Two days before Nishad Singh gave the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund its largest-ever donation, he appeared ambivalent about it.
“In general I’m averse to ~explicitly-woke stuff,” Singh wrote in a Signal chat on July 5, 2022, adding, “what’s up with the LGBT victory fund?”
At the time, Singh was serving as an executive at FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange that would later implode in what federal prosecutors have called one of the largest financial frauds in U.S. history.
Michael Sadowsky, a political consultant running a super PAC for Singh’s boss, Sam Bankman-Fried, replied simply. The donation, he wrote, was “a passthrough to run ads in favor of Becca Ballint.”
Though he misspelled her name, court records make clear that Sadowsky was referring to U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., who was then serving as president pro tempore of the Vermont Senate and waging a hotly contested Democratic primary campaign for an open seat in the U.S. House.
Texts unveiled publicly this week by prosecutors in the unfolding trial of Bankman-Fried, the former cryptocurrency mogul now charged with a series of financial crimes, lay bare the cynical scheme behind a $1 million pro-Balint ad blitz in last year’s House race. The messages were first reported on by Molly White, an independent writer following the trial. Singh, who pleaded guilty to several criminal charges earlier this winter, including campaign finance fraud, is cooperating with federal prosecutors in hopes of avoiding jail time.
At the time of Singh and Sadowsky’s exchange, Bankman-Fried was one of the largest and most sought-after donors in Democratic politics. And both Balint and her chief rival in the congressional race, Molly Gray, had met with representatives of Guarding Against Pandemics, a political action committee run by Bankman-Fried’s brother, Gabe, earlier in 2022. The group, which purported to support pandemic prevention measures, would ultimately endorse Balint over Gray.
“She’s been good on pandemics; put stuff on her website,” Sadowsky explained to Singh about Balint. “Molly Gray said she wouldn’t do anything on it.”
Sadowsky at the time was running Protect our Future, a super PAC funded by Bankman-Fried, that largely took its cues about who to support from Guarding Against Pandemics. But Protect our Future couldn’t pay for pro-Balint ads directly, he explained.
“Gray got (Balint) to commit to denouncing super PAC (spending) at debate,” he wrote. “So we would take a negative press hit.” Sadowksy continues: “In general, you being the center left face of our spending will mean you giving to a lot of woke shit for transcational (sic) purposes.”
And, indeed, when Gray’s camp criticized the ensuing onslaught of outside spending in the race, Balint’s campaign adeptly wielded the optics of the pro-LGBTQ+ PAC’s involvement. While campaign surrogates never explicitly called Gray homophobic, they strongly implied it.
“Molly Gray is very close to saying, you know, ‘We don’t want a gay agenda,’” Natalie Silver, Balint’s campaign manager, told VTDigger that July. The implication reverberated on the ground. The organizers behind a gay pride parade in the Upper Valley even publicly debated whether to disallow Gray from participating in their event.
When VTDigger reached out to Gray on Thursday, she attached to her email a picture of a cardboard placard that had been left for her in the staging room she was assigned before a July candidate forum at Vermont Law School. “Homosexuality exists in 450 species. Homophobia exists in 1,” it read, in handwritten all-capital letters.
“Relitigating what happened is hard and painful. Evidence introduced by the Department of Justice this week confirms what I warned of during the campaign — a coordinated effort to skirt campaign finance laws and to interfere in our elections right here in Vermont,” Gray wrote in her email. “Looking to 2024 and beyond, it will be incumbent upon candidates and political parties in Vermont to do all they can to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
In his brief exchange with Singh, Sadowsky also made clear why the people in Bankman-Fried’s orbit cared about the race to elect a first-term House member from Vermont.
“The winner here is favored to be the next senator of VT once someone retires,” he wrote. “This is both to help BB win, and to get on her good side.”
Prosecutors have not accused political campaigns on the receiving end of Bankman-Fried’s largesse — Balint’s is one of many — of any improprieties. And her campaign has maintained from the start that, as dictated by federal campaign finance laws, it had no knowledge of or control over how the Victory Fund raised or spent the money involved. (Balint’s campaign had been criticized at the time, however, for engaging in a tactic called ‘redboxing,’ which allows campaigns to skirt rules around coordinating with super PACs.)
“The Congresswoman does not know any of the people mentioned in this exchange, has never communicated with them, and did not solicit any donations,” Natalie Silver, Balint’s campaign manager, reiterated in an email this week.
Balint’s campaign also received several donations directly from Bankman-Fried and his allies. The campaign has said it is fully cooperating with prosecutors, and in April, the U.S. Department of Justice asked Balint’s camp to reimburse a $2,900 donation from Bankman-Fried to the federal government through the U.S. Marshall’s Office, Silver said. The campaign did so and has not heard from prosecutors since, she added.
According to a VTDigger analysis, Balint’s campaign directly received at least $26,100 from Bankman-Fried’s associates. Silver has previously said that the campaign was cordoning off any cash it believed could be tied into the case but has repeatedly declined to say how much. On Wednesday, Silver again declined to specify the total.
“Because this is an ongoing investigation and active case we cannot comment further,” she said.
The Victory Fund has previously insisted that it did not make spending decisions at the direction of its donors. “We are proud to have earned the support of a diverse group of donors, and we make decisions about which candidates to support independently,” Elliot Imse, a spokesperson for the Victory Fund, told VTDigger last August. It did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.