Greetings, and welcome back to Puck..

Tonight, a closer look at the Republican charm offensive of Sam Bankman-Fried, who, in case you forgot, allegedly committed a lot of political crimes. We’ve got a lot of new anecdotes, below, about all the money that S.B.F. and his team showered on Republicans—at least $13 million more than was previously known.

Mentioned in today’s note: Palmer and Julie Luckey, Daniel Lurie and London Breed, Gabe Bankman-Fried and Susan Collins, Elaine Chao and Mitch McConnell, Michael Kives and Bryan Baum, Caroline Ellison and her drinking buddy, Curtis Yarvin, and many more.

But first…

• Getting Luckey: The ever-charming Palmer Luckey is hosting a fundraiser for Donald Trump this weekend in Orange County, I’ve learned from a source. Palmer and I have squabbled over the years about whether the man of Newport Beach is a card-carrying “Silicon Valley” power broker or not, but whatever: With this event, he becomes Trump’s most active supporter in the tech industry.

  Luckey, who founded Oculus before founding the successful defense-tech startup Anduril, is part of a prominent MAGA family: His mom, Julie, is a major activist in conservative circles, and his sister is married to Rep. Matt Gaetz. Luckey has donated to DeSantis during his gubernatorial bid in the past, sure, but he’s formally hosting Trump on the 29th in Costa Mesa, according to a copy of an invite I saw. An Anduril spokesperson said she wasn’t aware of the event, and Luckey himself didn’t return multiple requests for comment.

• Lurie vs. Breed: I can all-but guarantee that the San Francisco mayoral race will become a flashpoint for leaders in the tech industry upset with how things are going politically these days. Expect many of them to flock to Daniel Lurie, who on Tuesday formally announced that he is running against incumbent London Breed. Lurie, the founder of anti-poverty organization Tipping Point—think of its relationship with Silicon Valley as akin to the Robin Hood Foundation’s ties to Wall Street—has long been a rumored candidate for something at some point. As an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune who could self-fund a bit, he has impeccable fundraising connections to the Marc Benioffs and Ron Conways of the world. If he loses to Breed, it won’t be for lack of money.

Over the preceding year, he had very publicly poured tens of millions of dollars into Democratic causes, feeding the perception that he and FTX were a motley crew of liberal hacks. So at 6 p.m. on that Wednesday evening in September, S.B.F. walked into The Grill with an entourage including his brother Gabe and FTX executive Ryan Salame, for some private time with the Republican majority leader and Senator Susan Collins.

S.B.F. had been priming the pump for weeks. In August 2022, according to my reporting, he quietly made a $10 million donation to McConnell’s dark-money group, One Nation, in what appears to be the largest single financial donation to a Republican group from an FTX executive. That donation, which was never reported, helps to explain Bankman-Fried’s claim, shortly after FTX declared bankruptcy, that he was actually one of the biggest Republican donors in the country that year. (One Nation wouldn’t address the specifics of this reporting.)

The campaign was all part of an effort by the Bankman-Fried brothers to curry favor on the right, where they saw an opportunity to rebalance FTX’s reputation and also to make some G.O.P. friends who might be willing to fund pandemic-prevention initiatives—and also, presumably, to generate some goodwill around the cryptocurrency industry. (Before the meeting, according to talking points prepped for it, Sam was instructed not to bring up crypto with McConnell, a topic the 80-year-old politician couldn’t have cared less about.) Some effective altruists believed there was better R.O.I. in winning over conservatives versus winning over liberals; moreover, McConnell, a childhood survivor of polio, was seen by the effective-altruist crew as “empathetic” to the pandemic-prevention cause, a source familiar told me. McConnell, in turn, pitched S.B.F. on being more of a centrist.

The McConnell-S.B.F. dinner—one of at least two dinners I’m aware of, including another with McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao—is among several new details I’ve come across that reveal how much S.B.F. invested in the conservative movement, making donations that would make his progressive mother, Barbara, squirm if she knew their full extent. Sam was personally left-of-center, sure, but he cared about relevance and power and progress on his pet issues, and he knew that building an influence machine meant playing both sides of the game.

For instance, Mitch McConnell was hardly the only major Republican power broker that Bankman-Fried met in the final weeks of FTX. In an extraordinary coincidence, on November 6, just two days before Election Day—the same day that Binance C.E.O. Changpeng Zhao helped trigger a run on FTX deposits—the Bankman-Fried brothers found themselves in Florida with Ron DeSantis. The brunch with Sam and Gabe was a get-to-know-you session, set up by celebrity “power-broker” Michael Kives’ partner Bryan Baum, according to the Times, which first reported the existence of the meeting but didn’t include these details.

The meeting was pre-scheduled, of course, but it shows just how politically ambitious the Bankman-Fried brothers were, and just how politically ambitious DeSantis was, too. The klatch, predictably, went pretty awfully, I’m told: I don’t think you could imagine two more different people than Sam Bankman-Fried and Ron DeSantis. In the retrospective sweep of history, I’m sure there are other meetings that would have generated more Expected Value for S.B.F. than time with DeSantis during that fateful first week in November.

Ellison held her fair share of out-there beliefs about artificial intelligence, drug use, polyamory, etcetera, and had a few fringe acquaintances, too. I’m told Ellison was friendly with the alt-right reactionary Curtis Yarvin, previously known by his pen name, Mencius Moldbug, a monarchist and frequent critic of democracy. A few months before FTX collapsed, the two got a drink in Berkeley. Yarvin called her a “genuinely good person” and said that he did not detect much of a political pulse in her from their conversations. “If anything I remember steering her away from that direction,” he told me. “Obviously that whole crowd was very interested in turning money into power. But not very good at it.”

Several months earlier, in fact, Ellison had made a secret donation to a 501(c)4 nonprofit called Defending America Together—one of the many, many groups set up by the Bankman-Fried operation along the way to world domination. This group’s primary purpose was to buy goodwill with conservatives, according to a person familiar with its operations. Caroline’s gift was for a sizable $3 million, I am told by a source, who described Ellison as the principal donor to this dark-money operation, although there were others. Defending America Together would end up spending $5 million on the G.O.P. primaries that cycle, including a $3 million donation to super PACs that supported David McCormick in Pennsylvania and $2 million for Mike Durant in Alabama.

Defending America Together might also be familiar to Puck readers as the group that was incorporated in Puerto Rico by a man named Erick Todd, who has been the subject of scrutiny by federal prosecutors on the island, as I wrote last year. I reached out to Todd, but he hasn’t returned requests for comment in over a year. A lawyer for Ellison declined to comment. Prosecutors may have been trying to make sure that the Ellison check really came from Ellison.

Ellison, who pleaded guilty last December to multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy, was not charged in the alleged straw-donor scheme involving Salame and Nishad Singh, another FTX executive who has taken a plea and will likely testify against S.B.F. next month. But she was, it seems, still somewhat enmeshed in the broader political operation surrounding S.B.F. According to the lawsuit recently filed by FTX against Bankman-Fried’s parents, there are multiple emails wherein Barbara Fried, the founder of the Democratic donor group Mind the Gap, suggests that Ellison could be an allied political donor of S.B.F. That was certainly news to me, and plenty of other insiders I’ve spoken with in the lead-up to next week’s trial, where Ellison is the star witness.