Last Updated on October 3, 2023
FTX founder and accused financial fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried tried to buy the 2024 Presidential Election for $5 billion dollars, by hatching a futile plan to pay 45th President Trump not to seek re-election, according to the author of an upcoming book on Bankman-Fried’s rise and fall.
Author Michael Lewis told 60 Minutes in a recent interview that FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who was one of the Democrat Party’s largest donors before his arrest, wanted to pay 45th President Trump $5 billion dollars not to run for president in 2024.
“One of the most shocking passages in this book I thought came with this revelation that Sam had looked into paying Donald Trump not to run [for president in 2024],” 60 Minutes interviewer Jon Wertheim said to Lewis, teeing up his response about Bankman-Fried’s alleged attempt to effectively purchase the 2024 election.
“That only shocks you if you don’t know Sam,” Lewis replied.
“Sam’s thinking, ‘We could pay Donald Trump not to run for president’,” he added.
“The number that was kicking around when I was talking to Sam about this was $5 billion,” Lewis went on to say, claiming that Bankman-Fried had made contact with a member of Trump’s team, but that the discussion never went any further than that.
Ironically, Lewis told 60 Minutes that Bankman-Fried had trepidations about bribing a presidential candidate not to run, and that he questioned the legality of it.
Lewis’s new book, “Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon”, was released today, and is described as a biography on Sam Bankman-Fried and his now-defunct FTX crypto exchange. Lewis is also the author of “The Big Short”, a book that profiled the 2008 financial collapse and was turned into a successful movie.
Sam Bankman-Fried became a multi-billionaire thanks to FTX and became the second-largest Democrat political donor in the 2020 election cycle. His spending spree continued into 2022, when he is reported to have funneled millions of dollars to Democrat causes through straw donors and dark money groups, in addition to making millions of dollars worth of personal Democrat donations.
While Bankman-Fried controlled the Democrat side of FTX’s political finance operations, his co-founder, Ryan David Salame, took care of the GOP side of things, donating millions of dollars to Kevin McCarthy’s political machine, that Congressional Leadership Fund. McCarthy proceeded to use that money to attack America First candidates throughout the 2022 election cycle, in a naked effort to protect establishment Republicans supportive of his eventual bid for Speaker of the House.
Read More: McCarthy Used FTX Cash to Defeat Conservatives in 2022