White House adviser defends President Trump's crypto ties in wake of Clarity Act defeat
President Donald Trump's crypto adviser, Patrick Witt, accused Democrats of unfairly amplifying Trump's crypto ties as a political weapon.
The White House's crypto adviser, Patrick Witt, defended Wednesday against accusations that President Donald Trump's own crypto ties contributed to last week's defeat of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, going gloves-off in Washington appearances this week, including an event in which he argued the president's cooperation was unprecedented.
"Democrats made it a political issue," Witt said at the Financial Markets Quality conference hosted at Georgetown University, suggesting that Democratic senators were disingenuous in light of the major housing bill that recently passed without similarly delving into government ethics, despite Trump's status as a real-estate developer. "Why was that bill okay to pass without a stringent, draconian ethics division?"
The Clarity Act negotiations were never able to get over the ethics debate — unrelated to its core market structure provisions — that it needed to address the crypto conflicts of interest of senior government officials. The president was the primary target of that effort, and at a couple of recent points in the legislative talks, he'd agreed to concessions that would have saddled him with some crypto limits.
He said the Democrats accusing Trump of an improper conflict for steering digital assets policy while controlling a crypto empire is "somewhat ironic, given that we're dealing with a lot of senators on banking committees who hold stocks and actively trade stocks in financial services companies that they regulate."