Senate banking comm

<div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">mayer 4 22</div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">...Brunet tweeted proudly that his critique had been promoted on Fox News by Tucker Carlson.</div><div class="GridWrapper-vNBSO jMumET grid grid-margins grid-items-2 ArticlePageChunksGrid-kRgPDq DBpfE grid-layout--adrail narrow wide-adrail" times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" serif="serif" font-size="font-size" px="px" style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; --grid-gap:2rem; --grid-margin:4rem; display: grid; grid-template-columns: repeat(12, 1fr); gap: var(--grid-gap); padding-right: calc(1 * var(--grid-margin)); padding-left: calc(1 * var(--grid-margin)); margin: 0px auto; width: 1263.33px; max-width: 1600px;"><div class="GridItem-buSdEM PibmB grid--item grid-layoutcontent" style="box-sizing: border-box; grid-column: 2 / span 6; margin-bottom: 1rem;"><div class="BodyWrapper-ctnerm irSTVw body bodycontainer articlebody" data-journey-hook="client-content" data-testid="BodyWrapper" style="box-sizing: border-box; --type-token:consumptionEditorial.body-core; font-feature-settings: normal; line-break: auto; line-height: 1.5em; overflow-wrap: normal; padding: 0px; max-width: 1600px; grid-column: 3 / span 8; margin-bottom: 1rem; width: 524.885px;"><div class="bodyinner-container" style="box-sizing: border-box;">The A.A.F.’s treatment of Cook has been mild compared with what several other Biden nominees have gone through. Late last year, Saule Omarova—a leading academic in the field of financial regulation, who is a law professor at Cornell and holds doctorates in law and political science—withdrew her name from consideration as Biden’s Comptroller of the Currency. She did so, she told me, because an opposition-research campaign against her, which the A.A.F. took credit for, had, among other things, falsely portrayed her as a secret communist.Born in Kazakhstan, in what was then the Soviet Union, Omarova received an undergraduate degree from Moscow State University, but she became a naturalized American citizen in 2005. Yet, during her confirmation hearing, in a moment reminiscent of the Joseph McCarthy era, the Republican Senator John Kennedy, of Louisiana, declared that he didn’t know whether to call her “<a data-offer-url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oitMokf41ho" class="external-link" data-event-click="{" element="element" externallink="ExternalLink" outgoingurl="outgoingURL" https="https" www.youtube.com="www.youtube.com" watch="watch" v="oitMokf41ho" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oitMokf41ho" rel="nofollow noopener" target="blank" data-uri="abd2d38d6bcd2fce5fb3b73399739802" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; cursor: pointer; --colortoken-name:colors.interactive.base.light; transition: color 200ms ease 0s; line-height: inherit;">professor or comrade</a>.” Omarova replied, “Senator, I am not a communist. I do not subscribe to that ideology. I could not choose where I was born.” Omarova’s résumé is hardly anti-capitalist: she worked at the corporate law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell and served in George W. Bush’s Treasury Department.<div data-attr-viewport-monitor="inline-recirc" class="inline-recirc-wrapper inline-recirc-observer-target-2 viewport-monitor-anchor" data-event-boundary="click" data-event-click="{" pattern="pattern" inlinerecirc="InlineRecirc" data-include-experiments="true" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Omarova told me, “There were so many accusations. A.A.F. was at the forefront of making my life extremely and unnecessarily difficult.” The group discovered that Omarova, after she’d read an article in The Economist about potatoes, had tweeted fondly about a time she helped farmers harvest potatoes outside Moscow. The A.A.F. proclaimed that the Biden Administration had “nominated a woman who waxes nostalgic for the good ole days of poverty, hunger, and forced labor in communist Russia.” Conservative outlets pounced on similar tweets about her past. “The A.A.F. made it into this big deal,” she told me. “They said, ‘She wants to make America into the Soviet Union.’ It was a complete absurdity. But people who have no idea who I am jumped in and said, ‘Go back to the Soviet Union!’ ”Digging into a person’s past—especially someone who isn’t that well known—takes time and money. “Somebody must have paid them a lot,” Omarova said, of the A.A.F. “They went through all my public speeches and academic writings to find any kind of phrase they could use against me.” She’d been featured, along with other professors, in an obscure 2019 documentary based on “<a data-offer-url="https://www.amazon.com/Assholes-Theory-Aaron-James/dp/0804171351" class="external-link" data-event-click="{" element="element" externallink="ExternalLink" outgoingurl="outgoingURL" https="https" www.amazon.com="www.amazon.com" assholes-theory-aaron-james="Assholes-Theory-Aaron-James" dp="dp" href="https://www.amazon.com/Assholes-Theory-Aaron-James/dp/0804171351?ots=1&slotNum=0&imprToken=6cc0215c-e08c-5e2d-fa9&tag=thneyo0f-20&linkCode=w50" rel="nofollow