DOJ charges former FTX exec’s partner with campaign finance violations

Michelle Bond, the partner of former FTX executive Ryan Salame, was charged with violating campaign finance laws on Thursday. 

Back in 2022, the Department of Justice alleged, Bond launched a campaign for a seat in the US House of Representatives. 

She and Salame “orchestrated a sham consulting agreement between Bond and the exchange [FTX] pursuant to which Bond was paid $400,000. Bond then used that money to illegally finance her campaign. Further, between June and August 2022, [Salame] wired hundreds of thousands of dollars to Bond’s personal bank account, which Bond then used to illegally fund her campaign,” the DOJ’s press release said.

Salame, late Wednesday, filed to void his guilty plea after claiming that officials had gone back on their deal not to pursue an investigation against Bond. 

“Yet the Government failed to abide by its word, recently resuming its investigation into Bond and pursuing an indictment against her,” lawyers representing Salame said. 

The government, in response to Salame, asked Judge Lewis Kaplan — who also oversaw the Sam Bankman-Fried trial — to reject Salame’s filing.

“Salame resorts to inaccurate, incomplete, and outright false assertions in an effort to evade his serious sentence for his involvement in an illegal campaign finance scheme that was unprecedented in scale, and for his role in funneling billions of dollars through an unlicensed money transmitting business,” the government’s lawyers wrote.

The lawyers said that any claim made by Salame that the government agreed to drop an investigation into Bond is “demonstrably false.”

Salame is due to start a prison sentence of seven and a half years in October, after getting the date pushed back. 

Bond was charged with “one count of conspiracy to cause unlawful campaign contributions; one count of causing and accepting excessive campaign contributions; one count of causing and receiving an unlawful corporate contribution; and one count of causing and receiving a conduit contribution.”

Each count carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. 

“As alleged, Michelle Bond and her co-conspirator romantic partner attempted to fund her campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives by illegally using hundreds of thousands of dollars from corporate coffers, among other sources, and then lying to Congress and others to cover it all up,” US attorney Damian Williams said. 

Bond, outside of Salame, has her own ties to the crypto industry. Back in June, she launched Digital Future, a “public policy and advocacy think tank” focused on crypto, fintech and AI.

Salame is one of a handful of FTX executives facing jail time after the collapse of the exchange. FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried faced a trial late last year where a jury found him guilty on all counts. Bankman-Fried was sentenced earlier this year to 25 years in prison.

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