Nov. 16, 2022 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec
25:32
EPISODE 317: HUMAN EVENTS SPECIAL: THE FTX HEIST
The FTX Heist has rocked the crypto space and Human Events Daily is here to break down exactly what happened!Jack Posobiec is joined by Editor in Chief of the Post Millennial Libby Emmons to discuss Samuel Bankman Friedman and how he and his girlfriend stole billions of dollars from users on the crypto exchange he created. Was he an intel asset? What will the ramifications of the scandal have on regulation over the crypto space? All these questions will be answered on today’s HUMAN EVENTS DAI...
Got a very special show for you today, all about the international FTX heist.
What is FTX?
How does it tie into Ukraine?
How does it tie into the Bidens?
And does it tie in to the intelligence Services.
We're going to get into it and Libby Emmons is joining me from the Post Millennial.
But first, I got to let you guys know that we just had a massive drop when it comes to new names, right?
New names for America Fest.
Yes, that is absolutely right.
We've got new names that are going to be joining us.
Newt Gingrich, Matt Walsh, Greg Gutfeld, Laura Ingram, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, Michael Knowles, Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, Harmeet Dhillon, Steve Hilton, Allie Stuckey, Seth Dillon, Congresswoman-elect Harriet Hagman, and Darren Beatty, Cash Patel, Eric Metaxas.
Make sure, alright?
I told you guys.
I told you there was going to be more names coming.
Now we've got a huge name drop.
I'm telling you right now.
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Don't even try coming to me the week of and asking for tickets.
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Sam is not a traditional billionaire because he believes in the concept of earn to give.
Which means his goal as a human is to make as much money as possible just to give it away.
Earn to give.
And that's exactly what he's doing.
So let's say that you have $100.
Last year, this 29-year-old guy donated $50 million.
Next year, he's planning to donate $500 million a year.
about which causes, which charities save the most lives per dollar.
This $100 can go as far as it possibly can to help the world.
Last year, this 29-year-old guy donated $50 million.
Next year, he's planning to donate $500 million a year.
And next decade, he will probably give away more than $10 billion.
The amount of good that you can do for the future of the world is really large.
And it's way more than you can do to actually make yourself happy with anything like that amount of money.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard today's edition of Human Events Daily, powered by Turning Point USA.
Today is November 16th, 2022.
Anno Domine.
Folks, today we've got to take a step back and look at everything involving The FTX heist.
Because that's what this was.
This was a heist not only of the user's donations, of the user's deposits, but also a heist potentially involving all the way up to and including the DNC and potentially intelligence services.
We're gonna break down all of it.
I know you've seen it in the news and everybody's focused on the election right now and the fact that Ukraine lied about missiles hitting Poland, but We need to dig into this FTX story, and that is why we are devoting today's show to the FTX heist.
And joining me to discuss all of this, Libby Edmonds, the editor-in-chief of the Post Millennial.
Libby, thank you so much for joining us.
Sure thing, Jack.
So Libby, what is FTX?
What is this and why should we care about it?
FTX is a crypto exchange, so it's a place where people can buy and trade cryptocurrencies.
And that's what that's what they were doing on it.
So it's a crypto exchange, right?
Seems something sounds totally innocuous, but the whole thing falls apart.
The whole thing gets destroyed.
We're, you know, the founder, this is some kid we're hearing, by the way, now the FBI is talking about extraditing him from the Bahamas back to the United States.
Lots of questions about missing funds.
Potentially to his girlfriend.
Break me down.
Who are some of the players here?
Who's this guy?
Who's his girlfriend?
And what was their relationship, not only personally, but financially?
So you have this guy, Sam Bankman Freed, and he was touted as a boy genius, as so many people in this space are when it comes down to it.
And his girlfriend, Catherine Ellison, was a CEO also of a hedge fund that he founded as well.
And so they were involved in a relationship.
There are allegations that he was involved in multiple poly relationships or things like this as well in the Bahamas.
And what happened was essentially some doubt came into play as to the value of the coin that FTX issues.
And that doubt was raised by another large crypto exchange, Binance.
