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The Party That Attacked Farage Over Crypto Money Took Some Of Its Own Labour ran an advert this year asking whether Reform was "the party of the people, or the party of crypto billionaires." The advert was aimed at Nigel Farage's undeclared £5m gift from a cryptocurrency investor. It sits uneasily beside what this newspaper has now disclosed about the Defence Secretary. Wes Streeting took £37,500 between 2022 and 2023 from a think tank called Labour for the Long Term. Thirty-four days before its first donation to him, LLT's founder, David Lawrence, received £500,000 from Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency fraudster now serving 25 years for stealing billions from his own customers. Streeting's team say they checked LLT's donor list before accepting the money and Bankman-Fried's name wasn't on it. There is no suggestion Streeting knew where the money originated. That is not the same as saying nobody should have known. The strongest evidence in this story is the contradiction Lawrence himself has been unable to explain. He told The Telegraph the donation to Streeting was actually funded by a different backer, a City investor. Electoral Commission records show that investor didn't start giving to LLT until February 2023, seven months after the money reached Streeting's office. Lawrence was asked to account for the gap. He declined. That is not a matter of interpretation. It is a discrepancy sitting in the public record he cited to defend himself. The mechanism that made this possible is the same one Labour claims to want closed. MPs cannot legally accept more than £500 from a foreign national. Unincorporated associations like LLT can, because they aren't required to disclose their donors' origins, only their own donations to politicians. The Electoral Commission has been calling for this loophole to be shut for years. Labour is currently legislating to close it, having spent this Parliament attacking the Conservatives and Reform for exploiting precisely the gap its own Defence Secretary walked through. Lawrence's defence, that Bankman-Fried's gift went to charity rather than to LLT, rests entirely on his own word, since he has been "unable to reassure party bosses with his own financial records," according to senior Labour sources. He stood down as a prospective candidate in November 2023 once that failure became apparent to his own party. Streeting's office had no comparable warning. Labour's internal machinery evidently knew enough about Lawrence to quietly steer other shadow ministers away from his money. Nobody steered Streeting. What's concerning here isn't proof, it's proximity. LLT didn't confine itself to health policy. It gave evidence to Parliament in 2023 on how artificial intelligence should govern nuclear weapons systems, the same effective altruism network that has clashed with the Pentagon in America over AI in weapons procurement. Streeting is now the minister who will decide exactly these questions for Britain. Nothing proves his policy has been shaped by that history. But a Defence Secretary whose office was staffed for a year by a donor-funded adviser from a think tank actively lobbying on AI and nuclear policy is not a coincidence that ends the story. It's one that starts a new line of inquiry. Labour built its attack on Farage around a simple principle: voters deserve to know where a politician's money comes from, and politicians have a duty to find out. Streeting's team say due diligence was followed to the letter, and perhaps it was. But the letter of the process didn't stop £37,500 of Sam Bankman-Fried's money reaching the office of the man who now controls Britain's defence budget. The party that built an advert on that principle owes the public an explanation for why its own systems missed it. "Labour is currently legislating to close it, having spent this Parliament attacking the Conservatives and Reform for exploiting precisely the gap its own Defence Secretary walked through"