Morning Wire - Senate Goes Blue & FTX Scandal | 11.14.22

Episode Date: November 14, 2022

Democrats win the Senate seat in Nevada, Hollywood’s favorite crypto exchange, FTX, files for bankruptcy, and conservative school board candidates stack up wins across the country. .Get the facts first on Morning Wire.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Senate Democrats declared victory in Nevada on Saturday after a Republican lead disappeared over the weekend. How did Democrats gain the advantage? And what does it mean for the balance of power in Washington? I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe. It's Monday, November 14th, and this is Morning Wire. Hollywood's favorite crypto exchange, FTX, has filed for bankruptcy, dragging down a litany of A-List stars in its wake. Now the company is being called a global money laundering scheme for politics. We have the details on the scandal and the unfolding investigation. And while the much-anticipated red wave failed to materialize nationally, conservative school board candidates stacked up winds across the country. Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know.

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and find the best deals near you. That's carzing.com slash wire. In a surprising turn, Democrats were declared victorious in the critical Nevada Senate race Saturday, despite the Republican candidate holding the lead heading into the weekend. The development ensures Democrat control of the Senate and is drawing outrage from Republicans

who appeared well on their way to victory in the race. Here with more on that Nevada reversal, and the latest from other races that remain up in the air is Daily Wire senior editor Cabot Phillips. Cabot a shift in Nevada over the weekend that has ended up being pivotal for control of the Senate. What can you tell us about that race? Well, when we last spoke, Republican challenger,

Adam Laxalt seemed to be in a good spot against Democrat incumbent Catherine Cortez Mastow. He was ahead by a few thousand votes heading into Friday, and Republicans were confident that he would end up on top. Senator Lindsey Graham, for example, all but declared victory, saying, quote, there is no mathematical way Laxalt loses. But then a batch of 27,000 votes came in from the state's largest county, which includes Las Vegas, and Laxalt's lead was cut to 800 votes. And then beginning Saturday night and into Sunday, with 98% of the vote counties, and lax all behind by around 6,000 votes, numerous outlets, including ABC News, declared the Democrat Catherine Cortez Mastow the winner. Now, it wasn't all bad news for Republicans in Nevada as Joe Lombardo

was able to unseat Democrat incumbent Governor Steve Sissellack. That was the party's first governor's flip of the 2022 cycle, but obviously it's bittersweet given the loss in the Senate race. Right. Now, the other Senate race that was undecided is out in Arizona where the vote count really came to a standstill, kind of like Nevada. What's the latest there with the last? the Senate race and also that governor's race. Republican Blake Masters appeared to be gaining on Democrat incumbent Mark Kelly as votes started to trickle in, but on Friday with about 80% of the vote in, the Associated Press declared Mark Kelly the winner.

At the time, he had around a five-point lead. The race for governor, though, is still a true toss-up. We still got around 10% of the vote left to count, and Republican Kerry Lake is within 30,000 votes of Democrat Katie Hobbs. Now, Lake's team says they're confident that the remaining votes are coming from Republican-controlled parts of the state. But again, it's still anyone's guess who actually comes out on top. And many Republicans are increasingly skeptical when the vote counting gets this delayed. Yeah, to that point, the question on a lot of people's minds, why are some states waiting

so long to declare the winner? Yeah, that is the million dollar question right now. So in Nevada, for example, every voter is issued a mail-in ballot, whether they request or not, you actually have to opt out of it to not get one in Nevada. And the state will accept ballots that arrive as late this Saturday, so four days after election day. In Arizona, where, according to the Washington Post, and this is a direct quote, printers used to produce ballots on demand failed at about a third of polling locations on election day. Officials say it could be another 10 days before the vinyl votes are counted, but because of some of those errors at polling places and malfunctions, it's even more backed up than usual. So potentially 10 more days. Yeah. Now, that delay has raised a lot of concerns from

voters, especially Republicans. Tell us about that. Well, there have been a number of incidents that went viral online and drew outrage from Republican voters and officials. For example, beyond that printer outage in Arizona, there was also a live stream camera that had been monitoring vote counting in Washoe County that went black during the middle of the night. Now, that county includes the city of Reno and helped swing the election to Democrats at the very end. The county released a statement saying, quote, we know that our election live stream cameras went dark overnight. We investigated what happened. And we investigated what and how to prevent it happening again, but not really the answer is that a lot of Republicans were looking for it.