And once that doubt came into play, there started to be some concerns and there was a run, essentially, on FTX with customers coming to get their funds out.
At the point when customers came to get their funds out, it turned out that FTX didn't have their funds.
So, Bankman Freed took a look around and said, you know, maybe what we need is a bailout.
Asked Binance and other crypto companies, you know, for some help.
Binance took a look and said, after a little due diligence, that they absolutely would not bail out FTX.
And it was further discovered that FTX had, through a backdoor without any real oversight or anything like that, given some $10 billion to Ellison's company, In order to bail out that company.
And that company... So wait, wait, wait, wait, just to be... Just to do the ban and wait, wait, wait, hold up.
He was using a backdoor into his own system to funnel millions of dollars to prop up his girlfriend's company?
Is that what you're saying?
His girlfriend's company.
Yes, correct.
Wow.
And without any of the users knowing this?
Without any of the users knowing this.
There was absolutely no transparency and there's no regulation here.
And because the companies were in the Bahamas, they pretty much were allowed to do whatever they wanted.
Um, so once this was realized that he was skimming off the top, that the funds were going to this other company that he had an interest in both personally and professionally.
It sounded like he had an interest.
All right, Libby.
He was very interested in that company.
And then the whole thing really started really, really just fell apart.
I thought it was interesting, too, that Binance, the CEO of Binance, said that he was not going to bail it out at all.
And he took an interesting approach, saying that if the company couldn't stand on its own, then it would fall.
And that that was a reasonable thing to have happen in an open marketplace.
And for folks who need to understand this, and I'm going to ask the producers to show some of this, this guy was touted by people like former President Bill Clinton, like Tony Blair.
He's donating tons of money to the Democrats.
We've got an entire list of that.
People can go check it out at ThePostMillennial.com.
He became the number two donor to the entire Democratic Party throughout the 2022 cycle, only followed by George Soros.
Through this essential Ponzi scheme that he was running, where people thought that they were making money, people thought that they were investing in this quote-unquote coin, they called it the FTT coin, that they were going to be issuing, when it turns out the entire thing was absolutely worthless, it was actually a Ponzi scheme, and the only people making any money off of it that we can see here are, number one, himself, his girlfriend, and the Democrat Party.
Hold it right there, Libby.
We're going to go to a quick word from our sponsors.
But then when we come back, I want to talk more about this backdoor and the potential for these unregulated industries in the sector.
So what I want to talk about, though, since we are talking about new economies, we need to talk about the importance of the parallel economy all across the country.
Americans are discovering that if we want to change this nation, we must change the way the marketplace works.
Woke corporations, like the one we're talking about today, are seeking to divide us.
Big banks and exchanges like this will freeze the accounts of people who disagree with their political views.
Sound familiar?
And our supply chain is dependent on countries that actively work against our values and crooks like this guy.
It is time for a change, and that change starts with you and your wallet.
That's why at Human Events Daily and myself, we are proud to partner with Public Square, the world's largest directory of freedom-loving businesses that our nation has ever seen.
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Right back with the evidence.
So let's look at FTX.
It certainly appears to be an egregious failure to treat customer assets as segregated assets.
It appears that the leadership there attempted to fill a hole at an affiliated company.
And it occurs to me that this is a worry that I don't have for one split second about my stocks or my bonds or my treasuries when they're held in custody by American banks.
Mr. Hsu, a predecessor of yours, said that there's no need for any additional guidance.
It's a settled matter as to how banks should custody financial assets.
And they do it all the time and they've done it forever.
But my understanding is that your office discourages banks from providing custody services among other services in the crypto space.
And it seems to me if people had access to custody services provided by a wide range of institutions, including regulated financial institutions, they might be able to sleep more comfortably knowing that those assets were unlikely to be Used for some completely inappropriate purpose.
So what you're hearing there is Senator Pat Toomey, my senator from Pennsylvania, on his way out.
He's being replaced by Fetterman, by the way.
So we're all very excited about that.
That he is making a full-throated endorsement of the regulation of the crypto space, specifically using FTX as an example.
