Fox’s ‘The Five’ Continues to Hammer Dems Over Disgraced Crypto King Donation, Despite Revelation He Donated Same Amount to GOP

Fox News’s top-rated program, The Five, didn’t skip a beat on Thursday in tying Democrats to the disgraced crypto king, Sam Bankman-Fried, whose collapsed company lost investors billions of dollars months after he donated some $40 million to the Democrats during the 2022 midterm elections.

While the story and the SBF connection to Democrats has been widely played in right-leaning media, the co-hosts of The Five skipped a key piece of reporting from Wednesday while lambasting Democrats and the media for ties to SBF – he now claims he donated the same amount of money to the GOP during the midterms. Fox News’s Bret Baier reported on this revelation in the hour after The Five.

“The Democrats’ favorite crypto creep and second biggest donor is really sorry about all that fraud,” began Judge Jeanine Pirro on Thursday, kicking off the show.

“Disgraced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, who gave nearly $40 million to the Democrats and vaporized billions of his investors money, is trying to win back his friends in the press by going on a media rehab tour. He got raucous applause during an event for The New York Times,” Pirro continued, before a clip of SBF played:

I want to thank you for engaging in it at a time, in truth, when I know you’ve been advised not to. So thank you so very, very much. Thank you.

“And now he’s sitting down with George Stephanopolous to complain about how he’s not a mini Madoff,” Pirro continued, playing another clip from ABC News.

“A lot of people look at you and see Bernie Madoff,” says Stephanopolous in the clip to a downcast SBF.

“Yeah. I mean, I don’t think that’s who I am at all. At the end of the day, well, there’s a question of what happened and why and who did what and what caused the meltdown. And I think that is reads very differently. Right. When you when you look at the classic Bernie Madoff story, there was no real business there. The whole thing, as I understand it, I think was was just one, one big Ponzi scheme, right? Yes. FTX that was a real business,” SBF answers.

“The crypto kingpin was also a big dollar donor to the media, showering them with millions. But Sam denies he was ever trying to buy influence. Okay,” Pirro says, before playing another clip.

“Matters a lot and I want to support good media ventures. That was the whole thesis there. And I you know, I don’t have like governance over any of these. I wasn’t looking for governance over them. I, I was looking just for journalists doing great work because I think what they do is really important. And I think that there needs to be a critical eye on stories,” SBF says in the clip.

“All right. I’ll go to that last quote, Greg, where he says, you know, he gave money, tremendous amount of money to the media and he wasn’t trying to influence them. He said, I was just looking for governance over governance, over the media. I was looking to support journalists who did good work,” Pirro continues.

The conversation continues as the other co-hosts hit SBF and the liberal for the day, Geraldo Rivera, ripped into all cryptocurrency as “suspect” and a tool for drug dealers.

Pirro eventually asked guest co-host Katie Pavlich to wrap the segment.

“Watching this person, SBF do all of these interviews, there’s a couple of different themes. The first one is like he kind of throws his hands up and says, I don’t know what happened. The dog ate the homework. It just kind of like happened to me. I’m sorry. And then the media is now trying to turn him into a victim, which is the second theme of all of these interviews,” Pavlich argues, adding:

Which brings us to the point of going back to the funding. Can you imagine if a republic, if Republicans got all this money before an election held on to more seats than they were supposed to hold on to, according to historic record and this happened?

The only questions that the media would be asking is, who did you donate to? And they would be hounding them down and go into every single office on Capitol Hill to their campaigns and asking them and demanding answers about how they were going to get money back to the investors that he has defrauded.

As Insider reported Wednesday, SBF did indeed donate “just as much” to Republicans. “I’ve been their third-biggest Republican donor this year as well,” he said in a YouTube interview with journalist Tiffany Fong. Insider adds:

Bankman-Fried explained that this was “not generally known,” because “all my Republican donations were dark.”

He also referred to the 2010 Citizens United case in the Supreme Court that let corporations and outside groups make unlimited political donations.

Watch the full clips above via Fox News