gary gensler SEC

no doubt will be target but got thru

SEE CRYPTO-CURRENCY

esg? compelled speech 1st amend

CONTEXT

3 26 maj rept

S.E.C.'s Enforcement Chief Abruptly Resigns}:

The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com › U.S. › Politics](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/us/politics/sec-enforcement-chief-resigns.html)

Mar 16, 2026 — A senior Securities and Exchange Commission official abruptly resigned on Monday, raising questions about the agency's ability to root out ...Read more

nyt no lnx

S.E.C.’s Enforcement Chief Abruptly Resigns

Margaret A. Ryan is leaving the agency just six months after joining it, a surprise given that most people hold the position for years.

By Ben Protess

March 16, 2026

A senior Securities and Exchange Commission official abruptly resigned on Monday, raising questions about the agency’s ability to root out financial wrongdoing.

The official, Margaret A. Ryan, the S.E.C.’s enforcement chief, is leaving the agency just six months after joining it. Typically, S.E.C. enforcement chiefs serve for years.

The agency, created nearly a century ago at the height of the Great Depression to protect investors and oversee financial markets, did not provide a reason for Ms. Ryan’s sudden resignation. And Ms. Ryan, a former Marine and military judge, could not immediately be reached for comment.

In a statement provided by the S.E.C., Ms. Ryan thanked the agency’s chairman, Paul S. Atkins, and expressed confidence that “the foundation” they shaped together “will continue to serve investors and the markets well.”

Her departure — which comes as the S.E.C. undergoes a broader, business-friendly transformation in President Trump’s second term — could further embolden Mr. Atkins to rein in the agency’s enforcement division. Well before Ms. Ryan arrived, the agency had begun to retreat from a variety of Biden-era enforcement priorities, including cracking down on Wall Street and the cryptocurrency industry.

In December, The New York Times published an investigation into the S.E.C.’s backtracking from crypto cases, finding that the agency had eased up on more than 60 percent of the crypto lawsuits that were pending when Mr. Trump returned to the White House in January 2025. The agency paused some of its crypto cases, lessened penalties in others and outright dismissed several of the lawsuits.

The pullback, coinciding with a long-running government shutdown that stymied the agency, had prompted some key departures and depressed morale within pockets of the enforcement unit. Mr. Atkins, however, has contended that the agency needed to change, and that he was reining in the prior administration’s overzealous stance.

“Our goal has been to the lead the division of enforcement back to Congress’ original intent: enforcing the federal securities laws, particularly as they relate to fraud and manipulation,” Mr. Atkins said in the statement announcing Ms. Ryan’s departure. “I am pleased to report significant progress toward this objective,” he added, crediting Ms. Ryan, who he said “served with honor and distinction.”

Ms. Ryan, a former judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, was a somewhat unconventional pick to run the S.E.C.’s enforcement unit, which is often led by seasoned white-collar litigators. Still, some former agency officials cheered the arrival of a law-and-order judge, predicting she would push Mr. Atkins to adopt a more aggressive stance.

In its statement, the agency said that it expected to announce Ms. Ryan’s successor in the coming weeks. In the meantime, Sam Waldon, a longtime agency official who was serving as a deputy enforcement chief, will be the acting director.

Ben Protess is an investigative reporter at The Times, covering President Trump.

See more on: Securities and Exchange Commission, Donald Trump

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context

intercept

after two elections where he bucked Ohio’s rightward trend, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown is clinging to thenarrowest of polling leads. If he loses to unpopular car salesman Bernie Moreno next month, he might have crypto to blame.

Cryptocurrency companies are pouring tens of millions of dollars into the race through a super PAC in response to Brown’s scathing criticism of the industry as Senate Banking Committee chair.

Their leading role in the race shows how much money — no matter the “coin” — talks.

Crypto sat in the political doghouse after the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX fraud two years ago, but it drew broad bipartisan support for its top legislative priority this May as it showered money on congressional races.

“Really their only avenue here to continue their scams is to get enough politicians to change the law.”

If crypto can take down Brown next month, critics warn, it could lead to more success for an agenda that includes neutering the Securities and Exchange Commission and opening the door for more traditional banks to hold crypto.

“They’re losing in the courts, they’re losing in the court of public opinion, so really their only avenue here to continue their scams is to get enough politicians to change the law,” said Dennis Kelleher, the CEO of financial reform nonprofit Better Markets. “The key to that is taking out anybody who opposes them.”

