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Tucker Carlson's interview with former FTX Digital Markets chief executive Ryan Salame begins with Carlson saying, "I feel like kind of an idiot."

After watching the entire two-hour ordeal, so do I.

Salame, who has pleaded guilty, is innocent, you see. Or at least that's the impression he wants you to take away. He was apparently also targeted because he's a hard-working entrepreneurial Republican donor but without that Caroline Ellison-type appeal.

Salame, we're led to believe, had this 'money transmission' charge laid at his feet, the victim of the unjust narrative that FTX executives were engaged in a massive fraud that involved evading regulators and law enforcement.

Carlson and Salame both struggle to understand how it's possible that Salame getting a loan from an insolvent firm to make millions in political donations could ever be a crime. Though no mention is made of Salame's message where he noted that Sam Bankman-Fried would be "rout[ing] money through me."

Nor was it mentioned that what Salame kept referring to as a "loan" against his assets apparently "were not documented in agreement or on term sheets, and there were no set interest rates, no interest payments, no collateral, and no evidence of repayment."

Salame also repeated his insistence that he was induced to plead, an idea we looked into in this newsletter before.

For those who missed the previous coverage, Salame insists that he was induced to plead by a promise that the federal government would cease investigating his romantic partner, failed political candidate Michelle Bond.

Since then, Bond has been charged with crimes that involve Salame, and Salame entered into a messy legal dispute over his plea, what he claimed when he pleaded, and whether he was handling the issues appropriately.

In this interview, he made the claim that he would be appealing his plea.

This interview seems likely to be one of the last we will see from Salame for quite some time, and little new was said. His self-surrender for his seven-and-a-half-year prison sentence is scheduled for today, as his eleventh-hour motion to delay his surrender was denied.