It's hard to overstate how clumsy this attempt at garnering political influence was. Reading the indictment (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourt

It's hard to overstate how clumsy this attempt at garnering political influence was. Reading the indictment (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.590940/gov.uscourts.nysd.590940.80.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.59...), it sounds like SBF made three kinds of illegal donations: 1. Hard money donations through a straw donor to specific campaigns. 2. Individual donations to party committees through straw donors. 3. Large donations to SuperPACs. Under American campaign finance law, hard money donations (1) are capped at $6000 per candidate/election pair (I'm using 2023 figures, but they aren't substantially different from 2021-22). This form of giving is publicly disclosed and carefully observed. So if you give Jane Senator a fraudulent max donation, you're creating a huge political problem for her for at best a few thousand dollars worth of potential benefit. No sane politician on the take does it through hard money donations. The situation for (2) is kind of similar. The caps are bigger ($41,300 per year per committee), but the party committees have such a vast budget that no one is going to take a phone call in return for a max donation, and again you're doing it through the most public, best-disclosed route. At best maybe your straw donor can write "Crypto is great :-)" on the memo field of the check, on the slim home that the DNC or RNC intern sent to deposit it will see it. Honestly these first two attempts read like someone tried to deduce how to influence politicians from first principles. (3) at least isn't amateur hour, you can give unlimited amounts to unaffiliated political action committees, and this is how billionaires dabbling in politics traditionally burn their money. But again, this was all done through wire transfers that are easily traced from Alameda to the straw donors, rather than by showing up with suitcases full of cash or bitcoin. I fail to see how any of this was supposed to succeed. In the best case, no one notices that the donations came from straw donors, and you have successfully poured your millions into the maw of the political system, never to be seen again. You will get your straw donor put on a bunch of mailing lists but get approximately zero return for this money. In the worst case, you've burned a bunch of politicians by making unsolicited direct donations that are tiny (a few thousand bucks) in the grand scheme of things but forever tar them with the stench of your fraudulent enterprise. Instead of buying influence, you've created strong incentives for most of Congress to salt the earth around you. Unless there's some 3-D chess aspect to this political giving that I don't understand, it looks very much like the people involved in this scheme just winged it based on how they thought buying political influence was done. It reminds me of the scene in Office Space where they try to look up 'money laundering' in the dictionary.