U.S. prosecutors have launched an investigation into Ryan Salame, formerly an executive with the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, to ascertain if he potentially violated campaign-financing laws in favor of his girlfriend, Michelle Bond, the Wall Street Journal reported July 11, citing people familiar with the matter.
Bond ran as a Republican congressional candidate for the 2022 Republican Primary in New York’s First District. She announced her campaign in June 2022.
Bond has been involved in the crypto industry for almost a decade and most recently served as CEO of the Association for Digital Asset Markets, a crypto trade body.
The probe
According to the report, the investigation has been going on since at least April. At the time, prosecutors conducted a search of the couple’s mansion in Maryland and seized their cell phones.
U.S. laws mandate that political campaigns cannot receive more than a set amount of funds from an individual or organization. This includes cumulative limits.
Sources told the newspaper that the investigation aims to establish whether the couple made contributions that were higher than the imposed limits.
The report said that prosecutors are focusing on the money personally contributed by Salame and loans made to the campaign by Bond herself.
The investigation is unrelated to the lawsuit against FTX and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
Salame has not been charged in the FTX case, but he does appear in the filings as an unnamed collaborator in the section about illegal political donations, according to the report. The donations in the filings are not related to Bond.
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