The prosecutor who put Bernie Madoff in federal prison for running a Ponzi scheme that defrauded investors of billions of dollars said Friday it’s “highly unusual” for Sam Bankman-Fried to be speaking publicly about the November collapse of his crypto platform FTX amid widespread allegations of fraud.
“It’s highly unusual for a subject of a high-profile criminal investigation to be conducting media interviews and public appearances during which he discusses the conduct being investigated,” Marc Litt, who prosecuted Madoff for the Southern District of New York in 2009, told The Hill.
“No criminal defense attorney I know would recommend doing that, and no matter how careful Mr. Bankman-Fried thinks he can be, it’s almost inevitable that something he says will come back to haunt him if charges are ever brought,” he said.
Bankman-Fried agreed Friday morning to testify next week before the House Financial Services Committee after giving numerous high-profile media interviews that the panel deemed “sufficient for testimony.”
Litt said the media storm around Bankman-Fried reminded him of his time working on the Madoff case.
“The understandable current media and public frenzy around the fall of FTX is reminiscent of my experience following the arrest of Bernie Madoff,” he wrote in an email to The Hill. “The public and the media were far ahead of prosecutors, who had only just begun to investigate a massive fraud…
