Former congressional candidate Michelle Bond has been charged with conspiring in an illegal campaign financing scheme run by executives of an anonymous cryptocurrency exchange based in the Bahamas.
Damien Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced that he was unsealing the charges against Bond after a back-and-forth with Bond’s partner and former FTX executive Ryan Salameh about whether prosecutors should investigate her.
Williams said Bond and Salameh tried to fund her U.S. House of Representatives campaign.“By illegally using hundreds of thousands of dollars from corporate coffers,” it alleged in a press release issued Thursday.
“Former congressional candidate Michelle Bond allegedly financed her campaign with illegally obtained funds and then made a calculated effort to cover up her wrongdoing, including lying to Congress about the source of the deposits,” FBI Acting Deputy Director Christie M. Curtis said in a statement.
Bond ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. House of Representatives in New York’s 1st district as a Republican in 2022. Shortly after, prosecutors said Bond’s lover was a “senior executive at a now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange’s Bahamian subsidiary,” and that Bond had entered into a “sham consulting agreement” with the exchange.
According to Thursday’s indictment, Bond received $400,000 from the settlement, and she allegedly used the money illegally to fund her campaign. Bond twice reported the $200,000 payment as “consulting income” on her 2022 financial disclosure form.
“But in a prepared conversation that Bond had with her trade group’s board of directors, Bond admitted that she did not work for the exchange and that the exchange had funded her campaign,” prosecutors said.
Bond was indicted on four counts, including “conspiracy to raise illegal campaign contributions” and “receiving and collecting excessive campaign contributions.” Each count carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison, according to the DOJ.
In addition to consulting fees, Bond’s campaign received thousands of dollars from the Salame-backed WinRed Super PAC. Those payments were properly disclosed in her Federal Election Commission filings and are not part of the campaign finance fraud indictment. Salame, his parents, and Bankman-Fried’s father are also listed as donors.
Bond declined to comment on the charges.
Salameh, moves to block Bond prosecution
Last week, Salame said prosecutors He added that he had entered into a plea deal to “intimidate” his partner and mother of an eight-month-old child, and that he would only plead guilty if the government promised to stop investigating Bond. Salameh Dismiss your partner’s charges or otherwise overturn his conviction. Prosecutors said in a response filed Wednesday that Salameh’s request was “factually without basis.”
Salameh, who was sentenced to seven years and six months in prison in May, I feel guilty In September 2023, he was charged with conspiracy to make illegal political contributions and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitter. He worked closely with former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. Bankman-Fried I was sentenced He was sentenced to nearly 25 years in prison in March following a criminal fraud trial late last year.
Prosecutors said they made it clear at a May 2023 conference that Salameh’s guilty plea would not stop the investigation into Bond.
“As prosecutors reflected in their contemporaneous memos, the government stated in that call that it “separated the Michelle (Bond)/Ryan (Salameh) discussion substantially and in part from prior defense discussions, that the Ryan disposition would not resolve the investigation into Michelle’s conduct, and that to the extent prior statements were otherwise understood, this call superseded.” “It was after this call that Salameh entered his guilty plea.”
Judge Lewis Kaplan of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered Salameh to file a response with the government by September 10, and said the court will hear the arguments on September 12.
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Prosecutors also addressed Salameh’s social media posts since his sentencing in May. He has been particularly active on X in recent months, frequently posting about the government’s lawsuit against Bankman-Fried and other FTX executives, including Nishad Singh and Caroline Ellison.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office filing lists several examples: one The August 18 article read, “If you want to know how broken our justice system is, look at how little time Nishad and Caroline had after lying to save themselves.”
“This behavior is consistent with other actions Salameh has taken since his sentencing, when he publicly expressed his complete remorse and contempt for the judicial system via tweets,” prosecutors said Wednesday.
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