clayton, jay
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1219 shareholders higher hurdle, CoC lobby
an 11 25
Jay Clayton, Attorney General Pam Bondi's most recent appointment to investigate Democrats involved with late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein after President Donald Trump's sudden reversal, has been chosen for what The New Republic's Michael Tomasky says is a "political task that has nothing whatever to do with justice."
Clayton, a corporate lawyer who is "mostly a high finance guy," Tomasky notes, chaired the Security and Exchange Commission during Trump's first term.
"One thing that impressed me, and that was at odds with the standard Trumpian flouting of rules of any kind governing the behavior of appointees and their families, is that his wife, a Goldman Sachs official, resigned her position when he took the job," Tomasky notes.
"What? People in the Trump solar system acting ethically of their own volition? Hard to imagine how Trump tolerated that," he adds.
However, Clayton has "no prosecutorial experience at all" Tomasky writes.
When Trump named Clayton to run the Southern District of New York earlier this year, Sen. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) blocked his nomination, but Trump appointed him on an interim basis for 120 days. After that the federal court for the district decides whether his appointment should go forward, and Manhattan's federal judges gave him the green light.
Clayton has been quiet in that position, Tomasky writes, saying "critics noted that when Bondi fired Maurene Comey, the daughter of James Comey who had overseen the prosecutions of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, Clayton said nary a word."
"The Aaron Sorkin-movie version of Clayton would have told Bondi to stuff it Saturday and resigned—I do not hold this public trust to go on politically motivated fishing expeditions. But that’s not real life, especially in Trumpworld," Tomasky writes.
It would be "brave" if Clayton comes back and says there's no evidentiary basis to indict his targets—former Democratic President Bill Clinton, Democratic presidential adviser Larry Summers, and Democratic donor Reid Hoffman, but if he does bring indictments, Tomasky says, there are only two plausible reasons.
"One might that there’s actually evidence sufficient to an indictment. In which case, let justice be done. But in Donald Trump’s, and Pam Bondi’s, America, we would be quite justified in suspecting a second explanation: That Clayton did what he was ordered by the White House to do," he writes.
"The Trump era is a time of learning what people are made of. I’m guessing that in six months’ time, we’ll know a lot more about Jay Clayton than we know today," he adds.
wiki
Walter J. "Jay" Clayton is an American attorney whospecializes in mergers and acquisitions transactions and capital markets offerings.[1] He is a partner at the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. He is President-elect Donald Trump's selection to chair the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.[2]
Clayton received his B.S.Eng. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1988 and a BA from the University of Cambridge in 1990. He earned his JD from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1993.[3] From 1993 to 1995, Clayton clerked with Marvin Katz, judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.[1]
At Sullivan & Cromwell, Clayton has represented prominent Wall Street firms, including Goldman Sachs. He has also helped multiple corporations raise money through initial public offerings, including Alibaba Group,[4] Ally Financial, Och-Ziff Capital Management, Oaktree Capital Management, Blackhawk Network Holdings, and Moelis & Company.[1] During the Financial crisis of 2007–2008, Clayton advised Bear Stearns in its fire sale to JPMorgan Chase in 2007 and Barclays Capital in the purchase of Lehman Brothers' assets following their bankruptcy.[3]
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https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/01/jay-clayton-sec/512171/
On Wednesday, Trump’s transition team confirmed that the president-elect will nominate Jay Clayton to be chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In recent days, Clayton, a Wall Street lawyer, had emerged as the frontrunner, ahead of other rumored considerations including Debra Wong Yang, a former U.S. Attorney, and activist investor Carl Icahn.
In a press release, Trump called Clayton “a highly talented expert on many aspects of financial and regulatory law,” who will take part in “unleashing the job-creating power of our economy by encouraging investment in American companies while providing strong oversight of Wall Street and related industries.” Clayton is currently a partner at the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell who works with Wall Street firms on mergers and acquisitions and regulatory investigations. According to the law firm’s website, Clayton represented large banks, including Goldman Sachs and Barclays Capital, during the financial crisis. He’s also represented large financial institutions looking to settle mortgage-related claims with authorities.
