It appears that Federal Judge Louis Kaplan has lost his patience with with Sam Bankman-Fried's attempt to break coerce witnesses and poison the jury pool, and is considering placing additional restrictions on his access to computers and the internet.
It seems that the judge is pushing the prosecution to ask for more restrictive conditions than they originally requested, indicating that the judge is not a happy camper:
Since his arrest two months ago, Samuel Bankman-Fried, the disgraced cryptocurrency executive, has been physically confined to the Palo Alto home of his parents, under the force of a $250 million bail package.
But he has roamed largely unfettered in the wilderness of the internet: conducting interviews, posting narratives, making calls on encrypted apps and using a virtual private network, a web tool that allows users to conceal data and visit websites without detection.
Those unrestrained days may soon be over.
On Thursday, a federal judge overseeing Mr. Bankman-Fried’s multibillion-dollar fraud case signaled a willingness to jail him for his persistent testing of his confinement’s boundaries, going beyond what prosecutors had asked.
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No new conditions were set during Thursday’s hearing, the latest of several hearings, held in federal court in Manhattan, to consider more restrictive bail terms. Judge Kaplan asked both sides to prepare concrete proposals that would limit and monitor Mr. Bankman-Fried’s access to the internet without inhibiting his ability to participate in his defense.
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But nearly from the outset of his house arrest, Mr. Bankman-Fried has published blog posts on Substack and entertained visitors, including several journalists, at his parents’ home. Late last month, federal prosecutors accused him of using the encrypted messaging app Signal to communicate with a possible witness.
The technical term for this is witness tampering, and it's a crime.
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On Feb. 1, Judge Kaplan ordered him to stop using encrypted apps while he weighed the issues. Eventually, though, prosecutors reached a deal with Mr. Bankman-Fried’s lawyers that would have prohibited him from using some apps, while explicitly permitting others.
But at a hearing last week, Judge Kaplan said he wasn’t convinced that those arrangements would fully prevent Mr. Bankman-Fried from secretly communicating with the outside world.
Then, on Monday, prosecutors said in a court filing that Mr. Bankman-Fried had twice used a virtual private network, or VPN, to gain access to the internet. His lawyer said he had used the VPN to watch National Football League playoff games, including the Super Bowl, through an international streaming subscription that he bought when he lived in the Bahamas.
At Thursday’s hearing, Judge Kaplan seemed skeptical about this explanation, noting that Mr. Bankman-Fried was living in “California, which is in the United States,” and could watch the Super Bowl on television.
But Judge Kaplan reserved his most pointed questions of the afternoon for the government. He interrupted a prosecutor, Nicolas Roos, as he laid out ideas that would broadly limit and monitor Mr. Bankman-Fried’s access to the internet and communications technology.
“There is a solution,” the judge said. “But it’s not one anyone has proposed yet.”
Mr. Roos gave a hesitating response before Judge Kaplan continued, saying that according to the government’s own account, Mr. Bankman-Fried had done things that suggested he “either committed or attempted to commit a federal felony while on release.”
Yeah. That dog ain't hunting.
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Judge Kaplan noted that the hearing was not called to consider bail revocation, “but it could get there, conceivably.”
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“We understand from your comments today that there is no margin for error,” he said. Any more violations, he said, and “we will be in a very different proceeding.”
Am I a bad person for wanting SBF to chill his heels in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, New York until the trial is over?
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