Mad Money

Operating through a cluster of blandly named super PACs, the crypto industry had made nearly half of all corporate donations in this year’s elections as of August. A single pro-crypto super PAC, Fairshake, has raised more than $200 million and spent more than $132 million this cycle.

Fairshake and its affiliates have spent millions backing Democratic Senate candidates Reps. Ruben Gallego in Arizona and Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, along with House candidates on both sides of the aisle.

Nowhere has crypto’s influence been more obvious than Ohio. In the last election cycle, a super PAC bankrolled by Bankman-Fried backed now-Rep. Shontel Brown, D-Ohio, over progressive Nina Turner.

This year, crypto is coming even harder into the state. A Fairshake affiliate, Defend American Jobs, has spent more than $38 million on ads boosting Moreno and blasting Brown, according to a recent Washington Postanalysis.

A Fairshake spokesperson did not return a request for comment, but the reasons for the attack ads are clear enough. Well before Bankman-Fried’s downfall, Brown was a vocal critic of cryptocurrency.

“Stablecoins and crypto markets aren’t actually an alternative to our banking system,” he said in December 2021. “They’re a mirror of the same broken system –– with even less accountability, and no rules at all.”

The super PAC’s spending on a race that could hand control of the Senate to the GOP has made some Democratic industry leaders uncomfortable. A spokesperson for one of the PAC’s top donors, the crypto exchange Coinbase, said the PAC’s spending decisions are made independently, a claim echoed by Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm that hasinvested billions in the crypto industry.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said in a blog post that the company was making its donations in an effort to get “regulatory clarity.”

In June, Armstrong said, “Crypto voters won’t be taken seriously until we send a clear message to political candidates that it is bad politics to be anti-crypto.”

Taming the SEC

Yet it isn’t just “clarity” that Armstrong and other industry players want. They also want specific legislation. “Getting the wrong kind of regulation is worse than none at all,” Armstrong said last month.

Top of the list is legislation called the Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act, or FIT 21, which would reclassify many kinds of crypto as commodities rather than securities.

The obscure-sounding shift has broad implications. Observers generally consider the rules for commodities — items like corn and wheat — to be looser than those for securities such as stocks and bonds.

“The CFTC was set up to regulate corn futures.”

Just as importantly, crypto critics say, would be a corresponding shift in oversight. Under the congressional legislation, crypto would shed the SEC for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a body with less resources and a leaner regulatory staff.

“The CFTC was set up to regulate corn futures,” said Mark Hays, a senior policy analyst with Americans for Financial Reform and Demand Progress. “The people they’re looking at are sophisticated hedge funds or ag traders, they are not set up to protect your cousin or your grandma logging onto their phone.”

SEC Chair Gary Gensler, who has emerged as a crypto industry foil, warned of the bill’s consequences in a statement after it passed the House with bipartisan support in May. Scammers could label themselves crypto companies in order to evade government oversight, he said.

Gensler said, “The crypto industry’s record of failures, frauds, and bankruptcies is not because we don’t have rules or because the rules are unclear. It’s because many players in the crypto industry don’t play by the rules.”

Opening Up the Banks

So far, the crypto industry’s favorite piece of legislation has not advanced in the Senate, although Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., recently made supportive-sounding comments.

Gensler also warned of the potential for larger contamination of the U.S. capital market. The issue arose in 2022, when SEC staffers tried to curb the danger with guidance advising financial institutions like banks to treat crypto as a liability rather than an asset on their balance sheets.

The SEC’s thinking was that crypto is too vulnerable to theft, fraud, or lost wallet keys, but the crypto industry and bankers cried foul.

Tech Billionaires Love Trump Now — Because He’s One of Them

https://theintercept.com/2024/08/07/silicon-valley-tech-billionaires-president-trump/

Stand With Crypto, an industry advocacy group, said the guidance “disincentivizes banks from offering digital asset custody at scale and limits banks’ ability to develop safe, innovative use cases for blockchain technology.”

While the guidance was nonbinding, for banks that decided to follow through, it meant that holding crypto for customers would require them to increase other holdings.

Congress passed legislation overriding the guidance, only to be vetoed by President Joe Biden in June. For now, the guidance remains in place. Yet the crypto industry still harbors its larger ambition of making it easier for traditional financial institutions to hold crypto.

Hays, the Americans for Financial Reform policy analyst, said, “They also want some of the other non-bank actors that provide crypto custody to be in the green.”

