DOJ Argues Sam Bankman-Fried's Attempts to Influence Witnesses Prove He Must Be Jailed Before Trial

The DOJ filed a formal submission wanting to revoke FDX founder Sam Beckman Fried's bond and move him to prison ahead of his October trial on allegations. He repeatedly repeatedly tried to influence witness testimony. Sorry to see you go. Sam. Anyway, joining us now to discuss is Coindesk global policy and regulation, managing editor Nick Day who is also the editor of the most important advancement of civilization since cave paintings. That's coin desk of crypto newsletter. Good morning, Nick. Good morning. So happy Monday. And of course, the prosecutors in the DOJ uh from the DOJ are alleging uh what, what, what, what kind of uh allegations are they making here uh as they submit to the judge regarding that uh viewer of our Samba freed. Not all of our viewers are uh accused of, of this kind of level of stuff to be sure so far so far. Yes. Yeah. No. So uh basically the Doj filed a written submission, echoing largely their, you know, verbal uh you know, claim uh or their verbal request uh from Wednesday's hearing where they said that Sam Beri had, you know, now on at least two different occasions, tried to influence witness testimony and therefore they're trying to revoke his bond and Roman him into custody ahead of his trial. In October. The defense has until tomorrow to provide a response. And, you know, we'll see what they say. But so far in court, they've said that, you know, a, they don't believe that, you know, be fried has gone so far as to try and intimate witnesses. They're claiming that he's merely trying to defend his reputation. And they're also saying that, uh, being or having him locked up would make it a lot more difficult to organize his defense. Although prosecutors in Friday's filing didn't seem particularly impressed by that argument. All right. And this comes as Sam Beman Freud's lawyers have asked the court to seal the private diary of former Alameda research Ceo Caroline Ellison. What's the data telling us? How might this turn out? Honestly? That is a good question. So, you know, obviously, uh, inner city press is Matthew Russell Lee has already filed to unseal that diary, uh, saying in, uh, you know, basically in the filing that this has already been shared with at least one news outlet. So it doesn't make sense to steal it from other news outlets. We'll see how the judge feels about that argument. But, um, you know, it seems to me, you know, in my uneducated opinion that there's a certain logic to that, um, you know, the bigger part to me at least is you know, in court, the defense said that the New York Times had only seen one or two pages of this diary of these documents. And in Friday's filing, the prosecutor said that they had actually been sent in eight pages and we're told that the New York Times only saw portions of it, but they have, they don't know which portions and the, they, they haven't even received the original version of this document. So they're asking for that as well. All right. The hypothetically this is kind of confusing because it's like, all right, you have a guy and like, let's say you have somebody who submits a diary to a newspaper. Does it make sense to then turn and go? Let's keep it sealed. I'm kind of confused by that whole thing. That's literally, you know, inner city press argument. Um Which, yeah, again, it's, you know, it's hard to say, ok, well, yeah, on the one hand, you're sharing it with, you know, one of the world's most prominent newspapers. On the other hand, you're asking for it to be sealed because it's not ready for public dissemination. Go figure that one out. Yeah, there's, there's something there. All right. Well, timeline real quick. What, what's going on next? Yeah. So tomorrow, the defense will have a chance to respond to Friday's filing and then the DOJ will have one more chance to respond before Thursday. Uh from that point forward, we'll see what the judge chooses my personal guess is we're gonna see another hearing happen. He'll schedule a hearing probably next week to discuss the submissions. He could also, I, I think he could just rule on the written filings. But, um, you know, this is Judge Lewis Kaplan of the US district court for the southern district of New York. He's been pretty meticulous, I would say about this whole thing so far. So, um, you know, my personal guess is again that he will schedule a hearing and we'll hear more arguments about this. All right, Nick, we're gonna leave it there. Thanks very much for joining us this morning. That was Coindesk Global Policy and Regulation and managing editor Nick Day. Don't forget to sign up for the state of crypto newsletter on coindesk dot com.