WASHINGTON, DC – US President Donald Trump’s Crypto Ventures were again under the microscope at a House Financial Services Committee hearing.
The committee held a “minority day” hearing. This means that witnesses were primarily elected by Democrats. On Friday, it was chosen by the current minority party in the House.
Maxine Waters, a ranking Democrat for the committee, who requested the extracurricular hearing after the panel met on the same topic, pointed to Trump’s various cryptocurrency efforts in her opening statement, saying her goal is to stop Trump from halting the interests of his crypto venture.
“What I’m opposed to in this law is the bent president of the United States, who I have decided to use the presidency to enhance access to profits,” Waters said.
Republicans focused on another tack. “There is currently no federal framework for non-security digital assets,” said the committee chair French Hill, a stance reflected in his own opening statement, which his colleagues, Brian Steele and Warren Davidson. They argue that Democrats and former President Joe Biden administration have allowed them to spend a year in which they couldn’t protect consumers by not providing rules to oversee codes.
Crypto has relegated the ideological wedge to the Democrats of Capitol Hill. Many Democrats (typically skewed towards younger members) support advances in digital assets law despite leadership directions. Most of the Democrats who attended this bonus hearing about the Clarity Act were in crypto critical camps, but Rep. Jim Himes, a Connecticut Democrat, has supported the crypto bill in the past and questioned witnesses at hearings about concerns, including tensions that allow financial companies to dodge surveillance.
Himes was the YES vote for FIT21, the predecessor of last year’s Clarity Act, 21st century financial innovation and technology, FIT21, and said that some of the new initiative provisions could allow calculations that certain types of issuers can be abused under Securities and Exchange Commission regulations.
The act of clarity itself is more complicated than necessary and does not address some of the cybersecurity risks posed to the cryptocurrency industry, Carroll House, a former White House adviser, said he is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Center for Geography and Economics. She pointed out recent crypto hacks, including Crypto Exchange Bybit, as an example.
Amanda Fischer, a Washington group advocating for public monetary policy, said the bigger issue is an exception that calls for regulation under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, not the Securities and Exchange Commission, and that it could provide perversion to other threat companies for SEC and Be Be securities compositions and conding registrations and other threat companies regulated under the Be Registration Bureau.
But as seen at other recent hearings, Trump’s code has once again reappeared as a star of the show.
Bert Naylor, a former investigator of the Public Citizens and Senate Banking Committee, said he believes Trump is selling favors by specifically soliciting gifts through his members and selling favors through actions such as his member dinner or ending SEC lawsuits against businesses that donated money to him.
White House officials routinely deny Trump’s display of conflicts of interest in pursuing the business interests of digital assets.
Waters launched the strike last month with what was meant to be a joint hearing of this and the House Agriculture Committee on Crypto Policy, but industry insiders noted that not all the Democrats on the panel were following Waters’ departure.
Read more: Planned code hearings at US homes derailed by a Democratic rebellion
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