“Stable” Coins

Sometimes lost in the fallout from the Bankman-Fried saga is the story of an earlier crash involving a so-called stablecoin, TerraUSD, which was supposed to maintain a one-to-one peg with the dollar.

In short, it didn’t. Investors who thought they were getting into crypto in the safest way possible had their savings wiped out.

“A stablecoin is really nothing more than a crypto money market fund, with all the risks and dangers of a money market fund.”

TerraUSD was an “algorithmic” stablecoin, meaning that it was not backed by actual assets. One of the industry’s best hopes in Congress is to get legislation passed authorizing stablecoins that are backed by concrete assets.

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., the ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee and a frequent crypto skeptic, floated the idea last month of reaching a “grand bargain” with Republicans during the lame-duck Congress after the election.

Although stablecoins seem to have more legislative legs than other crypto proposals, skeptics like Kelleher, of Better Markets, are wary. He likened them to money market funds, which had to be saved from collapse by the Federal Reserve in 2008 and 2020.

“A stablecoin is really nothing more than a crypto money market fund, with all the risks and dangers of a money market fund,” he said. “Except it has even more, because it’s a crypto product that is not only unregulated, but because it’s also untransparent.”

Editor’s Note: In September 2022, The Intercept received $500,000 from Sam Bankman-Fried’s foundation, Building a Stronger Future, as part of a $4 million grant to fund our pandemic prevention and biosafety coverage. That grant has been suspended. In keeping with our general practice, The Intercept disclosed the funding in subsequent reporting on Bankman-Fried’s political activities.*

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mar 2024

Legal experts take opposing views on SEC's climate disclosure rule and the First Amendment - Thomson Reuters Institute

The SEC’s climate rules, which were released March 6, are out, and the opposition to them through the courts that use the First Amendment as the basis for litigation is still likely

:{:{Debate has intensified over whether the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) newly released climate disclosure rules might be derailed by First Amendment legal challenges. The focus on the First Amendment comes after industry groups [brought a lawsuit](}:

https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fgo-ri.tr.com%2Fr1otbQ&data=05|02|natalie.runyon%40thomsonreuters.com|e6053633906440fc5ead08dc32218cce|62ccb8646a1a4b5d8e1c397dec1a8258|0|0|638440366888349416|Unknown|TWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D|0|||&sdata=pqi1JdkcDNkQi%2Fz28NEz1zYyz5MEXk1xSMsnXsIJrws%3D&reserved=0)

against California’s recent climate disclosure laws, arguing that the rules force companies to engage in “compelled speech” that is unconstitutional.}:

:{:{SEC chair Gary Gensler said in February that the regulator is taking account of court decisions over its past rulemaking in crafting its final regulation for climate disclosure. In particular, he noted a recent [decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit](}:

https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.uschamber.com%2Fassets%2Fdocuments%2FFiled-SEC-Buyback-Opening-Brief-and-Exhibits-A-C.pdf&data=05|02|natalie.runyon%40thomsonreuters.com|e6053633906440fc5ead08dc32218cce|62ccb8646a1a4b5d8e1c397dec1a8258|0|0|638440366888334349|Unknown|TWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D|0|||&sdata=ahQ%2FbfyuqTcSftVbElcsiBmWUljW7AKOtlqOGrJtee4%3D&reserved=0)

that rejected the argument made by industry trade groups that the SEC’s stock buyback rule, established in May 2023, violated the First Amendment. The groups said the agency’s stock buyback rule, which required companies to report day-to-day share repurchase data once per quarter, violated the First Amendment by impermissibly compelling their speech.}:

Legal experts noted that the First Amendment has become the preferred tool for industry groups in recent cases when objecting to proposed regulations that are deemed “controversial.” In a note to clients, the law firm Cooley wrote: “The First Amendment claim is certainly one that we have seen used successfully in the past and are likely to see again.”

Legal experts noted that the First Amendment has become the preferred tool for industry groups in recent cases when objecting to proposed regulations that are deemed “controversial.”*

The suit against California’s recent climate disclosure laws, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other industry groups allege that the rules violate constitutional rights by compelling companies to engage in non-factual, costly speech on climate change, a controversial political matter.

“The industry has had some recent success with this concept by arguing that ‘the government is requiring me to make statements about my business that are controversial and because of that you can’t force me to make those statements since they violate my First Amendment rights,'” said Bill Tarantino, a partner with Morrison Foerster in San Franciso. “I think there are judges out there who would adopt that view, including the current Supreme Court.” However, legal scholars differ on whether the First Amendment provides plaintiffs with a solid case to challenge regulations brought by federal agencies such as the SEC.

