Former FTX exec Ryan Salame returns to court after waffling on guilty plea

Former FTX executive Ryan Salame is back in court on Thursday, as Judge Lewis Kaplan looks for answers about the back-room dealings that led to Salame’s criminal plea deal, which resulted in a 7.5-year prison sentence.

Last month, lawyers for Salame, a former leader at Sam Bankman-Fried’s failed cryptocurrency exchange, asked Kaplan to void the defendant’s 2023 guilty plea to campaign finance and money-transmitting crimes, claiming that prosecutors weren’t holding up their end of the agreement.

Salame’s attorneys alleged in a court filing that the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office, in an effort to get their client to plead guilty, told Salame in April 2023 that they would stop investigating his domestic partner, Michelle Bond, for campaign finance violations if he agreed to the arrangement.

Bond, who was previously a lawyer with the SEC, was indicted in August on campaign finance charges tied to her unsuccessful run for Congress in 2022. The four-count indictment against Bond was unsealed a day after Salame, the father of their nine-month-old child, asked Kaplan to void his plea.

But Salame quickly reversed course, submitting a motion to the court within days to withdraw the petition to vacate his guilty verdict. Prosecutors struck back in their own 32-page memo last week, rejecting the claims in Salame’s original complaint.

Kaplan has made Salame’s attendance at the hearing a condition of his bail. The judge in May levied a heavier penalty than the sentence of five to seven years that prosecutors had suggested.

Salame is scheduled to surrender to prison in late October, following a delay related to a leg injury.

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