This actually took place on July 19, but Forbes’ YouTube channel just dropped it today, and it’s worth watching if for no other reason than it’s a great exposition of how Sen. John Kennedy does governmental oversight.

He’s asking questions of Gary Gensler, the Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, about the FTX cryptocurrency platform – which was far and away the smelliest, sleaziest player in the crypto marketplace. And Kennedy’s questions are the ones most Americans have; namely, why wasn’t anything done to mitigate the damage that FTX, and its slovenly idiot savant (at best) chief executive Sam Bankman-Fried, the son of a pair of well-connected San Francisco area academics, did to so many retirement accounts.

Kennedy notes that Bankman-Fried oozed arrogance and operated in a manner which should have raised eyebrows and scrutiny at the SEC but nothing was done until well after the carnage of FTX’s collapse had begun.

And Gensler has no answers other than the usual bureaucratic babble, song and dance.

Of course, what underlies all of this is that in the 2022 election cycle, Sam Bankman-Fried was the second biggest donor to Democrat candidates behind only George Soros, and it’s quite clear he bought himself indulgences from the Deep State to continue his commingling of funds and scamming people out of their money.

And perhaps Gensler wasn’t the instigator of the blind eye turned toward FTX. It was almost certainly someone over his head who made that call. Nor will Gensler speak to that question in a Senate hearing, no matter how vigorous Kennedy’s questions and how colorful his metaphors might be. Gensler knows he can’t say that politics protected Bankman-Fried, regardless of how obvious it is that’s exactly what happened.

So instead he sits there and he takes his five-minute beating from Kennedy, in the knowledge that once it’s over, it’s over.

Meanwhile, Bankman-Fried was out on bail at his parents’ home in the Bay area until he was caught tampering with witnesses. The judge in his fraud case ordered him jailed at an infamous facility in Brooklyn where he will await trial.