Proponents of First Amendment argument

Some experts argue that the SEC’s constitutional authority relies upon Supreme Court precedent granting deference to the regulation of commercial speech, which is involved in the purchase or sale of a good or service. Such speech receives less First Amendment scrutiny so that the government can enact laws that protect consumers. The SEC’s mandatory disclosure regime, as it involves the purchase and sale of securities, operates under this paradigm.

“But there is a catch,” explained Sean Griffith, professor at Fordham Law School, in a [recent paper](https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcorpgov.law.harvard.edu%2F2022%2F06%2F17%2Fwhats-controversial-about-esg-a-theory-of-compelled-commercial-speech-under-the-first-amendment%2F&data=05|02|natalie.runyon%40thomsonreuters.com|e6053633906440fc5ead08dc32218cce|62ccb8646a1a4b5d8e1c397dec1a8258|0|0|638440366888371784|Unknown|TWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D|0|||&sdata=8J6KtV4z2oAEkFMvdeI0Xf%2Bk05hCK3esMpO3fdClWRo%3D&reserved=0). “Regulations compelling commercial speech receive deferential review only when they are purely factual and uncontroversial. The uncontroversial requirement works to ensure that the regulation is motivated solely to protect consumers.” In the case of the SEC’s climate disclosure rule, there is a clear argument that the regulation is “controversial,” Griffith wrote, because the regulation imposes a “political viewpoint.”

Critics of First Amendment argument

Not all share Griffith’s viewpoint, however. What might be critical in any legal challenge that relies on the First Amendment is the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1985 opinion in [Zauderer v. Office of Disciplinary Counsel of the Supreme Court of Ohio](https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsupreme.justia.com%2Fcases%2Ffederal%2Fus%2F471%2F626%2F&data=05|02|natalie.runyon%40thomsonreuters.com|e6053633906440fc5ead08dc32218cce|62ccb8646a1a4b5d8e1c397dec1a8258|0|0|638440366888388867|Unknown|TWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D|0|||&sdata=5ufOLSp83kpM3CsKZAsEoF9CnW8M%2BK%2BS31cBJBifwC0%3D&reserved=0). In the case, the Supreme Court said the government may compel a commercial disclosure that is “factual and uncontroversial… as long as disclosure requirements are reasonably related to the [government] interest” and are not unduly burdensome on further speech.

Rebecca Tushnet, a professor at Harvard Law School, sees the SEC’s climate disclosure rule requiring “purely factual information about business operations, such as an issuer’s own estimates of its climate-related risks. And because the mandated statements would be purely factual, they are considered uncontroversial when measured against the Supreme Court’s decision in the Zauderer case.

:{:{“The disclosures here would not force companies to take a position on the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, endorse any ideological position on climate change, or make any moral statements. The issue of climate change may provoke disagreement, but climate disclosures reflect objective realities affecting businesses,” Tushnet wrote in a [paper with other legal experts](}:

https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdemocracyforward.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2022%2F07%2FLaw360-SECs-Climate-Rule-Is-Compatible-With-The-1st-Amendment.pdf&data=05|02|natalie.runyon%40thomsonreuters.com|e6053633906440fc5ead08dc32218cce|62ccb8646a1a4b5d8e1c397dec1a8258|0|0|638440366888399705|Unknown|TWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D|0|||&sdata=Qot6wTSyvD9L3RkrOiSFc0bFFI20SldI5y%2BQjcSsZx0%3D&reserved=0).}:

Other legal scholars share a similar view. In its [comment letter](https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fknightcolumbia.org%2Fdocuments%2Fuv7kb8b2or&data=05|02|natalie.runyon%40thomsonreuters.com|e6053633906440fc5ead08dc32218cce|62ccb8646a1a4b5d8e1c397dec1a8258|0|0|638440366888413040|Unknown|TWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D|0|||&sdata=kV8qCsQbOQ4ZU5IkkifimVVjP1Xrk4xgvI1iyV0aGRg%3D&reserved=0) to the SEC, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University also cited the Supreme Court’s decision in the Zauderer case as a guide.

“The [SEC’s] rules satisfy the predicates for Zauderer review because they require the disclosure of factual and uncontroversial information about the risks associated with securities that companies offer to the investing public,” the Institute wrote. “If the proposed rules trigger First Amendment scrutiny at all, they should be evaluated under the deferential standard of review that applies to compelled disclosures of factual information in the commercial context. The proposed rules appear to easily satisfy that standard.”

