Free Republic

Peter Strzok’s wife - an Appointee - is at the Top of the SEC Enforcement Division. Melissa Hodgman. They are still married, and she’s as Activist as her husband. And the Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit is directly under her. All the Crypto Crimes were allowed to go until the day after the Election.

President Biden is unleashing a tidal wave of red tape, nearly tripling the number of the most costly regulations from the Trump era, as he imposes a government wide approach to climate change and social justice policies. The administration’s newly released Unified Regulatory Agenda includes 332 “economically significant” proposed rules, each of which would cost the economy at least $100 million per year. In President Trump’s final year in office, he proposed 199 such rules, and 20 were aimed at deregulation. Mr. Biden’s regulatory push appears likely to exceed President Obama’s, said Wayne Crews, a regulatory analyst at the Competitive...

The Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal agency tasked with enforcing the nation’s securities laws, has been a foundational piece of the administrative state constructed by the Left over the past century. Over the past few years, however, the SEC has come under fire for potential abuses of power, particularly involving its use of administrative law judges to decide its own cases. The SEC’s use of its own judges gives it a clear home court advantage—one that a federal appeals court recently deemed unconstitutional. Now, it appears the SEC may be headed to the Supreme Court with the very constitutionality...

HSBC, Europe’s biggest bank, announced Wednesday it will no longer finance new oil and gas fields as part of its updated climate strategy. Climate campaigners welcomed the moved saying HSBC provided a new baseline for other major banks but urged the bank to go further. The bank said it would still provide financing to existing fossil fuel projects “in line with current and future declining global oil and gas demand.” It would also continue to provide finance and advisory services to energy sector clients but will assess the companies’ plans to transition to clean energy. “It sets a new minimum...

One of the most important and under-reported struggles under the radar is the politicization of administrative agencies, and the effort to cement via those agencies policies that Congress will never vote for, but that once enshrined will be very difficult for any administration or Congress to overturn. One central part of that is the "whole of government" climate policy, centered around stopping fossil fuel development and subsidizing electric cars, photovoltaics and windmills. Never mind that large scale storage remains a pipe dream, never mind the lessons of Europe. SEC As reported by James Freeman in the WSJ the courageous Hester...

EXCLUSIVE: Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Gary Gensler scrubbed mention of a meeting with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and key details of a meeting with billionaire Democratic donor George Soros from the public version of his calendar. Gensler's public calendar showed that he only had a staff meeting on Aug. 7, 2021 while his private calendar lists a meeting with Clinton, according to a Fox News Digital review. And on Aug. 20, 2021, his public calendar lists a meeting with Soros, but hid the meeting's agenda which his private calendar shows was to discuss a forthcoming Wall...

Always behind the curve, US Senators (Warren, Marshall, Kennedy) want to get to the bottom of Silvergate’s decline and its relationship with Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. This reminds me of the 2008 financial crisis when The Federal Reserve claimed they never saw it coming. Despite the data. But back to crypto bank Silvergate. Crypto bank Silvergate Capital Corp. was asked by three US Senators to release all records about transfers of funds for the collapsed FTX empire of Sam Bankman-Fried. “Your bank’s involvement in the transfer of FTX customer funds to Alameda reveals what appears to be an egregious failure...

Almost a full two weeks after first filing for bankruptcy on Nov. 11, the insolvent cryptocurrency exchange FTX finally held its first-day motion requests on Tuesday (Nov. 22). The hearing took place in Wilmington, Delaware, the traditional city where corporate bankruptcy cases are heard.Presided over by Judge John T. Dorsey of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, the Tuesday session focused on what assets FTX has, to whom they are owed, and where the overall bankruptcy case for FTX and its affiliates should be held.The remaining “how” of the once-popular crypto exchange’s implosion has been widely covered;...

You would think that with the FTX scandal still brewing and investors missing billions of dollars from their supposedly secured crypto accounts, Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler would have so much on his plate, he wouldn’t have time to muck around in our capital markets, which are working just fine. But sources tell me Gensler is doing just that — preparing to unveil plans for the biggest changes in about two decades to the way stocks are routed from buyers to sellers. If Gensler’s timing holds, he will announce (possibly this week) an open meeting for mid-December that...

