Democrat super donor and disgraced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried is set to appear as a speaker for a conference held by the New York Times with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Besides having to apply to the Times’ conference and pay a $2,499 fee to hear what the publication believes are “today’s most vital minds,” some speakers, including these two, have an apparent intertwined history.
As Breitbart News noted last week, Bankman-Fried recently had a softball interview with the publication and was also accused of mishandling FTX customer investments on a massive scale. Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange reportedly filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S. after a week of scandals.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Bankman-Fried was the sixth-largest donor in this midterm election cycle after he invested about $40 million, mainly on Democrat candidates and causes, with the bulk of the money on primary elections instead of the general elections.
However, this all comes as Fox News and other media outlets have reported that Bankman-Fried’s company reportedly set up a website to help raise funds for Ukrainians during the ongoing attack from Russia, and some have claimed that the funds were subsequently sent to fund the Democrat campaigns Bankman-Fried donated to.
As Fox News reported:
His [Bankman-Fried’s] company also reportedly set up a website, Aid for Ukraine, to raise funds for Ukrainians amid the ongoing war against Russia. The initiative was powered by the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, FTX and Ukrainian-web company Everstake.
Cryptocurrency donations were sent to the National Bank of Ukraine. The 30-year-old crypto financier wrote on Twitter in early March he was “excited and humbled to be working with the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance and others to support crypto donations to Ukraine.”
Last week, the deputy minister of digital transformation of Ukraine, Alex Bornyakov, stated on Twitter that the claims his country used government funds to invest in FTX, which in turn eventually turned into donations for Democrat candidates across the country, is a “nonsense” theory.
A fundraising crypto foundation @_AidForUkraine used @FTX_Official to convert crypto donations into fiat in March. Ukraine’s gov never invested any funds into FTX. The whole narrative that Ukraine allegedly invested in FTX, who donated money to Democrats is nonsense, frankly ♂️
— Alex Bornyakov (@abornyakov) November 14, 2022
Some lawmakers who appear to be in attendance as speakers are President Joe Biden’s U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen; New York City Mayor Eric Adams; former Vice President Mike Pence, who is a potential 2024 presidential contender; and Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister of Israel and the current leader of the opposition in the Israeli parliament.
Other corporate and nonprofit executives who appear to be speaking are Shou Chew, the CEO of the Chinese app TikTok; Reed Hastings, the founder and Co-CEO of Netflix; Andy Jassy, the president and CEO of Amazon; Van Jones, CNN host, author, and founder of Dream.org; Scarlett Lewis, the founder of Jesse Lewis Choose Love Movement; Priscilla Sims Brown, the president and CEO of Amalgamated Bank; Mark Zuckerberg, the chairman, and CEO of Meta (formerly Facebook), and Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock.
Jacob Bliss is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @JacobMBliss.
