by Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Book Substack
LITERARY SDNY, Oct 13 -- Thirteenth day of October and on the stand in the SBF trial trial was the former CEO of the now-bankrupt BlockFi, Zac Prince.
They'd lent a billion dollars to FTX and Alameda and lost $650 million of it when the dust so quickly settled.
SBF's lawyer Cohen, in another meandering cross examination, asked if he hadn't known that FTT was illiquid.
But how was that the point? Had he known that FTX was taking customers deposits and letting Alameda use them, to make huge "loans" to Sam and the others?
Speaking of Sam(s), where was Sam Trabucco? It emerged -- Kurt Wheelock spotted -- that Sam Trabucco, who supposedly left Alameda in August 2022 before the sh*t hit the fan, was still on a four-person Signal chat on D-Day, November 5, 2022, the one in which Ellison said she'd offer to buy all of CZ's FTT at $22.
Some replied that maybe he'd just been left on the chat. That seemed unlikely, given that only four people were on it: Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Elison, Ben Xie and.. Sam Trabucco.
Then others argued that Sam Trabucco, at least in the part of the chat the prosecutors had put into evidence, had not "said" anything. But he should have been and will should be indicted not for his role on November 6 but for his active involvement in the China bribe: conspiracy to violate the FCPA. It was open and shut.
Prosecutorial discretion, Kurt was finally told. But he'd seen this before, when they went after those who paid bribes in the UN but not those who took them, who remained there, all the way to the top.
Kurt's view was that while prosecutorial discretion might knock down in court a defense of selective prosecution, it was something that had to be looked at, in detail.
These were offices that wielded power, power to put people in prison or to allow some criminals to go free. But to cover them, journalistically, people needed access and that led to a certain kind of stories.
To say they were appointed by the party in power was just the start of it. The issue has come up in the Ghislaine Maxwell case, when Kurt and others had derided the narrow prosecution, others being allowed to get away. But this was different
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