And he's saying that, well, if you deposit anything with a regular bank, a regular bank would never do that.
Really, Pat?
Really?
You mean to tell me that your bank would never invest your own funds?
That all your money's just sitting there in, you know, in a vault like Scrooge McDuck?
Are we really supposed to believe that?
Come on.
Come on.
We know that's not how it works, okay?
But I get what you're trying to do.
What he represents, Pat Toomey, he's a huge Wall Street kind of guy.
And he's representing the Wall Street angle of saying we want control and regulation over crypto.
I've had a lot of crypto bros that are messaging me over this whole thing saying, Poso, I know you're focused on the election.
You got to get into this FTX deal because we're looking at it going.
This guy took a fall.
And he's always wanted regulation.
He's given money to candidates that supported regulation.
He's spoken out in favor of regulation.
And now it almost feels like because of his own inappropriate actions that we're going to have regulation over the sector because of him.
You know, was this, was it deliberate?
Was this a setup?
Libby Edmonds, what say you?
Well, I think it's actually pretty interesting.
I do think that there should probably be some regulation in the space, similar to the way securities are regulated.
And we do have, to Tumi's point, we do have FTC protections of up to $100,000 for deposit accounts.
So there are some protections there for American consumers of banking products like that.
But the kind of regulation that the crypto space needs, or that these kind of companies need, is much more similar to securities regulation, which is transparency, full disclosure, and a complete disallowance of the kind of conflict of interest that you saw between Bankman Freed and his girlfriend, as well as what we saw between him and his brother, who founded a big charity that he gave a ton of money to.
As well.
So, um, you know, with securities regulation, you're not allowed to do that kind of stuff at all.
You're not, you're just, you're just not allowed.
And that's the kind of thing that should be completely disallowed in this space.
Which, and by the way, just to point out one of the other places where money was coming in and going out of FTX was Ukraine because the Ukrainian government had signed deals with FTX.
And we're going to save that for the third segment because I've got this theory That there may be some intelligence connections here that we've seen from the national security state.
It certainly wouldn't be the first time that the national security agencies were using a bank or a financial vehicle as a pass-through apparatus to launder money, right, for their own black ops operations or launder money for other operations, skim money, etc.
But save that for the next segment.
My question, though, Libby, is Isn't the whole point of crypto that it is decentralized, that it's unregulated?
Isn't that kind of the promise?
And when you talk to the crypto bros, and you know, nothing but love for my crypto bros, but isn't that the whole point that it's decentralized?
We don't want this tied to financial regulations.
We don't want Big Brother looking over our shoulder, and we certainly don't want central banks to be controlling the entire thing.
We know, by the way, That a lot of the big Wall Street firms are now talking with the Fed, with the Federal Reserve, about issuing and you're seeing this with Rishi Sunak.
I talked about this a year ago on this podcast.
I said, this guy's going to become prime minister and he's going to be talking about central bank digital currencies for the UK.
And guess what?
Liz Truss out in what, 46 days?
And then Rishi Sunak comes in.
Boom.
First thing he says, central bank digital currencies.
What are we hearing on Wall Street right now?
Central bank digital currencies.
And to an extent, the U.S.
dollar is Kind of a central bank digital currency right now, but y'all ain't ready for that conversation.
I guess my point is, though, is doesn't this kind of detract from the overall promise of what crypto was supposed to be?
Well, sure it does.
Yeah, definitely.
But at the same time, do we want our assets to be part of some sort of Wild West scenario where anything can happen?
And not only is all investment at risk, But we don't even know what the risks are and we don't even know what's going on with that money.
We don't know what the company is investing in.
We don't know anything because there's absolutely no disclosures.
That doesn't seem reasonable at all.
And it certainly doesn't seem reasonable in terms of protecting investors.
And just in terms of, because we don't have a lot of time to bring up the point, though, you know, the kind of libertarian argument against that would be that, well, you know, then maybe a company deserves to fail if it's doing stuff like that.
In this sense, there was, right?
There certainly was a market correction because Binance started looking into it.
They did their due diligence.
They found out it didn't work.
