Reuters reported this week that embattled FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has hired one of the lawyers who represented Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell.

According to the news service, a spokesperson for Bankman-Fried confirmed on Tuesday that he has retained the services of attorney Mark S. Cohen.

Cohen defended Maxwell on trafficking charges

Cohen, who formerly served as assistant United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, previously defended Maxwell on charges that she helped supply underage girls to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Maxwell was convicted in December of last year on multiple sex trafficking counts and was sentenced this past June to two decades behind bars.

Before representing Maxwell, Cohen helped prosecute notorious Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman. Guzman was given a life sentence in 2019 for his role as head of the brutal Sinaloa cartel.

#cryptonews: #SBF has hired Mark S. Cohen, a civil and criminal defense attorney at Cohen & Gresser who also defended Ghislaine Maxwell. https://t.co/Jh1MioRRXp

— CoinMarketCap (@CoinMarketCap) December 7, 2022

Bankman-Fried has come under intense scrutiny after the Bahamas-based cryptocurrency exchange he founded filed for bankruptcy earlier this year.

Reuters reported last month that some $1 billion worth of client funds "vanished" when $10 billion were transferred to FTX's trading partner Alameda Research. However, some sources who spoke with the news service said the actual figure could be twice as large.

FTX founder was this year's second-biggest Democratic donor

Fox News noted that Bankman-Fried has long had deep ties to the Democratic Party, sometimes appearing at events alongside former President Bill Clinton.

Tony Blair and Bill Clinton on the same stage (and SBF.) You don’t see that very often these days, eh? pic.twitter.com/Vt5pn6egHn

— Dan Keeler (@dankeeler) April 28, 2022

The network reported that Bankman-Fried was the second largest contributor to Democratic political action committees (PACs) and other left-wing organizations during the 2022 midterm election season.

Totaling some $38 million, Bankman-Fried's contributions made him the second biggest Democrat-affiliated donor after billionaire George Soros.

This included giving $6 million to the House Majority PAC, an organization aligned with outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Meanwhile, another half million dollars were provided by Bankman-Fried to the Senate Majority PAC, which is linked to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Fox News also revealed that during a May interview with NBC News, Bankman-Fried's brother, Gabe Bankman-Fried, boasted that he and his sibling were "ambitious and looking to make a splash" ahead of the midterm elections.