Prosecutors Tell NY Court They Didn’t Renege on FTX Exec Ryan Salame’s Plea Deal

Federal prosecutors have fired back against Ryan Salame’s allegations that they reneged on agreements made in the former FTX executive’s plea deal – namely, that they would cease criminal investigations into Michelle Bond, Salame’s longtime partner and the mother of his child.

But prosecutors say they never made Salame any such promises, either formally or informally, and that their prosecution of Bond is fair game.

In a scathing 32-page memorandum filed Thursday, prosecutors urged U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan of the Southern District of New York (SDNY) to reject Salame’s recent petition asking for the conditions of his plea deal either be enforced or that his plea be thrown out and his sentence vacated, calling it a “shameless and self-serving attempt to renege on his guilty plea and conviction…and to undermine the lawful prosecution of Michelle Bond.”

Bond, a former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawyer who spent years leading a D.C.-based crypto lobbying group, has been charged with violating campaign finance laws for taking illegal campaign contributions from Salame and other FTX employees during her failed 2022 run for Congress. She faces a maximum of 20 years in prison if convicted of all counts.

The day prosecutors indicted Bond, Salame’s lawyers filed a petition with the court alleging that “the Government failed to honor its implied commitment not to pursue the campaign-finance charges against Bond.”

On Aug. 29, Salame moved to withdraw his petition in order to allow Bond to bring up the issue in her own case. However, Judge Kaplan ruled that he would still hold a hearing on the original petition regardless of Salame’s motion to withdraw it, and mandated Salame’s attendance as part of his bail conditions. Salame is set to self-surrender himself to prison to begin his sentence in late October.

Prosecutors have urged Kaplan to reject the petition without a hearing.

In their memo, prosecutors called Salame’s assertions “inaccurate, incomplete, and outright false” and denied that they breached their plea agreement with Salame, noting that there was “nothing in Salame’s plea agreement that suggested that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York would not criminally prosecute any of Salame’s criminal co-conspirators in consideration of his guilty plea.”

Salame and Bond’s lawyers both knew that his guilty plea had no bearing on Bond’s prosecution, prosecutors argued, detailing conversations dating back to May 2023 where they claim to have explicitly told the defendants lawyers that “a Ryan disposition will not resolve investigation of Michelle’s conduct.”

A hearing on the matter is slated for Sep. 12, 2024.