Well this is a twist that shouldn’t surprise anyone, and perhaps a clue as to why Sam Bankman-Fried and company have gotten kid-glove treatment by the media.

It turns out that SBF visited the White House 4 times last year, meeting with White House Deputy Chief of Staff Bruce Reid and Counselor to the President Steve Richetti each time.

Richetti and Reid are two of the most powerful political operatives in the White House, with offices near the Oval. Only Ron Klain holds a higher position in the Executive Branch, and these two see the president far more often than Kamala Harris or nearly anybody else. Richetti was the Chairman of Biden’s 2020 campaign, and Reid was his Chief of Staff when Biden was Vice President.

In other words, SBF went straight to the top, and was welcomed with open arms. As was his brother, who visited the White House 2 times last year.

Karine Jean-Pierre, though, assures us that these meeting had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that SBF was pouring tens of millions of dollars into the coffers of Democrat candidates and SuperPACs. Instead, the men were planning how to save America from bugs.

White House spokesperson says meetings with SBF were focussed on pandemic prevention pic.twitter.com/uDcvMQMN1E

— db (@tier10k) January 3, 2023

White House records recently made public have revealed that disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried met with senior Biden administration officials in the White House on four occasions over the course of 2022, including a just-disclosed visit on September 9.

When pressed on the subject during a press conference on Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre insisted that all meetings between White House officials and the fallen crypto mogul focused primarily on Bankman-Fried’s nonprofit pandemic preparedness initiatives. She also, however, stated that the conversations may have also pertained to “general information” regarding the cryptocurrency industry and crypto exchanges.

It’s good to know that the country is in the very best of hands when it comes to pandemic prevention. A crypto fraud and two connected political operatives should be meeting regularly to plot out how best to prevent the emergence of new and dangerous microbes during an election year. And the crypto dude’s brother should pop in every once in a while to chat up these fellows to ensure things stay on track.

They couldn’t do worse than Dr. Anthony Fauci and company, after all.

Bankman-Fried met on multiple occasions with Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed, two of President Biden’s senior-most advisors. Both officials occupy offices just steps from the Oval Office, a sign of their status in the administration.

All of Bankman-Fried’s meetings with Ricchetti and Reed took place in the West Wing.

Bankman-Fried’s brother, Gabriel Bankman-Fried, also met with senior White House officials twice in 2022.

While most of the meetings took place in the spring, records released at the end of December revealed that Bankman-Fried returned to the White House for a fourth meeting in September, just weeks before the crypto mogul’s $32 billion empire collapsed in historic fashion.

In the early fall, at the time of Bankman-Fried’s final visit to the White House, the then-billionaire was lobbying lawmakers to pass the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act (DCCPA), a framework for crypto regulation that, while potentially devastating to some sectors of the crypto industry, would have treated centralized exchanges like FTX much more favorably.

Why would anybody think that the White House’s top political operatives would be discussion a quid pro quo with crypto-scammer SBF weeks before the midterm elections, when the much more obvious explanation is that all of these altruistic men (SBF, after all, was a great proponent of “effective altruism,” we are constantly told by the MSM) were plotting how to save civilization itself from random viruses over which they have precisely zero control.

Pandemics don’t care whether it is an election year or what legislation is before Congress, so matters such as obvious conflicts of interest should be shoved aside in order to ensure the safety of the country.

I suspect the impetus for the meetings was panic over the impending retirement of Anthony Fauci, who did such a bang-up job preventing the COVID pandemic and managing it. Perhaps Richetti and Reid were interviewing him for the position of NAIAD Director? It would make sense. Knowing how to commit fraud and lie convincingly appear to be important skills for the position.

Karine Jean-Pierre was very open and up front about the relationship between the White House, the president, and SBF. Given the “effective altruist’s” fall from grace, she was asked what the president would do about the zillions in political donations from SBF that helped Biden win the White House:

Multiple politicians have since returned those donations or donated equivalent amounts to charity.

Press Secretary Jean-Pierre, however, has refused to comment regarding whether the President will return any donations made by Bankman-Fried, or thinks any other Democratic politicians should.

On Tuesday, Jean-Pierre doubled down on that refusal.

“I don’t have anything to share,” she said.

Of course not. She is too busy preparing for the next pandemic.