FTX Donated $1 Million to McConnell-Aligned Super PAC Weeks before Declaring Bankruptcy
The now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX donated $1 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, a Super PAC associated with Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), two weeks prior to declaring bankruptcy. FTX first filed for Chapter 11 protection two weeks ago.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, now-former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried donated over $5 million to Joe Biden. During the 2022 midterm election cycle, Bankman-Fried doled out $40 million dollars to mostly Democratic politicians, making him the party’s second-largest financial backer after George Soros.
According to FTX’s latest filing with the Federal Election Commission (FEC), the cryptocurrency exchange also gave $750,000 to Congressional Leadership Fund as well as an additional $150,000 to the American Patriots PAC, both of which support House Republican candidates.
Earlier this year, senior Republicans on the Senate Agriculture Committee, Arkansas’s John Boozman and North Dakota’s John Hoeven, both received donations from Bankman-Fried as part of the latter’s bid to have the Commodity Futures Trading Commission oversee crypto regulation, The Washington Free Beacon reports.
The spectacular fall of Bankman-Fried and FTX, once seen as an industry trailblazer, has rattled the crypto world, which shed $2 trillion in value earlier this year due to market instability.
“Here we are, with one of the richest people in the world [Sam Bankman-Fried], his net worth dropping to zero, his business dropping to zero. . . . The velocity of this failure is just unbelievable,” Harvard bankruptcy professor Jared Ellias told the New York Times.
The Senate Leadership Fund was the top spending Super-PAC in the 2022 midterm elections, reportedly giving out over $200 million in political donations, the organization Open Secrets found.