The SEC is often referred to as Wall Street’s watchdog. The agency is tasked with protecting investors and maintaining fair markets, which can include everything from investigating claims of unfair trading practices to implementing rules and regulations to keep financial markets—and those who trade in them—safe. That’s a large part of the reason that the nomination for the head of the SEC has been closely watched. During the campaign, President-elect Trump said that his intent was to cut regulation “massively.”
In the press release announcing the intention to nominate Clayton, Trump added, “We need to undo many regulations which have stifled investment in American businesses, and restore oversight of the financial industry in a way that does not harm American workers.”
Many expect that a pro-business Trump administration will reshape the way the agency polices Wall Street, but it isn’t immediately clear which specific regulations the new SEC chairman would scale back on, and how. One set of regulations that’s been mentioned is the Dodd-Frank Act, which the SEC enforces, and which Trump’s team has promised to “dismantle.” Still, it’s largely unclear what Clayton’s stance on rolling back regulation would be. In the press release, Clayton echoed Trump’s sentiment that policy should be set to encourage job creation.
Mary Jo White, the SEC’s current chairman, announced her plans to step down after the election, which isn't unusual during a change of administration. But there will be significantly more turnover than White. There are two additional openings on the five-person commission. (Traditionally, the commission is made up of two Democratic commissioners and two Republican commissioners in addition to the chairman.) And four division directors at the SEC have announced their departures in the past month, including Andrew Ceresney, the director of the SEC’s enforcement division. The exodus was largely expected after White announced her departure, but with so many empty seats, it opens the door for the SEC, and its new head, to be less tough on Wall Street banks.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/trump-pick-jay-clayton-to-be-most-conflicted-sec-chair-ever-w459289
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sherrod brown:
It's hard to see," Brown said, "how an attorney who's spent his career helping Wall Street beat the rap will keep President-elect Trump's promise to stop big banks and hedge funds from 'getting away with murder.'"
Most of the consternation over Clayton's appointment has to do with his own background as a longtime defender of big banks. He's been involved in some infamously shadowy episodes in the post-crisis era, with two in particular standing out.
He represented Goldman Sachs when the firm received a $5 billion capital infusion from Warren Buffet during the September 2008 meltdown. He also represented Barclays during its malodorous acquisition of the assets of Lehman Brothers, an episode one lawyer described to me years ago as "the greatest bank robbery you never heard of." (There is a chapter about this story in my last book, The Divide.)
That Clayton has been a devoted legal slave to the usual Wall Street monsters over the years is obviously concerning, though not terribly unusual.
What makes this situation somewhat unique is the fact that this incoming SEC chief is also married to a broker at Goldman Sachs – his wife Gretchen is a wealth management advisor. This means that a significant portion of Clayton's family income while in office will presumably be coming from a company he is charged with policing.
This is both far less common and a much bigger problem than you'd think. As one former congressional aide put it to me today, "Clayton will be the most financially conflicted SEC chairman in history."
Remember, at the Republican convention last year, Trump supporters heckled Ted Cruz's wife, Heidi, for being a Goldman Sachs employee.
Where are all those furious Trump supporters now that their idol has put the husband of a Goldman broker in charge of the SEC? Pretty quiet. You can hear the crickets chirping all across America today.
How much of an ethical problem Clayton's marriage is can be seen in a bizarre contradiction in the rules. As SEC chairman, Clayton going forward will have to recuse himself from any enforcement decision involving Goldman. This is no small thing, since Goldman has not exactly been a stranger to SEC enforcement decisions over the years.
Yet even as he has to sit out Goldman's inevitable enforcement problems because of his wife, Clayton will not have to recuse himself from rulemaking decisions that could affect Goldman far more than isolated corruption cases.
Ethics rules say officials like Clayton do not have to recuse themselves from matters of "general application," meaning in this case that Clayton may rule on matters concerning Goldman, provided they also impact other banks.
