Attorneys representing the US Division of Justice are formally in search of an “order of detention” for former FTX Sam Bankman-Fried, per a brand new courtroom letter.
Earlier this week, legal professionals for the DOJ and Bankman-Fried attended a listening to the place the federal government requested for the previous FTX CEO’s bail to be revoked and for him to be held in jail forward of his trial, which begins in October. Bankman-Fried was indicted for a sequence of fraud-related expenses in December after the collapse of FTX.
The prosecutors cited Bankman-Fried’s contact with a New York Occasions journalist as one of many tipping factors. Bankman-Fried allegedly tried to discredit his ex-colleague — and ex-girlfriend — Caroline Ellison by leaking her diary entries to a reporter.
Friday’s letter claims that Bankman-Fried has proven a historical past of tampering with witnesses. Particularly, the federal government says Bankman-Fried contacted Witness-1, the “present Normal Counsel of FTX US who could also be a witness at trial” by the messaging app Sign.
“The defendant’s use of Sign was in keeping with a historical past of utilizing the applying for obstructive functions,” the federal government wrote.
Following the contact, the courtroom restricted Bankman-Fried’s potential to make contact with former FTX and Alameda workers.
The July 20 article from the Occasions spurred the federal government’s legal professionals to push for a further movement to stop Bankman-Fried from making “prejudicial extrajudicial statements” after Bankman-Fried’s legal professionals “confirmed that the defendant had met with one of many article’s authors in particular person.”
The federal government clarified that Bankman-Fried does have the “proper to talk and defend himself to the press, even on a whole lot of events as [is] the case right here” however that Bankman-Fried has “repeatedly” sought to “corruptly affect witnesses and intrude with a good trial by tried public harassment and shaming.”
“The defendant’s current communications right here weren’t assertions of innocence, or a response to an inquiry or to a purportedly ‘poisonous media setting’ because the defendant claims,” the letter states.
Subsequently, the letter continues, Bankman-Fried is “unlikely to abide by any situation or mixture of situations of launch” and the bail situations have been confirmed “inadequate.”
Underneath the legislation, “The place the Authorities alleges {that a} defendant has dedicated against the law whereas on pretrial launch…the Courtroom ought to revoke pretrial launch and detain a defendant if, after a listening to, the Courtroom finds that two situations have been met,” the letter says.
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