Updated -- 01.31.2023: the able USDC Judge has, as expected, held the names will be revealed. SBF has until 02.07.2023 to file an appeal in the Second Circuit. But we will know who has staked him $250 million, in the coming weeks. End update.
Sam Bankman-Fried's legal team overnight retreads many of its same arguments, in trying to keep the identities of the two people who are his financial backstops on his $250 million (yep -- you read that . . .right!) bail / bond package. . . hidden from "freedom of the press" access under the First Amendment.
But it makes one new one, in the closing paragraph -- one that has no place in a Constitutional United States. The amendment reads "...shall make no law..." and it means just that. For over 240 years, our press has always been free to publish "salacious" stories, about even very private individuals -- with the sole check and balance being a libel or slander verdict, after the fact.
Team SBF argues speciously that disclosure would allow the press "to gather information for press stories focused on 'public scandal' that have little to do with Mr. Bankman-Fried’s bail conditions. . . ." That may be so, but that's a core right -- and it is the function of a free press. To shine light on questionable dealings -- that's a core pillar of our Constitutional scheme, from Hamilton & Franklin, et al., 245 years ago, to this very morning.
Team SBF would thus seek to impose a "prior restraint" in favor of what must be two of the top one-one-hundredth of one percent wealthiest people on the planet. The team says the court should not allow the printing of salacious stories.
The graphic at above right makes plain why this attempt (even if it takes months to resolve, in court). . . must fail.
"We the people" have an absolute constitutional right to know, and the press has a correlative constitutional duty to find out, whether these wealthy individuals are in a position to shape US policy on crypto- generally.
Game over. If security is a concern -- the obvious answer (and given their wealth, it will be a scant burden) is security guards and careful planning. Afterall, they chose to back a reprobate who clearly destroyed (largely by fraud) over $10 billion in investors' equity.
If they don't want the lime-light, they may revoke their surety bond obligations, at any time before their First Amendment mandated disclosure -- and Sam may (just ask Martin Shkreli, or Virgil Griffith or Bobby Shmurda) simply sit in jail until his trial date. He has no fundamental right to be hanging out, anymore -- at his parents' plush Palo Alto digs.
He is a "risk of flight" presumptive pre-trial detainee, absent the sureties' bonds.
He, like so many Ayn Randians, just doesn't "get" America. It is a land by, for and of the people, not just the wealthy. And this letter attempts to stand the relative rights and privileges accorded. . . on their head, to try to hide wealthy people from public examination -- when they choose willingly to risk their assets, for a miscreant.
Here endeth the sermon.
नमस्ते
And in a later filing in Manhattan felony court, we learn that the two sureties are only posting small bonds (compared to the overall $250 million package):
ReplyDelete". . .We therefore respectfully request that the Court update the bail conditions to reflect that the two non-parent sureties will sign separate appearance bonds prepared by the Magistrate Clerk’s office in the amount of $500,000 and $200,000, respectively. . . ."
Damn.