FTX's Bahamas unit paid co-CEO's MAGA Republican congressional candidate girlfriend $400,000

• FTX Digital Markets Co-CEO Ryan Salame and failed GOP candidate Michelle Bond are in a relationship.
• Bond received $400,000 from FTX Digital Markets for consulting, financial disclosures show.

Michelle Bond, a failed far-right Republican congressional candidate and prominent cryptocurrency advocate, received at least $400,000 in consulting fees from FTX Digital Markets — the Bahamas-based FTX entity where her boyfriend Ryan Salame is co-CEO.

The consulting payments are listed in Bond's congressional candidate financial disclosure report, and were originally reported in August by cryptocurrency trade publication The Block. They state Bond earned $200,000 both this year and the preceding year from FTX Digital Markets. Bond did not respond to requests for comment on what the consulting work entailed.

The spectacular implosion of FTX, which in the past month went from one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges to a now-bankrupt entity that owes billions to creditors, has drawn focus to 30-year-old founder Sam Bankman-Fried's ties to Democratic lawmakers. Bankman-Fried gave tens of millions in political donations this year to support mostly Democratic candidates through groups like Protect Our Future PAC.

Republicans have seized on the scandal. Bankman-Fried "has deployed his ill-gotten gains in service of the Democratic Party" and "funded his lavish donations…through rampant fraud," wrote GOP Sen. Josh Hawley in a letter to the heads of the Justice Department, SEC, and Commodity Futures Trading Commission demanding that they hand over correspondence with the company.

But as Bankman-Fried became a powerful backer of Democratic candidates and effective altruism charities, Salame, his co-executive for one of FTX's key subsidaries, was charting a different path. Bond and him began making inroads with MAGA Republicans and spending vast sums of money attempting to get Bond into Congress.

Bond, who was running to represent New York's First Congressional District, lost the Republican primary this August to Navy veteran Nick Lalota. During her campaign, she was endorsed by Donald Trump Jr., Kimberly Guilfoyle, and Senator Ted Cruz. Bond tweeted a photo in July of her and Salame out to dinner with Trump Jr. and Guilfoyle, who she referred to as "friends."

Bond also courted far-right voters with complaints about drag events in schools and appeared on the podcast of a Long Island anti-government group that organized hundreds of people to attend the Stop the Steal rally on January 6, 2021.

Salame became co-CEO of FTX Digital Markets in 2021, a wholly-owned subsidiary of FTX, after previously working at FTX's trading arm Alameda Research. He was a major Republican donor this year, giving at least $20 million to GOP candidates and conservative PACs. In the aftermath of FTX's collapse, people close to Salame claimed to The Wall Street Journal that he was unaware of any problems with the company and vomited upon learning about the financial disaster at the firm.

As the bankruptcy proceedings unfold, the company's new CEO John J. Ray stated in a filing last week that he had never in his career seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and concentration of power in the hands of a small group of individuals. Ray previously oversaw the Enron bankruptcy.

Bond's ties to Salame and FTX

The precise details of Salame and Bond's relationship are unclear, and neither responded to requests for comment to clarify when the two met or became a couple. Both feature heavily in each other's social media presence, and a campaign spokesperson for Bond referred to the couple as "longtime partners" in a statement to The Block in August. The banner for both of their Twitter accounts is a photo of them together, and in Bond's campaign materials they are pictured holding the hands of two children.

Past social media posts include the two posing together with Orlando Bloom and Katy Perry at an FTX-sponsored Crypto Bahamas event and sending loving messages online.

"Thank you to Ryan — my ❤️, best friend, & boyfriend/partner/significant other/fiancé/husband (as all reported by the press) — I thank my lucky stars to have met you and that you're in my life. I love you," Bond tweeted in September.

Bond is a former attorney for the Securities and Exchange Commission who in recent years became a well-known cryptocurrency advocate in Washington, and her now-deleted campaign website describes her as working "day in and day out with Congress and the Executive branch." She is currently the CEO of the Association for Digital Asset Markets, or ADAM, an advocacy organization that added FTX US and FTX to its board of directors in February of this year.

"FTX GONE GIVE IT TO YA," Bond tweeted at the time, repeating part of a headline from the Politico Morning Money newsletter.

ADAM did not respond to Insider's request for comment on Bond or its connections to FTX. An ADAM spokesperson told CNBC last week that FTX and FTX US are no longer board members.

Bond's crypto-funded congressional campaign

FTX US gave millions to a number of super PACs and political organizations before its bankruptcy this month, with the majority of the contributions going to Democratic candidates and groups. The largest recipient was Protect Our Future PAC, which received $28 million from FTX US in political contributions and donated to various Democratic candidates.

Out of all FTX US's donations to individual candidates, however, Bond received the largest contribution. Her campaign received $28,600 from FTX US, according to Open Secrets. In addition, The New York Times reported in August that Salame personally donated $1.5 million to the crypto-boosting GMI super PAC, which then gave $1 million to the Crypto Innovation PAC that in turn spent over $1 million on ad buys in support of Bond.

FTX US's donations to Bond are somewhat out of step with the rest of its contributions, which generally have gone to candidates that focus on Bankman-Fried's preferred issues such as pandemic planning. Bond, on the other hand, campaigned on an anti-immigration and anti-abortion platform and appeared on the podcast of a group that opposes vaccine mandates.

Bond joined a July 18 episode of the antidemocratic group Long Island Loud Majority's podcast, where she promoted a number of right wing grievance campaigns that included suggestions that schools were overrun with drag events and critical race theory.

"We have these schools accusing five-year-olds of being racist," Bond said.

Long Island Loud Majority broadened from a pro-Trump group into what the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated an antigovernment group, which promotes conspiracies of stolen elections, anti-vaccine falsehoods and anti-trans rhetoric. Bond also tweeted a photo of herself next to two members of the group, who wore t-shirts with its logo, at her campaign headquarters.

"The group has organized protests, convoys, and even led about 300 people to D.C. on Jan. 6, 2021, joining the crowds near the Capitol," Joe Wiinikka-Lydon, a senior researcher at the SPLC's Intelligence Project, told Insider.

Bond also leaned on support from prominent MAGA world figures. In addition to endorsements from Cruz and Trump Jr., Kimberly Guilfoyle made a short video just before the New York state Republican primaries calling on voters to rally around Bond — touting her as the "only MAGA-endorsed candidate" in the race.

"I'm here to encourage you all to vote for my friend Michelle Bond," Guilfoyle said in the August 22 video. "I know Michelle will fight like hell to restore President Trump's America First policies in Congress."

Bond finished the primary in a distant second place with about 27.8 percent of the total ballots cast and around 7,298 votes.

Additional reporting by Jack Newsham.