And shouldn't that be enough?
Because if you over-regulate, you essentially get to the point where these big players that are in the industry and in the field, they're going to box out anybody that's trying to come up as an up-and-comer, and they're going to solidify their monopoly over the market.
So the regulation gets put in place and it actually decreases competition.
So that's how you get your Walmarts, your Googles, your Verizons, your Cox cables.
And that really reduces selection and options for the consumer.
And they are the ones who end up getting screwed in the long run because of higher costs.
You know, I think for me, though, the way I come down on it is, look, if if these things are being issued by companies, Regardless of what you call it, regardless of technology, it still inherently is a security.
And I don't think there's a good argument for not regulating it as a security under existing law.
But when it comes to something like Bitcoin, which is truly decentralized, it's not tied to some dude and his girlfriend in the Bahamas, then regulation on that wouldn't make any sense because that's not issued by a privately held company.
Libby Emmons, last word is yours.
Yeah, I think these are securities and they need to be regulated by securities and American investors need to be protected from people like Bankman Freed who are willing to play a shell game with consumers' investments.
I don't think that's reasonable at all.
I have concerns about privacy with centralized You know, federally backed digital coin, and that does need to get sorted out.
But investors do need to be protected from these kind of schemers, for sure.
But what about that distinction between Bitcoin itself, original Bitcoin that is not tied to one of these companies?
Yeah, I think that's right.
One of the earliest things I learned about Bitcoin was not to keep your Bitcoin on an exchange, to keep it on your own flash drive.
And I think that makes sense.
Boom.
Keep it on your own flash drive.
It's called cold storage, folks.
We'll be right back with our last segment.
Is FTX part of an intelligence operation?
Things are going to get spicy.
Stay tuned.
In the end, my goal is to do as much good as I can for the world.
I'm part of an effective altruism community.
Basically, it's a group of people looking to try and figure out if you want to maximize the amount of good you do, maximize the positive impact that you can have on the world, what does that imply?
What does that mean you should do with your life?
And I think it sort of grew out of like, here's a group of charities, you're going to donate $100, which will save the most lives, right?
Which saves the most lives per dollar donated.
Um, and you know, it's centered on a bunch of really great developing world health charities.
Uh, things like, you know, uh, the Anti-Malaria Foundation, Systemiosis Control, um, and some direct transfer charities to, uh, really poor areas of, of the world.
And like, like, you know, GiveDirectly is one there.
And GiveWorld was sort of the pioneer of evaluating these charities, comparing them, and trying to figure out, you know, how you can save as many people, um, with, with your money as you can.
Uh, yeah.
Okay.
Libby, I'm just gonna throw it out there.
This dude sounds like a fed.
Right?
I'm sorry.
This dude just, like the whole thing I'm looking at, I'm saying, why is this guy protected?
Why is he propped up by all of these international globalist figures?
Why is he going?
He's working with the World Economic Forum.
He's working with Klaus Schwab.
His FTX gets named as a partner by Ukraine for some of the funds that are going over for the war effort over there.
I mean, this guy just sounds like an absolute fed to me.
He probably doesn't know, by the way.
You know, federal assets are not always witting, right?
You have unwitting assets and then they get used as the fall guy, right?
You get used.
You're the face.
You're just the face of the operation, man.
And they're using you as a pass-through vehicle.
And the great Darren Beattie said something to me the other day, and we prerecorded a long reform interview that's going to be coming out this Sunday with him, talking about the globalist American empire and the state of it.
But one thing he mentioned was to look into BCCI.
So I said, OK, what's BCCI?
Chicago Tribune, L.A.
Times, Washington Post, back when journalism existed, right here, look at this.
The Bank of Credit and Commerce International was seized last week by international regulators, was used as a front for Central Intelligence Agency operations, according to the U.S.
government and bank documents, as well as current and former government and bank officials.
The bank was involved in secret arms deals, including the covert sale of American arms to Iran in 1986, according to court documents and officials.
The family that was used to pass through these was the family of Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, who helped to finance the secret deals.
It is also believed that the CIA used BCCI, this bank, to aid the Afghan rebels.
