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Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand Wants to Save Crypto — But Trump Windfall Is a Political Obstacle

Centrist Democrats in the Senate criticize Trump’s newfound billions, while working to boost the industry that enabled his grift.

Donald Trump is cleaning up on crypto, disclosing a $1.4 billion windfall last week. Yet cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have, after a year of flying high in the wake of Trump’s election, plummeted.

The crypto industry is putting hopes for its revival in a long-awaited bill, under debate in the Senate, called the Clarity Act, which could open the doors to Wall Street investments.

But there is one thing ironically standing in its way: Trump’s giant crypto haul.

The naked self-enrichment has turned crypto into a prime example of presidential corruption.

The result is that even crypto’s most staunch Democratic allies will find it hard to back a crypto wishlist like the Clarity Act, which will need support from at least seven Senate Democrats to overcome a filibuster.

Take crypto stalwarts like centrist Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., the chair of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, who issued a statement demanding that any crypto bill include ethics provisions to stop Trump’s crypto profiteering.

With the industry poised to spend tens of millions more on the midterm elections, however, Gillibrand and other centrist Democrats may yet be tempted to sign off on window dressing instead of a crackdown, said crypto critics.

This Commission That Regulates Crypto Could Be Just One Guy: An Industry Lawyer

“Sen. Gillibrand and too many of her colleagues prioritize and spend enormous time pushing crypto’s special interest agenda, which is to get legitimized by the weakest possible law and regulated by the smallest, most underfunded, least capable, and most capture-able financial regulator,” Dennis Kelleher, the CEO of the nonprofit Better Markets, said in a statement last Monday. “That is presumably because the crypto industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in campaigns to buy friends and attempt to get crypto’s special interest agenda enacted.”

Gillibrand has dismissed those criticisms. In a statement of her own last week, she expressed her desire to both advance the bill and crack down on Trump.

“We cannot let self-dealing destroy an opportunity to strengthen consumer protections, crack down on illicit finance, and expand economic opportunity for the millions of Americans our financial system has left behind,” Gillibrand said. “The time to act is now — and that must include ethics reforms that prohibit members of Congress, the president, and their spouses from cashing in on their office.”

Declining Sector Hangs Hopes on Clarity Act

For crypto, the numbers are sobering. Bitcoin soared from roughly $60,000 just before Trump’s election to about twice that by October of last year. Since then, it and other digital assets have cratered. Bitcoin now trades back around $63,000 a token.

Trump Is Rewriting History to Justify His Sketchy Pardon of a Crypto King

The market’s gyrations did not stop Trump and his family members from profiting handsomely off the $TRUMP meme coin and other ventures. His roughly $1.4 billion of crypto profits last year meant that he cleared more than the largest publicly traded company in........

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