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Several top former employees of collapsing crypto exchange FTX maxed out donations to suspected fraudster George Santos (R-NY) during his successful campaign for Congress in 2022, FEC filings have revealed.
Ryan Salame, co-CEO of FTX, Claire Watanabe, former senior executive of FTX, and Ramnik Arora, former head of product for the company, all contributed the maximum amount possible to the Santos campaign allowed under federal law during the summer of 2022. SFGATE first reported the news.
A donation to Santos may not seem too out of the ordinary for Salame, a prolific political donor who poured out millions of dollars for congressional candidates from both major political parties during the 2022 election cycle. But Watanabe and Arora are both far more targeted in their politicians’ financial support.
Apart from Santos, the only two former FTX employees contributed to failed House candidates Michelle Bond (Salame’s girlfriend and outspoken crypto supporter), and Carrick Flynn, who was cited as an effective altruist favored by disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
Bankman-Fried is a leader in the effective altruism movement, which claims to use rational strategies to maximize the positive impact of philanthropy on as many people as possible, until his arrest last month for eight criminal charges, including fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and campaign finance violations. Among the many accusations Bankman-Fried is now facing, authorities believe he used embezzled customer funds to fuel his political ambitions in DC.
Meanwhile, Watanabe is contributing to one other candidate in the 2022 cycle—Karoline Leavitt, the failed right-wing Republican candidate and former Trump White House aide.
It makes sense why Watanabe and Arora, as senior executives of FTX, would donate especially to an effectively pro-crypto, anti-regulatory, or altruist congressional candidate. But why they gave their maximum contribution to Santos is less clear.
Santos has never made the issue of cryptocurrencies, effective altruism, or financial regulation the center of his congressional campaign. A relatively obscure candidate, the Long Island politician has since dominated national attention after a flood of claims made by him on the campaign trail have since been revealed to be completely false.
Santos told voters he graduated from Baruch College, where he was a volleyball star, before earning his MBA at NYU; no university has records of him ever attending. He said he later worked at Goldman Sachs and CitiGroup; owned by both companies never heard of him.
On the campaign trail, Santos weaved stories about his grandparents’ horrific flight from Europe during the Holocaust, and the death of his mother in the World Trade Center on 9/11. Santos is not Jewishand his grandparents were born in Brazil (he later told New York Post that he never claimed to be a Jew, only “Jew”); her mother not in the United States on September 11, 2001.
Santos marketed himself during his congressional campaign as a self-made entrepreneur who now has a small fortune. Despite his lack of a career on Wall Street, he claims entry financial disclosure form of his 2022 campaigns earned between $3.5 and $11 million in the last two years. In 2020, Santos did work for investment firm Florida Harbor City Capital, which was soon after charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with running $17 million Ponzi scheme.
As long as hundreds of thousands of dollars were used by Santos to fuel his campaign still unknown. At least some of those campaign funds, it can now be ascertained, came from the upper echelons of FTX.
Santos has refused to resign from Congress repeated calls to do so from a local Republican organization. In Washington, where he is a key component of the four-seat Republican House majority, the House leaders are Republicans have avoided made calls for his resignation.
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