A better explanation than what?
It wasn’t evasiveness, in my view.
Plus I’m not sure if the judge means much by “perjury” beyond “continues to plead not guilty” and this so-called evasiveness.
A better explanation than what?
It wasn’t evasiveness, in my view.
Plus I’m not sure if the judge means much by “perjury” beyond “continues to plead not guilty” and this so-called evasiveness.
I agree that some of his behavior was just unproblematic “being very literal about answers.”
You have my respect for acknowledging that; it’s very rare that anyone does.
Not remembering important things
I really think people should cut him a lot more slack for this. On November 11th, new FTX management said in a public announcement that, “Sam Bankman-Fried has resigned his role as Chief Executive Officer and will remain to assist in an orderly transition”, while behind the scenes they were reporting him to authorities[1]. So he probably didn’t expect that he was about to be permanently shut off from access to internal company data to the greatest extent that new management could manage and therefore he may not have been secretly exporting all the relevant data to his personal storage as may have been prudent. (In fact, he’d been busy turning off autodelete “on any place I found it”.) It’s very hard to remember exactly how things played out when in the middle of a crisis you’re suddenly shut off from almost all the relevant data and it’s now a year or so later.
He also gave dozens of interviews. A very literal person, when asked, “Did you say xyz on this date?” is not going to think, “I expect they’re quoting me...but sometimes they’re just paraphrasing me in a misleading way...and obviously I don’t actually remember...but it’s going to look really bad if I say I don’t remember and then they put a tweet from me on the screen saying it...so I better say yes.”
He was also living off bread and peanut butter in one of the worst jails in the country with limited access to the internet, discovery material and his ADHD meds, he’d just gone through a year of the globe turning on him with the final nail in the coffin being his former girlfriend testifying extensively against him right in front of him, and, I expect, he was doing what he could on the stand to mask autistic mannerisms so that he wouldn’t come across so unlikeable and shady. This can’t have helped his ability to recall things.
Not giving answers that substantially clarified what happened
Saying “I don’t know which piece of evidence you’re referring to?” when he was several times asked simple questions on whether he did or didn’t do something.Note that this is the opposite of taking questions too literally; instead, it’s being deliberately obtuse to mask his refusal to ever disclose information that the prosecution didn’t already present, which is a central example of “being evasive.”
I’d be interested to hear examples (genuinely). I can’t think of times when it seemed like this is what was happening, rather than him just “being autistic” (or not actually remembering, see above). In that link in my last comment it says, for example, “In their article Autism in the Criminal Justice System, Judge Kimberly Taylor and other experts urge criminal justice professionals to ‘[u]understand the need to repeat and rephrase questions” and note that “difficulty in maintaining eye contact or insistence on changing the subject of conversation to a topic of their choice—all typical diagnostic behaviors of a person with autism—can mislead an investigator, attorney, or judge.” Judy Mark—a UCLA Disability Studies faculty member who has an autistic son...acknowledges “answers that seem non-responsive’ and ‘times when [autistic individuals] might repeat themselves or become obsessed on an issue, something we call perseveration. They might become particularly focused on minute details that others find irrelevant, something we call hyperfocus.’”
Regarding perjury, a lawyer (I believe it was an FTX lawyer?) testified that SBF asked him what excuses he could use to explain that the money is gone, then the lawyer suggested some pontential avenues but was like “they won’t work because it’s not actually legal/doesn’t hold up with the details” (paraphrased), and SBF nodded at that, but then used these excuses anyway talking to the media?! And then when asked about what he had said in the media, he didn’t take it back, which at that point constitutes perjury.
Yes, an FTX lawyer[2]. Again, I’d be interested to hear more details. It sounds to me like they didn’t realize the nature of the mistake they’d made until the weeks leading up to the run on the exchange and I expect they thought that, given their ignorance at the time, they had not committed fraud. But I also expect that now they were facing a liquidity crisis—and didn’t think anyone would believe them that it was an accident—they were keen to know if it would have been fraud even if they had known exactly what they were doing. I can’t think of a time he lied in the media on the basis of this (or, ever).
In fact, Nishad appears to slip up at one point on this: “However, not all elements of the prosecution narrative line up neatly. Singh said he left the crucial June meeting still thinking things were OK and did not realise customer funds were being raided until September” (Financial Times).
I’m getting almost all of this from the first website I linked to, by the way.
