Not since Prince Andrew has a consensus bete noire used a major-network interview so well to make himself look exponentially worse. ABC’s George Stephanopoulos shredded Sam Bankman-Fried in this nine-minute clip of a two-hour interview, making it clear that SBF (as he’s colloquially known) is either being deceptive or flat-out lying about his defenses in the collapse of FTX.

In fact, it sounds as though Stephanopoulos knew more about the operations at FTX — and especially the money exchanges with Alameda — than SBF will admit. At times, SBF barely can look up at Stephanopoulos during most of the interview, and seems a lot more sympathetic to his own plight than the wreckage of the assets of his crypto investors:

"I expect I'm gonna have nothing at the end of this."

Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried sits down with @GStephanopoulos for a one-on-one interview following both companies in his cryptocurrency empire filing for bankruptcy last month. https://t.co/FxYbmQi92Z pic.twitter.com/lMviovTymN

— Good Morning America (@GMA) December 1, 2022

Let me correct the quote reference just a skosh: “I expect I’m gonna have nothing at the end of this,” said the man hunkering down in the Bahamas with $100,000 in the bank and $121 million in recently purchased real estate there as well.

Not in any sense does Bankman-Fried suggest that he feels any sympathy for the victims of the FTX collapse, nor any real responsibility for it. He repeatedly dodges the latter, especially in his breathtaking claim that he didn’t bother to manage risk for FTX, and only admits to being “vaguely aware” of customers’ deposited assets getting transferred to Alameda, which crosses “a bright red line,” as Stephanopoulos points out. SBF’s response was that he was asleep at the switch:

“There is something maybe even deeply wrong there, which was I wasn’t even trying. Like, I wasn’t spending any time or effort trying to manage risk on FTX and that that was obviously a mistake,” he said. “If I had been spending an hour a day thinking about risk management on FTX, I don’t think that would have happened. And I don’t feel good about that.”

“That’s a pretty stunning admission,” Stephanopoulos interjected partway through that quote. It’s a stunning rationalization, not an admission, however. Later, Stephanopoulos told the panel that managing risk is Job One for someone at the top of a funds exchange of any sort, which begs the question of what SBF was really doing with FTX, Alameda, and customer assets. Bankman-Fried’s attempt to claim that he never bothered with risk management beggars belief.

Stephanopoulos also notes at the end that Bankman-Fried went against his lawyers’ advice in doing this interview. Perhaps everyone should take this as an object lesson in the risks of contradicting attorneys hoping to protect you, and especially in sitting down for interviews while in the middle of a collapsing fraud. About the only positive thing that can come out of this is that Bankman-Fried is simply too stupid to have done this on his own, and that someone else must have been running this flim-flam behind the scenes. He sounds like a babbling idiot, literally babbling to himself at times between Stephanopoulos’ questions and his eventual answers. It’s a bizarre display in a case that is already bizarre enough.

That’s not the only bizarre takeaway from this interview. Perhaps we’ll see more of the two-hour discussion between Bankman-Fried and Stephanopoulos later this week. For now, though, it looks as if Stephanopoulos never asked about SBF’s political connections, mainly to Democrats, and his efforts to work those for his own political benefits. Axios reported last month that SBF poured $37 million into Democrats’ campaigns this election cycle alone:

By the numbers: Bankman-Fried spent around $37 million during the last election cycle, almost all of which went to boosting Democratic candidates and causes. That made him the party’s second-largest donor, according to OpenSecrets, and the sixth largest overall.

• The biggest outlay was $27 million to a Democratic political action committee called Protect Our Future.
• Its beneficiaries include: Carrick Flynn ($10.5 million), who lost a Democratic primary in Oregon’s 6th District; incumbent Georgia Rep. Lucy McBath ($2 million) and incoming Texas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett ($1.5 million).
• Others winning campaigns that Protect Our future spent at least $1 million to support include Valerie Fouschee (D-N.C.), Rep. Shontel Brown (D-Ohio) and Robert Garcia (D-Calif.). Adam Holler, a Michigan Democrat who lost, also received $1 million in the PAC’s support.
• Axios reached out to each of those candidates for comment, but didn’t receive any on-the-record replies.
• He also donated more than half a million dollars to the Democratic National Committee, which also didn’t return a request for comment, and made donations to Congressional and Senate campaign committees for both parties.
• Bankman-Fried also made maximum donations to many individual candidates, including Republican senators John Hoeven (R-N.D.) and John Boozman (R-Ark.).

How odd that a former Democrat operative in the Clinton White House would fail to follow that money while talking about a collapsing financial fraud like FTX. (Or even follow up on claims by SBF to have donated millions to Republicans in “dark” contributions.) Hopefully Stephanopoulos didn’t fail to ask about that and we’ll get some answers from Bankman-Fried in upcoming clips from this interview about his political campaigning as clients lost their shirts. I’m not holding my breath for those clips, however, and neither should you.

Addendum: Jim Geraghty looks at the transcript of Bankman-Fried’s interview with the New York Times. SBF didn’t fare much better there, either, and Jim lists some of the claims that set off his BS detectors:

Your mileage may vary, but from where I sit, a lot of Bankman-Fried’s answers retreat into jargon and complicated, confusing explations. When he uses the pronoun “we,” it’s often unclear if he’s referring to his trading platform FTX or his hedge fund Alameda Research, which I suppose illustrates the problem in a nutshell.

Also, a lot of answers from Bankman-Fried likely set off a lot of people’s BS detectors:

• “I didn’t knowingly commingle funds.”
• “I have limited access to data.”
• “Look, I wasn’t running Alameda. I didn’t know exactly what was going on. . . . I was a large owner of it. That is true. I had a lot of exposure on that side. But I wasn’t running it.”
• “I don’t know the details of the house for my parents.”
• “Lawmakers were not ruling on FTX. FTX did not have an application before Congress for anything. My donations were mostly for pandemic prevention.”
• “Media matters a lot, and I wanted to support good media ventures. That was the whole thesis there. I don’t have governance over any of these. I was not looking for governance over them. I was looking to support journalists doing great work because I think what they do is really important.”

Be sure to read it all.