Onchain, in court: What happened in crypto legal news this week
Michelle Bond, charged in SDNY with campaign finance violations tied to her 2022 congressional run, asked the court to block evidence of her husband Ryan Salame’s guilty plea and plea materials. Her lawyers argue Salame’s plea is only evidence of his own guilt and would unfairly prejudice Bond, while also seeking to include context from their divorce and custody proceedings. Bond is accused of benefiting from FTX-linked contributions allegedly routed through Salame. Separately, the CFTC ordered former congressman George Santos to pay about $35,000 after he profited from Kalshi prediction-market bets tied to whether he would attend the 2026 State of the Union. He is also barred from trading on prediction platforms for three years. In another SDNY case, Army soldier Gannon Ken Van Dyke moved to dismiss charges that he used nonpublic military information to make over $400,000 on Polymarket bets about Nicolás Maduro’s removal. His defense argues the Commodity Exchange Act is too ambiguous to give fair notice that event contracts are “swaps.”
