he possessed or produced as part of his performing the job of President of the United States and occupying that position belonged to the United States of America, and not to the person occupying the office.
I’d argue for a due-diligence standard in most situations rather than one of intent: did he do the things a reasonable person would do to make sure he didn’t violate the law? In the case of the President of the United States, with lawyers from all over the government at his beck and call, a reasonable person would have simply put the appropriate lawyers in charge of making sure he didn’t walk out with stuff that wasn’t his.
That TFG was not, and is not, a reasonable person – that should be on him.
I realize that’s not the way the law IS, but my point is that the law is constructed to ensure that, in the words of Dylan, “all the criminals in their coats and their ties are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise,” because, to paraphrase Wilhoit, those are the sorts of people the law is designed to protect but not bind. And that’s the part that’s fucked up.