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Sam Bankman-Fried is scheduled to have a five-and-a-half-hour session with his legal team, excluding any duration taken for his yet another arraignment on Tuesday regarding his most recent indictment. This new indictment has merged accusations related to campaign finance with the pre-existing charges.
Bankman-Fried, who entered a plea of innocence for the majority of those identical accusations, is now confronted with an updated indictment following the assertion by prosecutors that they would need to dismiss the charge relating to campaign finance, citing obligations under a treaty with the Bahamas. The founder of FTX was recently incarcerated subsequent to a federal judge's decision, which stemmed from two breaches of his bail terms, involving efforts to sway or instill fear in witnesses testifying against him.
His legal representatives requested permission for Bankman-Fried to utilize two internet-enabled laptops and two "mobile WiFi devices" in designated conference rooms at the U.S. Attorney's Office within the courthouse on each weekday. They also sought the opportunity for him to engage in defense-related work "for the entire day" on August 22, 2023.
Judge Lewis Kaplan, the presiding judge of the Southern District of New York, had informed the involved parties during a hearing on August 11th that he would consider requests for temporary release to the attorneys' offices.
Until 5:00 p.m. ET on Monday, he had refrained from expressing his opinion regarding the defense team's request for daily access. Nevertheless, he decided to grant Bankman-Fried permission to confer with his legal counsel in the attorney room of the U.S. Marshals Service from 8:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. ET on Tuesday.
He further reduced the allowed quantity of laptops and WiFi-enabled devices to just one per person instead of the initially requested two each.
Judge Kaplan has established a deadline of Wednesday for the defense to furnish details regarding Bankman-Fried's suggested "advice-of-counsel defense."
“The Government is left to guess whether it is the defendant’s assertion that he received legal advice relating to his deletion of Slack and Signal messages – a defense he alluded to at the August 11, 2023, conference … or that his fraudulent misappropriation of billions of dollars was somehow laid fully before legal counsel, who approved of the conduct, or that the defendant received legal advice on any other particular aspect of the conduct at issue, or a combination of these defenses, or something else entirely,” the DOJ said in a Friday filing.
