Former FTX CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, met with government officials at the White House on at least four separate occasions in 2022one of which allegedly took place just two months before the fall of his crypto empire.
Most of the meetings were disclosed in the visitor logs the White House releases each month, and the records show that Bankman-Fried met with Counsel to the President Steve Ricchetti on April 22 and May 12, along with another meeting on May 13 with political adviser Charlotte Butash.
However, according to a Bloomberg report on December 29, the former CEO of FTX also met with the president’s adviser, Ricchette, on September 8, a meeting that did not appear in the visit logs.
The revelation has piqued the curiosity of members of the crypto community, who want to know why there seemed to be such a revolving door of visits between FTX and the White House..
FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried reportedly had four meetings at the White House leading up to the 2022 mid-term elections.
Biden needs to explain what his administration was doing meeting so often with crypto fraudster SBF.
—Paul A. Szypula (@Bubblebathgirl) December 29, 2022
FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried reportedly had four White House meetings ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.
Biden needs to explain what his administration was doing by meeting so often with cryptocurrency fraudster SBF.
According to the Bloomberg report, the sources suggested that the policy had not been discussed at the meeting, and that the talks focused on the crypto industry, exchanges and pandemic prevention..
Despite living in the Bahamas, Bankman-Fried has been known to have been a regular visitor to Washington as he lobbied to influence cryptopolitics and make connections there.. He was previously accused of trying to redirect the attention of regulators from centralized exchanges like FTX to decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms like the MakerDAO lending protocol.
Bankman-Fried was a major donor to the Democratsand in a November 16 interview with cryptovlogger Tiffany Fong admitted that he had donated more or less the same amount to both parties, but that his “Republican donations were obscure”.
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