Oregon Dem crypto donation scandal widens

It's been a hot few days in the continuing saga of the Oregon Democratic Party's acceptance, and retention, of a $500,000 donation from a disgraced crypto executive – money that may have been stolen from customers of the now-bankrupt FTX crypto exchange.

You may already know the basic outline of the story. Last October, the Oregon Democrats took the half-million in a wire transfer from a Las Vegas-based outfit called Prime Trust. They reported it as a donation from Prime Trust, but that company is just a transaction facilitator, kind of like a PayPal. And so the real donor's name was not reported, as required by Oregon elections law, to the Secretary of State. When questions were raised about it a few weeks later, the donor's name was changed to Nishad Singh, one of the wiz kids at FTX. I believe he was the "director of engineering" of the Ponzi scheme.

Since then, the state elections division, currently being run by placeholders for other reasons, has decided that the party didn't do anything too bad, and it has slapped their wrist with a $15,000 fine. However, the elections types have also huffed and puffed and called for a criminal investigation into Singh, who's already in so much legal trouble that another indictment on the pile would hardly be noticed. Curiously, the state attorney general, Ellen Rosenblum, has recused herself from any such criminal inquiry. Hmmmm...

So what's the big news this week? Well, yesterday a blogger named Jeff Eager revealed some email messages from last fall that put Ron Wyden's people all over the donation, and some of what was published on his blog has made its way into the tighty righty National Review for wider consumption. The emails shed new light on who knew what and when. It's worse than what the elections minions let on.

One particularly intriguing email thread quoted by Eager comes on the very eve of the donation. In it, Mark Wetjen, then the head of policy and regulatory strategy for FTX, emails Diana Rogalle, a political fundraiser and consultant with close ties to Wyden, asking for the account holder's address so that Singh could wire the money to the Democratic Party of Oregon (DPO). Rogalle in turn forwards Wetjen's inquiry to three people: Amelia Manlove, identified as compliance director for the Oregon Democratic Party; Tim Leahy, Wyden for Senate’s campaign manager, as well as outreach director for Wyden’s Senate office; and Jocelyn Tyree, compliance director for Wyden for Senate.

It's pretty clear from Eager's report that the deal was worked out among Rogalle, Wetjen, and a political consultant named Susan McCue in late September. Whether Singh was involved at that point isn't entirely clear, but it seems to me unlikely that the $500,000 came from funds that were rightfully his personally.

Anyway, I doubt that justice will be done in this case; with the Democrats completely controlling every aspect of state government now, it's going to be impossible to find an enforcer without a disqualifying conflict. If we had a real U.S. attorney, maybe they could do something, but that person owes her job to Wyden, so you can probably cross her off the list, too.

At the very least, the DPO should give the $500,000 back to the bankruptcy trustee of FTX, because that is most likely where it came from, stolen from crypto account holders. But that money's probably already been spent. When last I looked on the secretary of state's clunky website, the DPO had only about $32,000 in the bank.

What a dirty business.