That would be the Mujahideen, which later, elements of which turned into the Taliban.
When I look at something like this, and I see the Ukraine connection, and I say there's all of this money going in, there's back doors built in, there's front doors, there's trap doors, You know, and this guy's given this total halo effect.
New York Times is not talking about him this way.
New York Times is saying, oh, he just tried so hard, and he only slept four hours a day, and he had a beanbag in the office, and Reuters is out here.
Well, it's actually good that he did this, because now it can help us with regulation, and he actually, the world owes him a favor.
I'm sorry.
This whole thing looks to me like this guy, and that we should actually have a discussion about the very real possibility.
That this guy could have been some sort of, witting or unwitting, federal asset.
He is now being protected and now what we're witnessing is a massive cleanup operation because the whole thing fell apart because of his own malfeasance, right?
We weren't supposed to find out about these trap doors and back doors and all of it because he was skimming, right?
Sure, they were gonna skim stuff off the top and the CIA is gonna take their bit and you're gonna make sure you fund, you know, the midterms and the politicians that you want.
to make sure they're getting their cut.
But the problem was that he was skimming for his own girlfriend.
He wasn't supposed to be doing that.
That's why the whole thing fell apart.
Libby Emmons, is it possible?
Is it is it possible or is it crazy for us to think that when we know that the intelligence agencies have acted like this in the past, that we should not apply that same rubric to the things that we see before our eyes now?
I think this should be thoroughly investigated.
And you do have congressmen saying that they would like to get on that, you know, as soon as the next house is in session, that they want to see what's really going on here.
You have a guy who is a baby boy genius.
Everyone loves a rich baby genius.
You know, it's a big trope for the Democrats, really.
And he gave some $38 million, I think, in the 2021-22 election season to Gillibrand and a whole host of other Democrat candidates.
And yeah, I think this should really be looked into what was really going on here.
Who was he backing and why?
And he does have this idea of what's called ethical altruism, which is essentially I get rich so I can give money away to big causes that I believe in.
And he had all of these things set up to fight future pandemics.
You know, a fund that was started by his brother, And he was skimming off the top and giving it to his girlfriend to pump up her company, which held most of its assets and coins that were proprietary to his company.
It's sort of, you know, what's that even about?
Is that some sort of shell game or something?
What's really going on there?
Yeah, I think we really need to know what's going on and what the relationship with FTX and Ukraine was about as well.
I mean, this guy, I love, by the way, his name, Bank Man Fried, right?
Bank Man Fried.
Could you find, if you were looking for a patsy, if you were looking for a fall guy, if you were looking for someone who's obviously a total headcase and a true believer that would never really question what was going on, never really question where the money was coming from, never really question what else was going on in his own company, doesn't this seem like the exact guy that you would go with?
Yeah, he does seem he does seem kind of like a strange fellow.
I hate to cast dispersions or judgments, really, but.
Yeah, he does seem kind of kind of bizarre and strange.
He showed up on everything wearing T-shirts, didn't really seem to have a lot of consideration for the people around him.
You know what?
Yeah.
What's going on here?
No, look, I honestly think this is one of those situations where Because the regime is the way it is, because the media is the way it is, that only, only through Elon Musk asking questions, and he's asking questions as well on Twitter, will we ever be able to even have a forum to be able to discuss these things, but I don't think that we'll ever actually get the true story, because I guarantee that whoever this guy's handlers were, if they existed, right, they're gone.
They are long gone, and I'll tell you one thing right now, They've already found another one.
It's like the end of Guys and Dolls, right?
The game keeps going.
It's the floating craps game.
The game keeps going.
Libby Emmons, thank you so much for joining us today.
Give everyone your coordinates, where can people follow you and your work.
I'm at Twitter, at Libby Emmons, and you can of course check out thepostmillennial.com every day.
The action keeps moving, folks.
Skye Masterson.
Skye Masterson is going to keep the action going wherever.
And Nathan Detroit.
Oh, Nathan Detroit.
He's always up to something.
He's always up to something.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, then you're never going to find out.
