Judge Jeanine Pirro: SBF's money is fraudulent, dirty money, should be returned
'The Five' co-hosts discuss the collapse of FTX and the arrest of former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.
While creditors of imploded cryptocurrency exchange FTX seek to recoup their losses, recipients of monies from disgraced founder Sam Bankman-Fried – especially politicians who accepted his donations – should pay it back, Judge Jeanine Pirro said Wednesday.
Still, Pirro admitted on "The Five," recovering the money will be difficult.
"This money is fraudulent money. It's dirty money. And it was part of a scheme to defraud," she said. "And then it's the scheme that is bigger than anything I think we've ever seen in this country. So let's not kid each other. The money should be returned," she said.
Pirro also said a $300 million reported expenditure by SBF in the Bahamas should be accounted for. She appeared to reference a New York Post report that Bankman-Fried "extracted" at least $300 million from FTX before it collapsed. Bankruptcy data reported by the Post and Reuters suggested some of those funds were used to purchase a $16 million vacation home for his parents Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried in New Providence Island's Old Fort Bay community – an exclusive area near Lynden Pindling International Airport that lies far from the bustling and touristy Nassau city center.
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Sam Bankman-Fried testifies during a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee at Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill December 8, 2021 (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
State and federal bankruptcy laws will further complicate attempts to recover the funds, Pirro said, citing a figure of 1 million creditors "who have been conned out of $1.8 billion."
Pirro expounded upon Bankman-Fried's expenditures as well, calling the investor a "dirtbag" who appeared to know "something was coming up" before FTX crumbled.
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Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and chief executive officer of FTX Cryptocurrency Derivatives Exchange, speaks during the Institute of International Finance (IIF) annual membership meeting in Washington, DC. (Ting Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
"That's why he started putting so much money into newspapers and giving it to journalists because he was trying to buy them out," Pirro said.
"He said, oh, I just wanted honest and honest media, honest journalist and an honest fourth estate. No, you were buying favoritism."
"And now he's got something like $300 million in [The Bahamas] that he put there in an effort, like most defendants do who are wealthy -- in an effort to get away, if he can abscond and just use this money to change his identity. That's what Robert Durst did," she added, referring to the now-deceased real estate scion convicted of murder.
During Durst's 2021 testimony, he responded to a defense question by saying he was "hiding from Jeanine Pirro" at one point in 2000 – when she was the sitting Republican D.A. in White Plains and had been looking into the disappearance of Kathleen Durst.
On "The Five," Pirro added that no one should care about Bankman-Fried's vegan- and ADD-based objections to being held in the island nation's filthy prisons.
"I don't give a damn, and neither does any other red-blooded American," she said. "My concern is in the Bahamas: He better stay there. I don't want to hear that he took off, that they can't find him now, or that he killed himself."
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