Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) is being investigated over her attendance at the Met Gala in recent years.

In June, the Board of the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) created its report related to the allegations made against Maloney and her attendance at the 2021 Met gala. 

The board found that “there is substantial reason to believe that [Maloney] solicited or accepted impermissible gifts associated with her attendance at the Met Gala.” The board recommended that the House of Representatives’ Committee on Ethics continue to look into the allegation that she “may have solicited or accepted impermissible gifts associated with her attendance at the Met Gala.”

The Committee on Ethics put out a press release on Monday, explaining that it will continue to review the subject. It also released the OCE’s Report and Findings.

The board’s findings detail that even though Maloney told the OCE that she had always been invited to the Met Gala, and had never asked to be invited, that wasn’t true. In 2016, she called a former president of the Met to ask to be invited. The former president said Maloney was “unhappy to say the least that she is not receiving an invitation to the party of the year,” adding how Maloney “went on about how much she does for The Met.”

Maloney has also taken steps to get federal funds and grants for the Met. One of the witnesses explained how Maloney has helped the Met saying,“…all of them [government officials], as I like to say, have been our champions and have really articulated what we do here in terms of education and community outreach with their various colleagues at those levels of government. For us it has been invaluable just like being, I like to say, a cheerleader for the museum.”

When questioned, Maloney doubled down and said she did not remember ever calling people at the Met over whether or not she was invited to the gala. 

Further evidence showed that Maloney might have asked to be invited to the Met Gala in 2020, as well, which was canceled due to the pandemic. 

The OCE discovered that Maloney was invited to the Met Gala every year after her 2016 request. White House regulations allow Members of Congress to go to charitable events only if they “accept unsolicited offers of free attendance,” according to the report.

“Representative Maloney is confident that the House Ethics Committee will dismiss this matter,” a spokesperson for Maloney told The Daily Wire. “Although the Committee has not made any determination a violation occurred, she is disappointed by the unproven and disputed allegations in the report issued by Office of Congressional Ethics and strongly disagrees with its referral.”

Maloney is leaving office in January after she lost her primary to Representative Jerry Nadler for the twelfth congressional district in New York that was recently re-drawn. 

Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York had been conducting a probe into defunct cryptocurrency platform FTX months before the company led by disgraced chief executive Sam Bankman-Fried filed for bankruptcy.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office famous for prosecuting financial crimes spent months examining cryptocurrency companies with both domestic and foreign branches, according to a report from Bloomberg. Lawyers had begun examining FTX, which is based in the Bahamas and incorporated in Antigua and Barbuda, for compliance with the Bank Secrecy Act, which demands that financial institutions work to detect money laundering and terrorism financing.

FTX filed for bankruptcy two weeks ago after users discovered that trading firm Alameda Research, a company run by Bankman-Fried love interest Caroline Ellison, had allegedly been using consumer holdings from FTX to make investments. John Ray III, the lawyer who represented plaintiffs after the collapse of Enron, noted that the cryptocurrency empire was the worst failure he has ever witnessed.

“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here,” Ray, who succeeded Bankman-Fried as chief executive to manage the bankruptcy, said in court documents. “From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.”

In a more recent statement, however, Ray said that “many regulated or licensed subsidiaries” of FTX have solvent balance sheets and responsible management. “It will be a priority of ours in the coming weeks to explore sales, recapitalizations or other strategic transactions with respect to these subsidiaries, and others that we identify as our work continues,” he remarked.

Bankman-Fried, whose considerable fortune disappeared overnight when the company filed for bankruptcy, sought $8 billion from investors to cover withdrawal requests made by customers after the bankruptcy filing. A number of institutional investors were forced to mark down their shares in the company to zero over the past several days.

Sequoia Capital, a leading venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, defended the company’s vetting process and announced a $150 million loss from the collapse in a letter to shareholders. “We are in the business of taking risk. Some investments will surprise to the upside, and some will surprise to the downside,” the message said. “We do not take this responsibility lightly and do extensive research and thorough diligence on every investment we make.”

The House Financial Services Committee is preparing to hold hearings regarding the collapse of FTX as the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission continue their own investigations. Officials in the Biden administration, including Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, have expressed a willingness to implement more regulations on the nascent sector.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve announced the beginning of a simulated digital currency initiative alongside multiple financial institutions soon after the cryptocurrency sector collapsed. Central bankers are weighing the possibility of launching a central bank digital currency, which would preserve the international role of the dollar while mitigating pitfalls intrinsic to cryptocurrencies such as liquidity risk, according to a paper from the Federal Reserve.