Mark your calendars for this Tuesday! Sam Bankman-Fried’s attorneys certainly should as well. Give the founder of FTX and Alameda credit for consistency, anyway. He’s willing to run his mouth off in the media, and now he’s pledging to run his mouth off in Congress, too.

Or so SBF claimed this morning on Twitter, replying to a tweet from Maxine Waters from four days ago:

1) I still do not have access to much of my data — professional or personal. So there is a limit to what I will be able to say, and I won't be as helpful as I'd like.

But as the committee still thinks it would be useful, I am willing to testify on the 13th. https://t.co/KR34BsNaG1

— SBF (@SBF_FTX) December 9, 2022

3) I had thought of myself as a model CEO, who wouldn't become lazy or disconnected.

Which made it that much more destructive when I did.

I'm sorry. Hopefully people can learn from the difference between who I was and who I could have been.

— SBF (@SBF_FTX) December 9, 2022

There’s only one problem, which is that Waters later seemed to change her mind — or at least her enthusiasm level. On December 5, Waters wanted him to come to the hearing on Tuesday the 13th. Two days after that, though, the outgoing chair of the House Financial Services Committee claimed to have no interest in requiring Bankman-Fried testify before her panel:

BREAKING: House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D) does not plan to subpoena Sam Bankman-Fried to testify at hearing on FTX's collapse

SBF gave tens of millions of dollars to Democrats and was their second biggest donor this last election cycle

— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) December 7, 2022

Waters later claimed that a subpoena was on the table:

Lies are circulating @CNBC that I am not willing to subpoena @SBF_FTX. He has been requested to testify at the December 13th hearing. A subpoena is definitely on the table. Stay tuned.

— Maxine Waters (@RepMaxineWaters) December 8, 2022

I’ll bet. Waters almost certainly didn’t think Bankman-Fried would be dumb enough to accept her invitation, and for good reason. As it turned out, though, Waters didn’t need to issue the subpoena. So far, anyway.

The first big question will be whether Bankman-Fried actually shows up for the hearing, either in person or by remote video connection. SBF never says he’ll be in attendance at the hearing, but only that he will testify. That in itself is surprising, given that any testimony given in Congress carries criminal penalties for falsehoods. It’s one thing to blow smoke up the skirts of media outlets hoping to salvage SBF’s supposed “altruistic capitalism” and his big-time support for Democrats, but it’s quite another to lie to Congress. And the incoming Republican majority in the House will have no qualms making referrals for any perjury they can find in SBF’s testimony next week, and those issues do not disappear between sessions of Congress either.

It seems very unlikely that Bankman-Fried will show up in person, even if he does testify. He’s been holed up in the Bahamas since the collapse of FTX and the disappearance of billions of dollars in investor deposits, likely to complicate efforts to arrest him. It’s not impossible to extradite people from the Bahamas — we do have an extradition treaty with the Bahamians — but it’s complicated. Why make it easier for the Department of Justice to execute an arrest warrant by setting foot in a US jurisdiction?

With that in mind, though, the attorneys working for Bankman-Fried must be ordering up hemlock martinis by now. It’s bad enough that their client has shot his mouth off to every reporter he can find, apparently confusing political risk with legal risk. Now he’s volunteering to testify before Congress, where — under oath or not — lies become felonies. Perhaps there’s some eight-dimensional chess strategy going on here that lurks behind a veneer of obsessive-compulsive con artistry, but this looks very much like a con artist who thinks that doubling down will keep his spell in place.

At any rate, keep those calendars marked, but somehow it seems a little unlikely that Bankman-Fried will actually follow through. And given all of his connections to Democrats — and the ability in the committee format for Republicans to drill down into those with SBF — I’d bet that Waters herself and/or her colleagues will find a way to get out of this epic event.