Prosecutors have charged Michelle Bond with violating campaign finance laws. She’s a former Republican candidate who has now founded a crypto think tank. Her fiancé, Ryan Salame, a convicted ex-FTX executive, is already facing over seven years in prison. Salame wants to withdraw his guilty plea. He claims the prosecutors went back on their promise not to investigate Bond.

A U.S. attorney has officially charged Michelle Bond. She ran for Congress in 2022 and is engaged to Ryan Salame. The charges include conspiracy to make illegal campaign contributions, accepting excessive donations, and receiving illegal corporate and straw contributions. Each charge could land her a maximum of five years in prison, adding up to 15 years in total if she’s convicted.

According to Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Bond funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars from corporate funds to support her campaign. She allegedly tried to cover this up by lying to Congress and other authorities.

These charges come after Salame filed a request to void his guilty plea earlier this week. He argues that prosecutors broke their agreement by continuing to investigate Bond after he pleaded guilty. In May, he was sentenced to seven and a half years for violating campaign finance laws and running an unlicensed money-transmitting business. Salame believes the government implied they would stop probing Bond if he accepted his sentence.

However, prosecutors have dismissed Salame’s request as “legally meritless.” Williams stated that Salame is merely trying to avoid his sentence for what he described as a “campaign finance scheme unprecedented in scale.” Salame is set to begin his prison term in October.

These charges are part of the ongoing fallout from the $11 billion collapse of the FTX crypto exchange in November 2022. The scandal led to the sentencing of founder Sam Bankman-Fried to 25 years in prison in March. Other executives, including Caroline Ellison, Nishad Singh, and Gary Wang, are still waiting for their sentences.

Bond launched her campaign for New York’s First Congressional District in May 2022. At that time, she served as the CEO of the Association for Digital Asset Markets, while Salame was an executive at FTX’s Bahamas-based subsidiary. Shortly after her campaign launched, Salame allegedly set up a fraudulent $400,000 consulting agreement between Bond and FTX. According to the indictment, Bond used these funds, along with other wire transfers from Salame, to illegally finance her campaign.

Between June and August 2022, Salame also wired hundreds of thousands of dollars to Bond’s personal bank account. Prosecutors claim that Bond concealed her actions by making false statements to a congressional committee, the Federal Election Commission, and her employer. In her House Ethics Committee disclosure, she reported the $400,000 FTX payment as consulting income, even though her internal notes indicated the funds were meant to support her campaign.

In June, Bond founded her pro-crypto think tank, Digital Future. She has been a strong supporter of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.