FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) testified on October 26 as expected. His testimony provided a glimpse of what line of argument is to be expected from the defense as the case progresses. As Bankman-Fried’s lawyers questioned him, they emphasized on a particular document that could be the key to exonerating the defendant.
Why This FTX Document Is So Important
According to a post by Inner City Press, which live posted happenings at the trial, Bankman-Fried’s primary counsel, Mark Cohen, had questioned the defendant about a ‘Document Retention Policy.’ In reply, SBF mentioned that the policy had been drawn up by the law firm Fenwick and West and, more specifically, Dan Friedman.
From Cohen’s questions and SBF’s testimony, it was pretty clear that the defense was trying to rely on the policy to justify why some correspondence between the defendant and his former associates was on auto-delete, as earlier revealed. Bankman-Fried mentioned that informal chatter on Signal (a platform on which they communicated) could be set to auto-delete in line with the policy.
He had earlier justified while there was even a need for auto-delete when he stated, in reply to Cohen’s question about using Signal, that encryption was important because FTX had been hacked in the past and that it was a measure taken in order to avoid any data…
