Bankman-Fried’s Defense Seeks to Block Prosecutors From Calling FTX Witnesses

The criminal trial of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried started Tuesday (Oct. 3).

Things kicked off at 9:30 a.m. at a Lower Manhattan federal court with voir dire questioning about the various qualifications of the potential jurors.

But before the trial officially began, the former crypto kingpin turned accused financial criminal sent out a few last legal salvos through his defense team.

The most recent filings from Bankman-Fried’s lawyers, dated Monday (Oct. 2) and Tuesday (Oct. 3) reveal that the defense wants to stop federal prosecutors from calling several witnesses to the stand, including FTX investors and a Ukrainian FTX customer who lost everything in the exchange’s collapse.

Mark Cohen, Bankman-Fried’s lawyer, claimed the Ukrainian customer was picked only to elicit jury sympathy.

“The proposed testimony that is unique to this witness would apparently reference hardships and individual circumstances created by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Such testimony would be irrelevant to the charged crimes and would serve only to elicit the jury’s sympathy and outrage,” Cohen wrote in the Monday night filing.

Read also: Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX and the Demise of the Cool Kids

The defense team also requested that Judge Lewis Kaplan, the senior United States district judge serving on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and overseeing the trial, stop Bankman-Fried’s former colleagues who have turned on him from testifying about the meaning of certain expressions used as part of the alleged crypto crime.

“If the Court rules (now or during trial) that any of the proffered categories of testimony can be admitted, the defense should be permitted to cross-examine the witnesses, including as to the basis and credibility of their understanding and interpretation of statements allegedly made by Mr. Bankman-Fried,” Bankman-Fried’s lawyer Mark Cohen wrote to Judge Kaplan Tuesday, hours before the jury selection started.

Bankman-Fried’s defense team also accused federal prosecutors of “gamesmanship” for requesting to call expert investors as witnesses after denying their client’s own witness proposals.

As covered by PYMNTS, the way that U.S. prosecutors see it, Bankman-Fried continually embezzled money from customer accounts on the FTX crypto exchange since launching it in 2019. The resulting shortfall due to allegedly criminal misappropriation was directly responsible for the exchange’s collapse as the crypto industry entered a bear market last year.

Bankman-Fried has maintained his innocence, pleading not guilty to each criminal count he is charged with.