FTX executives maxed out donations to Rep. George Santos

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Several former high-profile employees of collapsed crypto exchange FTX maxed out donations to alleged con artist George Santos (R-NY) during his successful 2022 campaign for Congress, FEC documents have revealed.

Ryan Salame, co-CEO of FTX, Claire Watanabe, former senior executive of FTX, and Ramnik Arora, the company’s former chief product officer, have all donated the maximum amount possible to the Santos campaign allowed by federal law. during the summer of 2022. SFGATE first reported the news.

Donations to Santos don’t seem particularly erratic for Salame, a prolific political donor who disbursed millions to congressional candidates from both major political parties in the 2022 election cycle. But Watanabe and Arora were both much more targeted in their support finance to politicians.

Besides Santos, the two former FTX employees have only donated to failed House candidates Michelle Bond (Salames’ girlfriend and vocal crypto proponent) and Carrick Flynn, a supposedly effective altruist favored by disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

Bankman-Fried was a leader of the Effective Altruism movement, which claimed to use rational strategies to maximize the positive impact of philanthropy on as many people as possible, until his arrest last month for eight criminal charges, including fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and campaign finance violations. Among the many allegations Bankman-Fried now faces, authorities believe he used embezzled client funds to fuel his political ambitions in Washington.

Meanwhile, Watanabe donated to another candidate in the 2022 cycle, Karoline Leavitt, a failed far-right, anti-regulation Republican House candidate and former Trump White House aide.

It makes sense that Watanabe and Arora, as senior FTX executives, would donate to particularly pro-crypto, anti-regulatory, or effective altruist congressional candidates. But why they would distribute maximum contributions to Santos is less clear.

Santos has never made the issues of crypto, effective altruism, or financial regulation central to his campaign for Congress. A relatively obscure candidate, the Long Island politician has since dominated national attention after a barrage of claims he made during the campaign trail have since been proven entirely false.

Santos told voters he graduated from Baruch College, where he was a volleyball star, before earning his MBA at NYU; no university has any record of his participation. He says he then worked at Goldman Sachs and CitiGroup; the two companies have never heard of him.

During the election campaign, Santos told stories about his grandparents escaping from Europe during the Holocaust and his mother’s death at the World Trade Center on 9/11. Santos is not Jewish and his grandparents were born in Brazil (he later told the New York Post that he never claimed to be Jewish, only Jewish); his mother was not in the United States on September 11, 2001.

Santos presented himself during his campaign for Congress as a self-made entrepreneur who now owns a small fortune. Despite his apparent lack of a Wall Street career, he claimed in his 2022 campaign financial disclosure forms to have earned between $3.5 million and $11 million over the past two years. In 2020, Santos actually worked for Florida investment firm Harbor City Capital, which was soon after tasked by the Securities and Exchange Commission with managing a $17 million Ponzi scheme.

The origin of the hundreds of thousands of dollars used by Santos to fund his campaign is still unknown. At least some of those campaign funds, it can now be confirmed, came from the upper echelons of FTX.

Santos has refused to resign from Congress, despite repeated calls to do so from local Republican organizations. In Washington, where he is a crucial component of the slim four-seat Republican majority in the House, Republican leaders in the House have avoided making calls for his resignation.

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