SEC needs to prepare for battle

Leaving aside the legal arguments on whether using the First Amendment will be an effective tool in the courts, the environment and recent court cases show that there has been momentum behind efforts to limit the rulemaking powers of federal agencies such as the SEC and others, or what some critics refer to as the administrative state.

:{:{“No matter what the SEC does, it is likely to face a protracted legal battle when the rule is finally promulgated,” wrote the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law in a [recent report](}:

https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fblogs.law.columbia.edu%2Fclimatechange%2F2023%2F12%2F11%2Fthe-secs-final-climate-disclosure-rule-must-respond-to-emerging-legal-risks%2F%23%3A_{%3Atext%3DFirst%2520Amendment%2520Challenges%2Creview%2520under%2520the%2520Zauderer%2520standard&data=05|02|natalie.runyon%40thomsonreuters.com|e6053633906440fc5ead08dc32218cce|62ccb8646a1a4b5d8e1c397dec1a8258|0|0|638440366888425272|Unknown|TWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D|0|||&sdata=xI2gJg7A8OzkU4ssKEM%2FFS5Ir24YKTWNk%2BccBIzyQDY%3D&reserved=0)}.

“Indeed, the rule is an appealing target for challengers seeking to limit government action and attempting to push legal boundaries in Administrative Law and under the First Amendment.”}:

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ny CNN 7 24

The Bay Area has long been, and remains, a hippie-dippie bastion of Democrats who voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. But there’s a small, powerful sect of Silicon Valley billionaires who are carving a path for the maybe-Trumpers and the MAGA-curious in the tech world.

Elon Musk explicitly endorsed Trump over the weekend and, according to The Wall Street Journal, inked a nine-figure donation promise to a new pro-Trump political action committee called America PAC. David Sacks, the billionaire tech investor, co-hosted a fundraiser last month at his San Francisco home and spoke at the Republican National Convention on Monday. Other contributors to America PAC include the Winklevoss twins, Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

In the last election cycle, the few Trump backers who existed in the Valley largely kept their support under the radar. Their numbers are still small, but they’re no longer hiding, and their wallets are open.

So, what’s gotten into these guys?

For one, there might not be as many Trump supporters in the tech world as you might think.

“A mythology has been marketed by partisans suggesting a non-existent surge of tech titans abandoning the Democratic party support in a rush to support the Trump/Vance campaign. The truth is that most leading tech figures do not support Trump/Vance and those prominent ones who do, were there years ago as well,” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, dean for leadership studies at the Yale School of Management, told CNN.

And for the ones you might have heard of, most likely, it’s not a sudden fervor for the far right’s Christian extremism or a predilection for red baseball caps. Instead, they’re looking out for the bottom line.

The two biggest pain points for people in tech have been the Biden administration’s record on antitrust enforcement and its attitude toward crypto, Adam Kovacevich, CEO of Chamber of Progress, a center-left tech policy group, told me.

“I don’t think it has as much to do with Trump per se,” he said. “I think they would have probably stayed with Biden if they felt more care and attention was being paid to the innovation economy.”

In other words: It’s not that the billionaires love Trump, it’s that they really don’t like Lina Khan, President Joe Biden’s top antitrust crusader; or Gary Gensler, the Wall Street cop who’s made no secret of his hostility toward digital assets.

Lina Khan, the FTC chair, has led an aggressive antitrust campaign, specifically targeting Big Tech.

Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

In recent years, Khan has spearheaded lawsuits against Amazon, Microsoft and Meta. In an interview with CNN last year, Khan described those efforts as part of a broader campaign to bring more of the government’s resources to bear on the daily economic problems of ordinary Americans.

But government regulation, however well intentioned, rarely sits well with the people who are getting rich off the status quo.

Two of the most famous venture capitalists in the Valley, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, have committed to donating to America PAC, according to several news outlets.

The pair haven’t exactly been hiding their frustration with the Biden administration, either.

“The American government is now far more hostile to new startups than it used to be,” they wrote in a recent blog post, which cited regulatory agencies using “brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries.” They also lamented the Biden administration’s proposed tax on unrealized capital gains, which they said would “absolutely kill” startups and the venture capital industry.

One person familiar with their plans told the Financial Times that their pivot to Trump was because “there is so much at stake on the crypto side” and the growth of artificial intelligence. “It doesn’t mean support for (Trump’s) views on immigration,” the person told the paper.

