In its closing assertion yesterday, the prosecution pointed repeatedly to the distinction between the fluency and demeanor of Bankman-Fried beneath questioning by his personal legal professionals and his evasiveness in cross-examination.
“Did you discover how on Friday [during direct examination] his testimony was easy, prefer it had been rehearsed a bunch of instances?” stated Nicolas Roos, the prosecutor, and he “had an ideal reminiscence.” However when questioned by the federal government, Bankman-Fried “couldn’t bear in mind a single element about his firm or what he stated publicly.”
In cross-examination, there have been 140 situations by which Bankman-Fried had stated he couldn’t recall the reply to a query, stated Roos. When Bankman-Fried did reply, in the meantime, he “approached each query like up was down and down was up.”
The prosecution additionally sought to debunk the concept, peddled by the protection, that Bankman-Fried was largely unaware of the embezzlement of FTX buyer funds, or the extent of the monetary shortfall it created. To search out Bankman-Fried not-guilty of fraud, Roos informed the jurors, “you would need to consider that the defendant, who graduated from MIT, who ran two billion-dollar firms and who was testifying in Congress, was really clueless.”