Yes, not a good look. What's been the Democrat response to all this? So Democrats, for their part, had been warning in the weeks leading up to the election that final results in many states would take a few days, and that the reason Democrats often take the lead at the very end is because their voters are typically concentrated in more urban areas that take longer to send in results.

And also, remember, they dominate among early voters, but that has done little to alleviate frustration from Republicans. Republicans say that allowing days for votes to come in opens the door to fraud and undermines the confidence of voters in the final outcome. They point to large states like Florida that reformed their election laws over the last two years and had votes counted within just a few hours on Tuesday. Essentially, Republicans say that it should be election day and not election week or month. Now, these delays are also impacting the House as well. Yep, we'll get into the House more later this week, but the bottom line is we still do not know who's got the majority in the House. because about 20 districts are still counting votes.

Yeah, well, we'll have you back on as more of these belated results come in. Kevin, thanks for reporting. Anytime. That's the Daily Wire senior editor, Cabot Phillips. Coming up, Hollywood's crypto-darling collapses amid allegations of fraud. What if I told you that you can make those fine lines, forehead wrinkles, dark spots, and even under-eye bags, disappear? Well, you can when you make GenuSel skin care a part of your daily routine. Geniasell uses a proprietary base of clinical levels of botanical extracts,

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That's genuSell.com slash wire. FTX, the third largest crypto company in the world, has filed for bankruptcy and is facing criminal investigations. The implosion is bringing up questions about the company's CEO, who was the Democrat's second largest donor in 2022. Here to explain what happened with FTX and what it means politically is Daily Wire Culture reporter Megan Basham. So, Megan, the entire financial world is talking about FTC.

right now. But I think most people, including myself, have a hard time tracking with these crypto stories. What exactly happened here? So FTX's CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, was seen as sort of this wonderkint. He's only 30 years old, and he set up both FTX and a separate hedge fund called Alameda that has been making huge loans and donations to all sorts of organizations. So on November 2nd, a crypto news outlet obtained a leaked document that showed the close ties between those two companies. And the question became whether Bankman Freed, or SBF, as he's known in the crypto world, has been using money that customers had invested with FTX to fund Alameda's financial activities. Now, what that did was cause FTCS investors to try to pull out their investments.

And, of course, the cash wasn't there that allowed them to do so. So what you had then was a collapse and a filing for bankruptcy. And since then, it's hit all kinds of other. other financial companies who were invested in FDX. And overall, it's just caused a really sharp downturn in cryptocurrencies. This was Brian Armstrong, CEO of the crypto trading platform Coinbase, talking about it on the All In podcast. I had to scratch my head a bunch of times and I was like, where is this guy getting all this liquidity?

Because he was like buying 9% of Robin Hood. He was putting like a billion dollars into this. He was donating to all these politicians. And I was like, it did not make sense to me where he was getting all this cash. So now the DOJ, the SEC and authorities in the Bahamas where FTX is headquartered are investigating for potential financial crimes. And they've also frozen some of the company's assets. Okay, so a lot of the discussion, though, about FTX is now focused on its role as a Democrat donor. Tell us more about that.