noopener" target="blank" data-orig-url="https://www.amazon.com/Assholes-Theory-Aaron-James/dp/0804171351?ots=1&slotNum=0&imprToken=6cc0215c-e08c-5e2d-fa9&tag=thneyo0f-20&linkCode=w50" data-ml-id="0" data-ml="true" data-xid="fr1650386914199ach" data-uri="fdd2e5e52bf77c7c80b969ca164f051e" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; cursor: pointer; --color__token-name:colors.interactive.base.light; transition: color 200ms ease 0s; line-height: inherit;">Assholes: A Theory</a>,” a whimsical treatise by Aaron James, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Irvine. The A.A.F., without acknowledging the film’s satirical tone, promoted a snippet of Omarova calling the financial-services industry “the quintessential asshole industry.” She told me, “They didn’t cite the film. It made me sound unhinged, nasty, and, like, a rude person.” A compilation of clips from the documentary had been taken off YouTube owing to copyright violations; during the pre-hearing process for Omarova’s nomination, Republican staffers insinuated that she’d personally concealed the footage. “I don’t know what kind of relationship those senators had with A.A.F.,” she told me. “But clearly they knew of that clip." Omarova told me that someone went to Moscow to “try to dig up” an undergraduate paper that she’d written on Karl Marx. Opponents also circulated an elementary-school photograph of her wearing the obligatory red kerchief of the Young Pioneers. “They used it to say ‘Look at her, she’s such a devout Communist!’ They were going through my whole life, looking for anything they could smear or frighten me with.” ...Omarova disclosed reams of personal information to the Senate, including her compensation as a law professor. Jones then e-mailed her colleagues at Cornell about what he portrayed as her annual salary—but the figure he cited represented nearly two years of pay. In the e-mail, which was obtained by The New Yorker, Jones asks, “Do you think it is appropriate for the university to provide such a large salary to Dr. Omarova?” He invited her colleagues “to share” their “thoughts” with him.While the hearings were ongoing, the A.A.F. trumpeted a dismissed shoplifting charge against Omarova—omitting the fact that she’d disclosed it herself. She told me that the incident, which came about from a misunderstanding with a security guard, had occurred not long after she had emigrated from Russia—and had led her to become a lawyer. The A.A.F. also accused her of belonging to a Marxist group on Facebook that she was unaware of and had never participated in, and misleadingly edited a comment she’d made about the need to insure economic security for laid-off fossil-fuel workers so that it sounded like an attack on those workers and the industry. “They were saying that I wanted to kill oil-and-gas workers,” she told me. “That’s exactly the opposite of what I was saying.” Omarova had suggested that it would be good for the environment if America transitioned away from fossil fuels, even if some companies ended up going out of business. She had also called for tougher regulations on banks. These two points likely constituted the true motivation for the opposition she encountered from the Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee. Omarova was soon opposed by every Republican senator, and also five Democrats—led by Jon Tester, of Montana, who has been a major recipient of banking-industry donations. Omarova described the confirmation experience as “soul-crushing.” She went on, “You feel stripped down. You feel your house has been destroyed, and you are standing there in front of everyone looking at you, and they have distorted and twisted everything.” She expressed surprise that, in the United States, spurious controversies could be so easily “manufactured out of nothing.” She added, “I’m a naturalized citizen. I put so much effort to be here, and I embraced this country with all my heart. I came from a place that didn’t have freedom of speech or thought. But this made so personally clear to me how fragile our democracy is.”
 Three months after Omarova withdrew her nomination, Sarah Bloom Raskin endured a similar character assassination. Bloom Raskin, a law professor at Duke University, was not a new or untested figure. After graduating from Harvard Law School, she worked as a staffer on the Senate Banking Committee, and she twice won confirmation from the Senate to top economic positions: between 2010 and 2014, she was a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, and during the Obama Administration she served as the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury—becoming, at the time, the highest-ranking woman in the department’s history.& Her husband, Representative Jamie Raskin, of Maryland, is a progressive firebrand, but Bloom Raskin is regarded as a moderate in business circles, and has wide support from the banking industry. But, like Omarova, Bloom Raskin offended fossil-fuel companies—in her case, by suggesting that climate change posed a potential economic risk that the Federal Reserve needed to consider.... 
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