“On November 9, 2022 . . . S&C attorneys in our Criminal Defense & Investigations Group, in consultation with Mr. Miller, reported the concern to federal authorities, including the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York [USAO], the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.” (from this paper)
Under an immunity grant. FTX lawyers were permitted to testify for the prosecution but not the defense, I believe.
That’s interesting. Do you know when that invitation was (I can’t find it)? If it was close to the trial date, fair enough. If it was at the point of being remanded, it looks like he ended up experiencing a lot of problems that weren’t particularly foreseeable.
I can fact check if you’re curious, but just going by memory for now:
In SBF’s “practice” testimony that the judge requested, someone made a comment about how very convenient it was that he wasn’t able to produce the document retention policy that he kept referring to in an effort to defend himself. He replied that he’d requested it from FTX many times.
There was at least one complaint in the run up to the trial that a huge amount of discovery material had been made available to the defense at such a late date, and SBF was having so many problems with Internet access, that this should hardly count as an opportunity to review the information.
There’s also a huge difference between “information the prosecution wants to use against the defendant” and “information the defendant wants to use to defend himself”. I think the basic situation was that SBF didn’t have a realistic opportunity to look at the former before the trial and that he never had access to the latter (except for information that was inextricably part of evidence that prosecutors had judged served their own ends more than SBF’s overall.) I don’t think there’s a tension between millions of pages being used against you and having minimal access to data that might exonerate you.
Thank you—I misread you, I apologize, I thought you’d said the judge offered a trial delay. (Although it’s still somewhat interesting that Judge Kaplan reminded the defense that they could submit a request for a delay and he would consider it.)
Clearly the Court did not find this persuasive, but I still want to share some sense of the difficulties SBF was facing: at “the latest opportunity the defense had to observe whether the plan for access to the internet-enabled laptop would work as promised,” due to a number of factors, SBF “spent an entire day getting access to a single document. That is one day he could not spend working at the MDC or conferring with his lawyers.” (from here). Perhaps Brady only requires that access is given to SBF’s lawyers (who were not all “well-bankrolled” by the way—Mills at least worked pro bono), but I still think these kind of things are worth mentioning in discussions of the extent to which SBF’s testimony was evasiveness vs. genuinely not recalling.
Also, even if “the recently produced documents” were mostly “from the defendant’s own Google accounts,” he had at least 2.5 million pages in his Google accounts, so whether they were technically “accessible” is not really the point. (Assuming he did have access—SBF reported that FTX cut off his access to his personal LinkedIn account, for example.)
But I do think I veered into talking about how FTX would only provide data to the prosecution not the defense, when my original comment that started this thread was just the words “discovery material”, which may have confused things.
I see no reason to believe he was incapable of factoring those things in to the extent relevant, or unwilling to do so
I think Judge Kaplan’s apparent dislike of SBF has been widely reported and I assume we’ll have to agree to disagree on whether that biased any of his judgments in this case.
Thanks for going to the trouble of sourcing these quotes.
To me, the focus on “What this is referring to” is illuminating because it shows how SBF is laser-focused on what the prosecution has on him. What’s strikingly absent is a desire to try hard at remembering so he can tell as much of the truth as possible.
I mean, in the “practice” cross-examination, I think he was frequently rebuked for guessing at what the prosecutor meant or sharing information beyond a short, binary, direct answer to the question the prosecutor (thought she) was asking. For example, “A. And by “go negative,” you’re talking about negative in a particular coin or negative net asset value? Q. Just have a negative balance, Mr. Bankman-Fried. A. Sorry. I— … THE COURT: … I’ve gotten beyond my tether here. … part of the problem is that the witness has what I’ll simply call an interesting way of responding to questions for the moment. Q. Mr. Bankman-Fried, in May of 2022, were you aware that account ID 9 @AlamedaResearch.com could have an overall negative value? A. I am giving you my best guess at answering the question. Q. I’m not asking for a guess. I’m asking what you understood at the time. A. I am going to answer what I think the question you are asking is, but I apologize if I’m answering the wrong question.” I think the precise question she intends to ask here is extremely important, but she won’t specify (or doesn’t understand that she needs to.) It’s a very complicated case and the details matter. If Alameda’s trading accounts collectively had a net liability of billions to FTX for an extended period with no uncorrelated collateral, then they “borrowed” billions here in the way ~everyone thinks they did. But if one subaccount was temporarily negative $3 billion in a particular coin while another subaccount was temporarily positive $4 billion in another coin and it’s mostly for market-making purposes, then the sense in which Alameda was “borrowing” $3 billion via its customer accounts is extremely different.
