Giving money to Democrats can’t be a crime, because it’s only government extortion.
Giving money to Republicans, however — that’s insurrection. Of course the FBI’s on it!
via arstechnica:
The FBI on Thursday reportedly searched the home of former FTX executive Ryan Salame, who ran the failed cryptocurrency exchange’s Bahamian subsidiary and was a major campaign donor to Republicans. Yesterday morning’s search of Salame’s $4 million home in Potomac, Maryland, was reported by The New York Times and Bloomberg, with both media outlets citing anonymous sources.
Salame hasn’t been charged with a crime but was a member of FTX founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s inner circle. Salame received $87 million in payments and loans from FTX entities, the exchange’s new leadership said last month.
It’s unclear what FBI agents were looking for at Salame’s house, but the search “signals that federal authorities are not done with their investigation into FTX’s collapse as they prepare for Mr. Bankman-Fried’s trial set in October,” the Times wrote. “They are scrutinizing an array of employees and advisers in the former crypto mogul’s orbit, including Mr. Bankman-Fried’s younger brother.”
The Times notes that Salame has been under scrutiny “over the $24 million in campaign contributions he made during last year’s midterm elections,” with federal authorities alleging in court filings “that most of the $90 million contributed to political candidates by a handful of former FTX employees, including Mr. Salame, had been misappropriated from customers of the exchange.”
Bankman-Fried is facing 13 criminal charges in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. Three former executives who worked with Bankman-Fried at FTX or its affiliate, Alameda Research, already pleaded guilty to criminal fraud charges and are cooperating with government prosecutors. The executives who pleaded guilty are Nishad Singh, FTX’s former director of engineering; FTX’s former CTO Gary Wang; and former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison.
At the Revere Hotel in Boston, FBI agents and Army Special Ops units were about to conduct a "training exercise".
In the "exercise", they would go into a room and interrogate a "role player".
Instead, they went to the wrong room, where an unsuspecting airline pilot answered the… pic.twitter.com/OmuBXouQQI
— Spike Cohen (@RealSpikeCohen) April 29, 2023
FBI Claims They’re Spying on Fewer Americans
Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authorizes the federal government to investigate non-US citizens abroad in the interest of gathering foreign intelligence. But if the investigation puts them on the trail of a citizen, they are supposed to turn the case over to the FBI. This is a system that’s been around for a while (FISA was enacted in 1978 at the height of the cold war) and it seemed as if it worked pretty well. Of cou …
h/t Glenn