But these decisions about things like the Volcker rule or fixed-income transparency or swaps could have a profound impact on Goldman's bottom line, with hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars at stake.
Who knows how much this will or even could affect his wife's personal compensation. Industry lawyers I spoke with today seemed split on how big a deal it is. But all agreed that it's not a good look for Clayton.
"I get the feeling that this Trump crew doesn't particularly care how bad things look, though," said one.
Obviously there have been many previous instances of familial conflicts involving government officials. Even the outgoing SEC chief, Mary Jo White, was criticized for conflicts involving her husband, John White, a partner at the white-shoe firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore.
Trump's pick for Transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, is the daughter of the owner of a major shipping company, which poses obvious problems. Former Sen. Tom Daschle's marriage to a lobbyist was a source of consternation for ethics watchdogs for years. There are other examples. The Beltway typically yawns at these situations.
"In general, Washington has kind of a professional courtesy among the corrupted to not take romantic partner conflicts seriously," says Jeff Hauser, director of the Revolving Door Project. "It's a major issue."
Goldman Sachs isn't just a frequent flyer when it comes to SEC enforcement fiascoes. The bank is also a regular applicant – and recipient – of SEC waivers exempting it from the automatic penalties and sanctions that would otherwise be triggered by their offenses.
Even if Clayton sits out these decisions, the situation is ridiculous. Who needs an SEC chief who has to stay on the sidelines for some of the most important cases the agency considers? It's like having a police commissioner who has to cover his ears every time someone mentions the Crips or the Latin Kings.
A year ago at this time, Donald Trump was ridiculing Ted Cruz for being a "puppet" of Goldman. Now Clayton joins senior advisor Steve Bannon, Treasury appointee Steve Mnuchin, NEC director Gary Cohn and White House advisor Anthony Scaramucci as high-ranking Trump appointees who are either from Goldman or married to someone at the firm. What a joke.
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https://theintercept.com/2017/02/17/a-corporate-defender-at-heart-former-sec-chair-mary-jo-white-returns-to-her-happy-place/
MARY JO WHITE, whose tenure as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission under President Obama bitterly disappointed those who hoped she would aggressively enforce banking laws, is rejoining the corporate defense team at Debevoise & Plimpton, marking her sixth trip through the revolving door between various government jobs and the white-collar defense law firm she calls home.
Debevoise represents numerous major financial institutions under federal investigation, and White will now help those corporate clients manage their legal exposure.
White got the call to return to Debevoise on Inauguration Day, her last day at the SEC. As Debevoise presiding partner Michael Blair told the Wall Street Journal, “We had been waiting to make that phone call for several years.”
This latest trip through the revolving door is particularly disturbing because White declared in ethics disclosure forms before becoming SEC chair that she was retiring from her partnership at Debevoise, receiving a lump sum retirement payment of over $2 million. Instead of staying retired, she immediately went back to Debevoise after her government service ended, pocketing the money.
It is not, however, surprising.
White auditioned for the job promising to police Wall Street aggressively, and be “bold and unrelenting.” But once installed, she spent her time at the SEC operating like she still worked for Debevoise. Her tenure was marked by persistent delays on finalizing rules mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act, including those on corporate political spending and disclosure of the CEO pay ratio. One anti-corruption rule requiring oil and gas companies to disclose payments to foreign governments got finalized so late that Republicans had the opportunity to scrap it earlier this month with a special review procedure.
Critics have charged that White continued the SEC’s tradition of light enforcement. James Kidney, a former SEC trial lawyer, attacked the agency in a scathing retirement speech in 2014, saying that it “polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors.”
Kidney added, “I have had bosses, and bosses of my bosses … who made little secret that they were here to punch their ticket. They mouthed serious regard for the mission of the commission, but their actions were tentative and fearful in many instances.”
