Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried met with government officials at the White House on at least four separate occasions in 2022, one of which reportedly occurred just two months before the fall of his crypto empire.
Most of the meetings were disclosed in visitor logs that are posted by the White House every month, with the records showing that Bankman-Fried met with Counselor to the President Steve Ricchetti on April 22 and May 12, along with another meeting on May 13 meeting with policy adviser Charlotte Butash.
However, according to a Dec. 29 Bloomberg report, the former FTX CEO also met with the president’s counselor Ricchette as recently as Sept. 8, a meeting that did not show up on the visitor logs.
The revelation has piqued the curiosity of crypto community members, who want to know why there seemed to be such a revolving door of visitations 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
As per the Bloomberg report, sources suggested that politics had not been discussed at the meeting, and that conversations were focused on the crypto industry, exchanges and pandemic prevention.
Related: Prosecutors unlikely to offer Sam Bankman-Fried a favorable plea deal, says lawyer
Despite living in the Bahamas, Bankman-Fried is understood to have been a regular visitor to Washington as he pushed to influence crypto policy and make connections there. He was previously accused of attempting to redirect regulators away from centralized exchanges like FTX to decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms such as lending protocol MakerDAO.
Bankman-Fried was a significant donor to the Democrats, and in a Nov. 16 interview with crypto vlogger Tiffany Fong admitted that he had donated about the same to both parties, but that his “Republican donations were dark.”