Rep. Maxine Waters, D-California, the chair of the House Financial Services Committee, was supposed to have Bankman-Fried as the star witness at a hearing examining the FTX affair. Waters had to content herself with having the current FTX CEO, John Ray III, who had been hired to guide the company through bankruptcy.
According to the Western Journal, the hearing erupted in fireworks when Waters tried to pull a fast one. She attempted to adjourn the hearings when she had finished questioning Ray. The committee’s Republican ranking member, Rep. Lance Gooden, R-Texas, objected because he had not had his turn to question the witness.
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“Chairwoman Waters, Chairwoman Waters, I’ve not had the opportunity to testify — or [rather] to question the witness,” he said.
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Waters, who had been giving her closing remarks, abruptly stopped. After an aide whispered something in her ear, the congresswoman picked up where she had left off.
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Gooden was having none of it. “Chairwoman Waters. Parliamentary inquiry. Are all members entitled to question witnesses?”
After a brief and frank exchange of views, Waters allowed Gooden five minutes to ask Ray questions.
According to Red State, Ray’s testimony was damning, “FTX commingled customer funds with the FTX Foundation and affiliated nonprofits to advance SBF’s vanity projects and progressive causes.”
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Ray also went on about his difficulties in handling the company’s bankruptcy. “It’s one of the worst from a documentation standpoint. Even in the most failed companies you have a fair roadmap of what happened. We’re dealing with literally, sort of a paperless bankruptcy, in terms of how they created the company. It makes it very difficult to trace and track assets particularly, as I’ve said, in the crypto world. It’s really unprecedented in terms of the lack of documentation.”
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Red State speculates that Waters wanted to bring the hearing to an abrupt end because the Bankman-Fried had been very generous to Democratic politicians with his ill-gotten gains. The politicians who benefited from the donations included members of the Financial Services Committee, Waters, and Reps. Sean Casten, Chuy Garcia, Jim Himes, Ritchie Torres, and Josh Gottheimer.
Since the Republicans took control of the House during the 2022 midterm elections, Waters will no longer be chair of the Financial Services Committee. Then, a proper investigation of the collapse of FTX can begin.
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