And then there are plenty of reports of how when SBF gave extra information that wasn’t asked for, that was surely “evading questions, trying to pour forth verbiage to distract Sassoon from what she’d asked.” (from here)
Perhaps we’re understanding the term “referring” differently—I hear it as “I don’t understand exactly what you’re asking me (and if I guess wrong you might make me look like a liar)” while you might be hearing it as “I don’t know which of the many pieces of supporting evidence have prompted you to ask this question and I don’t want to reveal more than you already know about.”
Taking the first example of “referring to” in your comment, we have:
Q. In fact, over and over again in public forums you described FTX platform as safe, correct?
A. I am not sure specifically what that is referring to. I may have.
I’m picturing his thought process as something like, “I think I used the word ‘safe’ multiple times in public forums in reference to FTX U.S. If that is what she’s referring to then my answer is ‘Probably.’ But maybe she’s referring to that tweet someone else wrote using the FTX Twitter account that said FTX International was safer than Binance. And I can’t think of any times I’ve actually described FTX International with the word ‘safe’ and I don’t think I would have said that, so what do I say? If I say ‘Yes’ then I’m giving the impression that I said something bad that I don’t think I said, but if I say ‘No’ then she might bring up that tweet and make me look like a liar.”
I think that’s how my mind would respond anyway, given the way other interactions had gone. For example, “Q. Now do you remember telling Zeke Faux in early 2022 that Alameda played by the same rules as other traders? A. Not in that wording, no. Q. So you don’t recall that. A. No. Q. Do you recall telling him that in other wording? A. I recall saying that Alameda wasn’t front running other customers, that its trading access was like other customers.” If SBF had given a straight “no”—because he did not in fact make the claim that the prosecutor is heavily implying he did—and then the prosecutor had shown the jury a quote from Faux paraphrasing SBF that was taken out of context, would that have been perjury? I would definitely have been wary of giving yes/no answers to imprecise or misleading questions.
It would also include saying confidently “no” if you’re sure you never said something.
Who is ever sure they never said something? I’m not sure why you and I disagree here. I feel like the “normal” way to answer questions about things you may or may not have said a year or so ago is to say “yes” when you’re >50% sure you said it and “no” otherwise. Or, perhaps when testifying in your own defense, to just say “yes” every time you get the sense the prosecutor is about to pull out some written record of you saying it, even when that’s technically lying because you don’t actually remember, because it’s not worth the risk. But I think literal-minded people will feel very uncomfortable having only those two options and would rather say “I don’t recall”, especially if in squeezing their 25% confidence into a “no” only to get proven otherwise would constitute perjury.
I don’t know which of the lines above are the 2+ suspicious ones, but none of them strike me as such.
Thanks for the summary. One nitpick:
During this section especially I kinda wanted to shout at my podcast when Will asked rhetorically “was he lying to me that whole time?” the answer is yes Will, it seems like they were. The code snippets from Nishad Singh and Gary Wang that the prosecution shared are pretty damning, for example.
To be fair to Will, he does acknowledge that Nishad’s insurance fund code “seems like really quite clear fraud”, if comparatively minor.
As for the other code snippets in your link—the “backdoor”—Nishad and Gary said the intention was to support Alameda’s role as a backstop liquidity provider (which FTX was heavily dependent on in its early days to function):
“[Wang] testified about several changes Bankman-Fried asked him to make to FTX’s software code to allow Alameda to withdraw unlimited funds from the exchange. . . . Wang agreed that the changes were necessary for Alameda to provide liquidity on the exchange” (Reuters)
“Singh also acknowledged that he originally thought some of the special treatment Bankman-Fried’s trading firm Alameda Research received on FTX was meant to protect customers by allowing it to more effectively ‘backstop’ some trades. ‘My view at the time [was that] it would be helpful for customers,’ Singh said” (Financial Times)
As others have observed, it’s been taboo to publicly speculate on SBF’s innocence since long before his conviction, including—or perhaps especially—in EA spaces. So please excuse the pseudonym, but...
I think this sentence is a tragedy. This isn’t the place to get into my general issues with the United States incarceration system, but even putting that to one side, I believe there’s much more to this story than meets the eye and it would be nice to see more EAs seriously grappling with the arguments in his defense.