Ryan Salame, a top FTX executive who reportedly played a key role in the exchange’s political fundraising operations, pleaded guilty on Thursday to federal criminal charges tied to the exchange’s collapse.
The guilty plea comes less than a month before the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, the FTX founder, is set to begin. Bankman-Fried, who has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges against him, stands accused of orchestrating a multibillion-dollar fraud that ultimately culminated in FTX’s bankruptcy and the loss of funds for its customers.
When Bankman-Fried’s FTX empire collapsed last fall, Salame was co-chief of FTX Digital Markets, the exchange’s Bahamas-based subsidiary. A Republican megadonor, Salame reportedly served as a secret go-between for FTX donations to right-wing politicians and political causes.
Salame was arraigned on Thursday at the U.S. Courthouse in the Southern District of New York. Bloomberg first reported that Salame was expected to plead guilty on Thursday morning.
Other former leaders of the FTX exchange empire – Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang, and Nishad Singh – have already pleaded guilty to criminal charges. All are expected to serve as witnesses for the government’s case against Bankman-Fried, who prosecutors say conducted one of the largest financial crimes in U.S. history. Prosecutors had previously said that Salame intended to plead his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and so wouldn’t testify.
Salame’s Role at FTX
In its original indictment against Sam Bankman-Fried, which listed Salame as an unnamed co-conspirator, the U.S. Department of Justice charged Bankman-Fried with using a straw donor scheme to secretly make political donations in violation of campaign finance laws.
As Bankman-Fried publicly branded himself as an ardent supporter of the Democratic party – he made the second-largest single donation to Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, and he and his family were active in a variety of left-leaning political causes – he allegedly used Salame to covertly court Republicans.
Salame doled out more than $24 million to Republican political candidates during his time at FTX, and he was the 11th largest individual U.S. political donor in 2022 according to OpenSecrets.org. In a court filing last month, prosecutors shared “private messages” from Salame that purport to show him explaining how he was used as a straw donor to secretly funnel money from FTX and Bankman-Fried.
“In a private message to a trusted family member in November 2021, Salame explained that the defendant ‘want[ed] to donate to both democtratic [sic] and republican candidates in the US,’ but the defendant would not do so ‘cause the worlds frankly lost its mind if you dontate [sic] to a democrat no republicans will speak to you and if you donate to a republican then no democrats will speak to you,’” the filing said.
The DOJ dropped its campaign finance charge against Sam Bankman-Fried in July – due to treaty obligations with the Bahamas – but it later clarified that the FTX founder would still be “charged with conducting an illegal campaign finance scheme.” The campaign finance allegations will now be lumped in with wire fraud charges from the original indictment, prosecutors said in a letter addressed to U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who is presiding over the Bankman-Freid case.
Separate from the Bankman-Fried case, federal prosecutors are reportedly investigating if Salame and his girlfriend, Michelle Bond, broke campaign finance laws in connection to Bond’s unsuccessful 2022 congressional bid, according to the Wall Street Journal.