Historically, Trump hasn’t shown a lot of love for tech bros, whose social media companies he long accused of having anti-conservative bias, especially after several of them suspended his accounts in response to the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. But the recent influx of tech money — facilitated in part by his 39-year-old venture-capitalist VP pick — appears to have softened some of Trump’s Luddite-ish views.

As recently as 2021, he called bitcoin a “scam against the dollar.” Lately, though, he’s positioning himself as the crypto-friendly candidate. While his campaign hasn’t laid out specific policy proposals around digital assets, it began accepting crypto donations this spring, and Trump is scheduled to speak at a national bitcoin conference next week.

The Biden administration, meanwhile, is working to mend ties with industry leaders who say they’ve been stymied by the SEC and Gensler, generally agreed to be the crypto community’s Voldemort.

To be sure, plenty of Big Tech dollars are still flowing to Biden and down-ballot Democrats from tech-world donors, including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Google co-founder Eric Schmidt. But Trump’s gains from Silicon Valley have come just as some major Democratic donors have hit pause amid conversations about replacing the president on the ballot.

And, as Kovacevich notes, just because there are a few big names turning toward Trump, “they’re not speaking for everybody.”

“In fact, most of the big company CEOs aren’t terribly involved in partisan politics,” Kovacevich says. “They’re going to have to work with whoever wins the election.”

https://www.investmentnews.com/w-va-attorney-general-threatens-to-sue-sec-over-enhanced-esg-disclosures-204490

no lnx

State attorney general threatens to sue SEC over ESG disclosures

attorney general

State and federal GOP officials continue to push back against what they call regulatory overreach. The SEC says it is trying to meet investor demand for ESG information.

March 26, 2021

By Mark Schoeff Jr.

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey has threatened to sue the Securities and Exchange Commission if it doesn’t back off its effort to expand environmental, social and governance disclosures.

Morrisey said that mandating ESG disclosures from companies that are not related to their financial performance would represent regulatory overreach and would be unconstitutional because it would not “withstand strict scrutiny” under free speech rights.

In a letter Thursday to SEC Acting Chair Allison Herren Lee, Morrisey criticized a recent speech in which Lee said the SEC is considering expanding climate risk and ESG disclosures to meet investor demand.

“There is a significant constitutional obstacle to the unprecedented and dangerous course you charted in your remarks,” Morrisey wrote. “If the Commission proceeds down this pathway, states and other interested stakeholders will not hesitate to go to court to oppose a federal regulation compelling speech in violation of the First Amendment.”

Disclosures related to ESG issues such as diversity and corporate political spending are outside the SEC’s regulatory purview, the state’s attorney general asserted, and would only serve to provide ammunition for some customers and investors to target companies on those issues.

The SEC should concentrate on disclosures that affect financial performance rather than “statements on issues that drive a political agenda,” wrote Morrisey, a Republican. “Your proposal would in fact create a system with an unlimited number of additional mandatory statements. This is federal overreach and political activism at its worst.”

The SEC recently released a request for public comment on strengthening climate-risk disclosures, something Lee argued would meet a market demand.

“Of course, we already have an extensive public record demonstrating investor desire for the SEC to ensure better disclosure in this space,” Lee said during an online appearance at a March 15 event hosted by the Center for American Progress. “But, it’s time to move from the question of ‘if’ to the more difficult question of ‘how’ we obtain disclosure on climate.”

Over the last few weeks, the SEC has launched several ESG initiatives, including establishing an enforcement task force on climate and ESG issues.

Sen. Patrick Toomey, R-Pa. and the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, expressed concern that the task force would give the SEC a way to implement new ESG policies without going through a rulemaking process.

“It is imperative that the SEC provide fair notice, and fully comply with the Administrative Procedure Act if it is going to impose new requirements,” Toomey wrote in a March 24 letter to Lee. “The SEC also should not use enforcement actions as a backdoor for imposing new regulations on ESG and climate change issues.”

An SEC spokesperson declined to comment on Morrisey’s or Toomey’s letters.

Toomey’s worries reflected similar qualms by Republican SEC members Hester Peirce and Elad Roisman about the agency’s recent ESG focus, which has been carried out by Lee, a Democratic SEC member.

That intensity around the issue is likely to continue underGary Gensler, the Biden administration’s nominee for SEC chair, who is awaiting Senate confirmation. He voiced support for enhanced ESG disclosures at his confirmation hearing earlier this month.

Related Topics: Disclosures, Securities and Exchange Commission, Sustainable Investing