Yeah, you know, a big part of this story is that FDX was considered a respectable crypto. To give you one example, Formula One racing and Major League Baseball, both had sports. sponsorship deals with FTCX. But as you said, the biggest scandal here is connected to Democrat politics. So Bankman-Fried donated to a number of senators and Congress people overseeing the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. That's the CFTC. And that's the agency in charge of regulating the crypto industry. Now, a little bit of that money went to some Republicans who also sat on that commission, but the vast majority of it went to Democrats, including, and especially actually, President Biden. So Bankman-Fried was a huge donor in the midterm elections, the second largest

individual donor, in fact. Estimates put his total contribution to Democrat candidates at around 40 million. He gave $6 million to the Democrats' House majority pack. He gave more than $5 million to Biden's 2020 campaign. And that made him the president's second largest individual donor as well, behind only George Soros. And some of the accusations surrounding this are pretty complex and they're just now coming to light, including connections to Ukraine. But what we're hearing is that only days after Biden pledged to send billions of taxpayer dollars to Ukraine, FTCS partnered with the Ukrainian government to process funds. So the issue is whether FTX funneled some of that funding to Alameda. And again, that was Bankman Freed's hedge fund that was supposed to be a separate company.

If he then turned around and used it for political donations, then we're talking about a whole other level of fraud. There's still a lot of threads left to pull on in what is turning out to be a very complex story. Right, extremely complex. Well, we're going to continue to monitor it. Megan, thanks for reporting. Yeah, my pleasure.

That was Daily Wire Culture reporter, Megan Basham. After Glenn Yunkins' surprise win in Virginia last year, many pundits predicted a parent coalition would sweep Republicans to victory in the midterm. While election night did not deliver the overwhelming victory Republicans had hoped for on a national level, conservative school board candidates flipped seats across the country. The GOP victories signaled that parental rights were a big factor in voters' decisions in places like Florida. Daily Wire investigative reporter, Marita Lorty, is here with more details for us.

All right, Marad, not everyone has paid as much attention to these races as the national ones, but tell us about these conservative school board victories. Sure. So first off in Florida, all six of the school board candidates, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis endorsed won their runoff races. This means that of the 30 local education candidates DeSantis backed this year, a total of 24 have now won their races. Over the summer, conservative school board candidates, including some endorsed by DeSantis, won their races and flipped school boards to conservative majorities in five counties, including some traditionally blue areas like Miami-Dade, as well as Sarasota. All of this points to a larger trend of conservatives gaining the upper hand in the education debate. Keep in mind, Florida has been the epicenter of the education culture war in some ways, after Governor DeSantis signed landmark parental rights legislation earlier this year. As we've reported here back in March, DeSanta signed a bill that prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade.

So big gains in Florida for GOP-backed school board candidates that's perhaps not surprised. as we've noted how DeSantis and his party really swept Florida away in their own sort of red wave. But what about other states? Did we see similar trends in other places? Yes. In Michigan, Maryland, and Indiana, Republicans flipped school boards to give them conservative majorities as well. That's according to two parental rates groups who endorsed many of the victorious candidates. One of those groups called 1776 Project PAC claims to have officially flipped 100 school boards since November last year.

The group's candidates also won in Oklahoma and Ohio. The other group, Moms for Liberty, said its candidates won in Indiana, South Carolina, and North Carolina. Now, we don't often hear about school board wins after national elections, but this year is clearly different. There's a movement and more of a political focus now on this. Why are things shifting on this issue? Well, this is yet another sign that parents are becoming an activated voter block. We got the first indication of this last fall when Glenn Yonkin flipped Virginia, and there was some question as to whether that would fizzle out. It's also a sign that conservatives' efforts to

regain a foothold in local governance may be paying off. It remains to be seen whether this level of energy will continue through to 2024. Yeah, that'll be an interesting trend to track. Mara, thanks for reporting. Thanks, John. That's a Daily Wire investigative reporter, Marita Lorty. That's all the time we've got this morning. Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back this afternoon with more news you need to know. The American economy is still feeling the traumatic effects of a two-year pandemic and lockdown-induced recession, which is why you should take action to hedge against inflation right now and solidify at least some of your investment portfolio with gold from Birch Gold.

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