Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell met with disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and persuaded him to donate millions to his list of anti-Trump candidates, according to Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short.
Lewis told 60 Minutes that Sam Bankman-Fried met with McConnell ahead of the 2022 election and donated millions to support the GOP leader’s list of anti-Trump GOP senate candidates.
Via Real Clear Politics:
60 MINUTES: To that end, Lewis writes that in 2022, Bankman-Fried met with the most unlikely of allies, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. According to Lewis, Bankman-Fried wanted to help McConnell fund Republican candidates at odds with Donald Trump.
JON WERTHEIM, 60 MINUTES: You’re flying with Sam, and he tells you about a meeting he’s gonna have with Mitch McConnell.
MICHAEL LEWIS: Well, the interesting thing starts before we even get on the plane. I meet him at the airport, and he comes tumbling out of a car. And he’s in his cargo shorts and his T-shirt. And he’s got, balled up in his hand– it takes me a while to see what it is, but it’s a blue suit. It’s got more wrinkles than any blue suit ever had. It’s been just jammed into this little ball. (laughs) And a shoe, like, falls out of the pile that he’s got in his arms. And I said, like, “What– why you have the suit?” And he says– (laughs) he says, “Mi– Mitch McConnell really cares what you wear when you– (laughs) when you meet with him.” And he’s having dinner in six hours with Mitch McConnell. And I– I said, “Well, you got the suit. Is there– you got a belt?” He goes, “No. I don’t have a belt.” I said, “You got– you have a shirt?” He goes, “No. No shirt,” “and the suit, you really can’t really wear that suit.” And he goes, “Yeah. But they told me to bring a suit.”
60 MINUTES: According to Lewis, Bankman-Fried wanted to help McConnell fund Republican candidates at odds with Donald Trump…
MICHAEL LEWIS: What is the subtext of this dinner, is Sam is gonna write tens of millions of dollars of checks to a super PAC that Mitch McConnell is then gonna use to get elected people who are not “hostile to democracy.”
JON WERTHEIM, 60 MINUTES: Wait. So, Mitch McConnell has a list of Republican candidates who are, sort of, on the playing field for democracy versus what he deemed outside?
MICHAEL LEWIS: He and his team had done the work to distinguish between actual deep Trumpers and people who were just seeming to approve of Donald Trump but we actually willing to govern.
McConnell also refused to fund popular conservative candidate Blake Masters in Arizona.
Masters lost on election day after the Maricopa County voting machine “malfunctions.”
Besides meeting with Mitch McConnell and donating to his anti-Trump causes, The National Review noted SBF donated over $5 million to Joe Biden.
During the 2022 midterm election cycle, Bankman-Fried doled out $40 million dollars to mostly Democratic politicians, making him the party’s second-largest financial backer after George Soros.
Lewis also alleges that Bankman-Fried considered paying Donald Trump not to run for re-election in 2020.
In an excerpt published in the Washington Post, Lewis wrote:
“On a separate front, he explained to me, as the plane descended into Washington, he was exploring the legality of paying Donald Trump himself not to run for president.”
“His team had somehow created a back channel into the Trump operation and returned with the not terribly Earth-shattering news that Donald Trump might indeed have his price: $5 billion. Or so Sam was told by his team.”
However, the excerpt failed to explain why Bankman-Fried did not press ahead with the plans.
As The Daily Fetched reported in July, Federal prosecutors dropped a campaign finance charge on Thursday against Sam Bankman-Fried due to ‘procedural failing.’
The Democrat donor spent over $40 million to fund the midterms with his Ponzi scheme through his crypto exchange (FTX).
Following the collapse of FTX last year, up to $2 billion has disappeared into a black hole.
SBF is Biden’s second biggest donor and funneled money through Ukraine, funding Democrats.
Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty to seven counts of fraud and conspiracy stemming from his cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, collapse in 2022.
The disgraced Crypto scammer faces 110 years in prison.
READ: Sam Bankman-Fried Wins Approval to Get ‘Uninterrupted Access’ to Adderall in Prison
