well, sam bankman-fried also had a hedge fund. they say that they directed customer deposits and misused them by giving them to the hedge fund to cover its own loans and its expenses and according to the s.e.c. bankman-fried had also used the money from the customer deposits to buy luxury real estate in the bahamas for him, his family and other executives and took out allegedly $1.3 billion in loans and he also donated tens of millions of dollars to political campaigns. now, that is also one of these criminal charges, a conspiracy to violate federal campaign laws so one of my colleagues has tallied the numbers and it looks like in this past year, in this past cycle bankman-fried donated more than $900,000 to candidates and $39 million to outside groups. that s just a huge amount of money in the campaign finance world. you know, this comes as he was supposed to be appearing before the house financial services committee, also testifying there today, though, is the person who is the new c
herschel walker. we will see what happens tonight. it s trending towards that i think a few things. i think trump does best whenever his back is sort of up against the wall when he has a healthy competition. think about what he did in 2016 in such a large field. and if you are going to be competitive in a general election. you are going to have to be able to compete in a primary. so, in some ways, i think it s better for him to have some competition. we will see if anyone jumps in. may not be until next summer. some key things to watch if he becomes a candidate tonight, he enters the campaign finance world. what does that mean? that means that every quarter, everybody, including people who may want to run against him are going to judge how much is he raising? and that s going to be a real indicator to some of the people on the fence about getting in or not about whether they should if trump ones on the trump presidency, on his record, on his policy accomplishments, no new wars, moms li
felt they were limited in their choices and had to settle. a lot of satisfaction. look at any polling ask people what they think of this field, it is record highs. so some of this has to be linked back to ego and the idea they are more popular than the rest of these candidates. how does deval patrick deal with his work for bayne capital in a democratic primary, james? he has to figure that out and has to figure out elizabeth warren. dave brought up a great point about south carolina. but as former governor of a neighboring state he is expected to be quite well in new hampshire and if he doesn t i m not sure where it goes from there. the other thing about deval patrick, the last time he won for office was 2010. total campaign finance world has totally changed in terms of small dollar contributions. for him to get on debate stage in december he needs 200,000 ville contributors and right now it s hard to see the path and in massachusetts, a lot of folks saying this is very serious and
where they just directly go after the leakers. they don t necessarily go after the substance of what has been leaked, although, they will on the edges to try to discredit. but her quote was the only thing i see inappropriate about the meeting was the people who leaked the information on the meeting after it was voluntarily disclosed. if you talk to folks in the national intelligence world, they will tell you they see a lot of problems with that meeting. frankly, even those in the campaign finance world. i want to john on that. the irony here is she s focusing on the leakers with this, but the president is tweeting about a report from anonymous sources where these people were leaking that four out of the 7 of the memos contained classified information. there s cherry picking going on. of course. everything that donald trump was and has done since he s been in office has been on his terms. it s on his rules, and he if it works to his advantage, and we should say most politicians do
are ways in which in the in the campaign finance world like laws and norms both kind of operate and they reenforce each other in different ways and i wonder the degree which you as a reporter in this field feel like we re seeing an anomaly because it s so different than what we ve seen before or just an alteration in shift in norms that this will now be like oh, i m going to hire my son. i m a senator, i m you know, my daughter is going to be a chief of staff. i think we re seeing a permanent change in norms. i was back when it was hugely scandalous for hillary clinton to have a policy role in the clinton white house. and now we have that times a million. it s not appropriate, we shouldn t do that it would look bad and those are the kind of things that president trump has decided he doesn t care about and are unimportant to the american people in his view and he s gotten rid of them and said so what. that latter one is part of the issue too. i thought this was very good. donald