Here's why FTX founder got hit with charges much more quickly than Trump: legal expert

On Monday, Sam Bankman-Fried, the controversial founder of bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was arrested in the Bahamas, and is likely to face extradition to the United States.

It remains unclear exactly what the young businessman could be charged with, but experts have suspected that Bankman-Fried was raiding FTX to fraudulently finance his other ventures — an allegation Bankman-Fried strongly denies.

But one question remains: how was Bankman-Fried arrested barely a month after the collapse of his company, while former President Donald Trump, who has been in the crosshairs of multiple criminal investigations related to attempts to overturn elections and the hoarding of classified information at his Florida country club, has remained under investigation for years with little apparent progress toward charging him?

On Monday, former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti took to Twitter to explain why that is.

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"One thing to keep in mind is that SBF's case is the *exception*, not the rule, when it comes to complex financial crimes. When I was a federal prosecutor, I investigated and prosecuted complex financial cases, often in parallel with the SEC. Those cases often took *years*," wrote Mariotti. "We haven't read the indictment yet, but on its face, SBF's actions are difficult to justify or explain. His customers were told that their $ would remain at FTX. A lot of that $ went to a different company, some went to SBF (via a loan). It's like if your local brokerage sent your money to a totally different company or gave it as a 'loan' to its CEO without your approval. Very hard to explain."

"So what about Donald Trump? Didn't he do the exact same thing?" said Mariotti. "As a starting point, the crimes Trump is alleged to have committed in connection to January 6th are very complicated. SBF committed garden variety fraud. Trump engaged in an unprecedented scheme to overturn an election. A scheme that has never been seen or charged before. Is it a crime to try to persuade your VP to set aside genuine electors? To try to persuade state legislators to do the same? That's not as clear as a typical fraud case."

If Trump is charged, Mariotti argued, a clearer path to doing so quickly is the classified documents case than the election case.

"Until now, Trump has been accused of crimes that require prosecutors to prove his state of mind (intent to fraud, 'corrupt' intent) or are unprecedented or otherwise don't fit neatly into existing criminal statutes, despite what many Twitter lawyers would have you believe," wrote Mariotti. "But the Mar-a-Lago case is remarkably straightforward. Most people who bring classified documents to their home and keep them are in deep trouble. It's like having heroin in your purse or meth in your garage. It is much more straightforward than January 6th." And, he argued, Smith could be bringing that within "weeks."