Under White, the SEC failed to monitor stock buybacks to prevent market manipulation. It failed to stop the epidemic of granting waivers to companies automatically banned from securities activities after settling cases of civil and criminal wrongdoing. White stood with Republican commissioners even as Democratic colleagues tried to stop those waivers from being granted. In a troubling continuance of regulatory capture at the agency, White hired a senior Goldman Sachs attorney as the SEC chief of staff.
Though White made a big show of fighting to force companies to admit guilt in any settlement, a break from past practice, in reality this tool was rarely used. According to a letter from Sen, Elizabeth Warren, of 520 settlements from June 2013 to September 2014, only 19 required admissions of guilt. And in the majority of those cases, the SEC only asked for a broad admission of the facts of the case, rather than admissions of specific securities violations. In one example, the SEC got JPMorgan Chase to admit to breaking a law in 2013, but it wouldn’t say which one.
Perhaps the most notable trend of White’s SEC tenure was how she repeatedly recused herself from cases, not only because of her past association with Debevoise (which forced recusal from cases involving Bank of America), but because her husband John White worked as a corporate lawyer at another white-shoe firm, Cravath Swaine & Moore. It’s been rumored that firms would try to sign up with Cravath just to knock White out of enforcement cases.
In the first two years, White recused herself from over four dozen investigations, according to the New York Times. In several cases, this resulted in a 2-2 split on enforcement decisions among the five-member panel, delaying or sometimes ending the offending banks’ cases.
White got ethics waivers to insert herself into some cases involving former clients, like Credit Suisse, despite the conflict of interest. Enforcement against the Swiss bank has been called cozy and soft; a recent $90 million fine for misleading investors was “almost a win-win for the SEC and Credit Suisse,” according to former SEC enforcement attorney David Chase.
Warren asked President Obama to fire White last October, saying “The only way to return the SEC to its intended purpose is to change its leadership.”
Unlike Obama, President Trump does not even pay lip service to that intended purpose, which is to protect investors.Trump’s choice for White’s replacement, Jay Clayton, is also a former corporate lawyer. Clayton worked for Sullivan & Cromwell, which represented Goldman Sachs, among other financial firms. Clayton’s wife Gretchen is a vice president at Goldman Sachs, leading to yet more conflicts of interest. And even before Clayton’s confirmation, the SEC’s acting chairman, Michael Piwowar, has quietly worked to roll back the power of senior attorneys to open investigations into Wall Street misconduct.
White began as an associate with Debevoise & Plimpton in 1976. She became an assistant U.S. attorney under President Carter, then went back to Debevoise to do white collar defense work. In 1990, White returned to the federal prosecutor role, eventually becoming the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, which includes Wall Street, under President Clinton. When that ended, White became a partner at Debevoise from 2002 to 2013, until President Obama tapped her to chair the SEC.
Not only is White returning to Debevoise, but her SEC director of enforcement, Andrew Ceresney, is headed back through the revolving door to the law firm as well.
White will be a “senior chairwoman” at Debevoise, representing corporate clients in government investigations and negotiations. Her 2013 ethics form stated “I will retire from the partnership of Debevoise & Plimpton,” enabling her to take a lump sum retirement payment of a little over $2 million, along with payouts of stock accounts.
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Jay Clayton - SEC.gov
https://www.sec.gov › biography › jay-clayton
1.
Jay Clayton was nominated to chair the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on January 20, 2017, by President Donald Trump and sworn in on May 4, ...
Jay Clayton (attorney) - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Jay_Clayton_(attorney)
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Walter Joseph "Jay" Clayton III (born July 11, 1966) is an American attorney and Chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Contents. 1 Education; 2 Career; 3 SEC Chairman.
Political party: Independent
Education: Lafayette College; University of Pe...
President: Donald Trump
Born: Walter Joseph Clayton III; July 11, 1966 ...
Education · Career · SEC Chairman
Securities and Exchange Commission appointees - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Securities_and_Exchange_Commission_a...
2.
Members of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission are appointed by the President of ... The President also designates one of the commissioners as chairman, the SEC's top executive. Service may continue past term expiration up to ...
Roosevelt · Truman · Eisenhower · Nixon
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