Sam Bankman-Fried opened up in an interview about his mistakes with FTX and blamed his ex-girlfriend for his downfall. Bankman-Freid, 30, is still in the Bahamas following his company's $32Bn loss, but openly spoke with Vox reporter Kelsey Piper through Twitter's direct message feature on Tuesday about his current circumstances with little remorse. The FTX owner told Piper that his ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison's company Alameda was responsible for gambling and losing his company's money - to which he was 'oblivious' until it was too late.

Despite the scrutiny of crypto by Gensler, the SEC missed on FTX Gary Gensler’s controversial tenure as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission could reach peak drama over a 45-minute Zoom call with Sam Bankman-Fried, the former crypto wunderkind at the center of the largest debacle the $1 trillion digital coin industry has ever witnessed.On March 23, some eight months before Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire collapsed and was forced into bankruptcy, Gensler granted what some crypto players are calling an unusual meeting to the then-billionaire and prolific fundraiser for Democratic candidates, including his boss, President Joe Biden.Even before the FTX...

Like the disastrous Bernie Madoff debacle where investors lost millions of dollars, Sam Bankman-Fried has apparently cost investors like Steph Curry, Shaq and Tom Brady considerable sums as well. What do Bernie Madoff and Sam Bankman-Fried have in common? Greedy investors who apparently didn’t bother to monitor what was going on. Yes, had they monitored FTX, Bankman-Fried’s company, they would have noticed that FTX held less than $1bn in liquid assets against $9bn in liabilities. Generally, with buyer beware, the onus falls on investors to monitor what is going on. But The Fed’s completely dropped the ball on Bernie Madoff...

Since the corrupt SEC is delaying the merger vote between DWAC and TMTG (typical review by SEC is 30-45 days and it's now been ~150 days) your vote is needed for the extension! Find all of your control numbers (which you'll have one for every account you bought in) and go to www.proxyvote.com and vote FOR both measures

The only thing I can do is research and write about it. With an even stronger degree of certainty than originally expressed, and with all of the subsequent data points falling into alignment with the initial suspicions, the background of Jack’s Magic Coffee shop remains unchanged. {Go Deep}Six weeks ago, the Twitter security ‘whistleblower’ came forward to congress. The whistleblower is a former technology expert who came from within the research farm of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, is a well-known cybersecurity expert who left government work, entered the public world, and eventually became the...

A major bitcoin investor has suddenly died, leaving behind a cryptocurrency fortune reportedly worth more than $2 billion. Mircea Popescu, a Romanian national, drowned last week off the coast of Costa Rica, local reports said. He was 41. Popescu drowned at Playa Hermosa, according to Teletica.com, which reported that Popescu was swept away by the current and died. His death has prompted questions surrounding what will now happen to Popescu's enormous bitcoin fortune. Popescu, a controversial figure sometimes referred to as "the father of bitcoin toxicity," is known for launching a "bitcoin securities exchange" called MPEx in 2012, according to...

Boeing has agreed to pay $200 million to settle charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) claiming the aviation giant misled investors about the safety of its 737 MAX airplane. The 737 MAX was involved in two crashes that killed all aboard in 2018 and 2019, now understood to be at least partly caused by flaws in the aircraft's Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) software. Boeing admitted MCAS played a role in both accidents. MCAS was intended to automatically kick in and help prevent the 737 Max from stalling in a particular flight scenario where the aircraft's angle...

The company founded by former President Donald Trump that launched his social media platform Truth Social is considering legal action against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for allegedly slow-walking approval of the company’s planned merger with another company that would provide the joint entity a mass infusion of capital, Breitbart News has learned exclusively. Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), in a statement provided exclusively to Breitbart News, said it was exploring possible legal action against the SEC for the alleged delays, which the TMTG statement attributes at least in part to alleged political bias at the regulatory agency....

Gary Gensler, President Joe Biden's Securities and Exchange Commissioner, had final approval authority for the Hillary Clinton campaign's payments for the discredited Steele dossier, according to congressional testimony that is adding to concerns about conflicts of interest as the SEC investigates Donald Trump's social media firm’s merger request. Questions surfaced last month about the SEC's probe of Trump's Truth Social when RealClearInvestigations journalist Paul Sperry reported that Gensler, as SEC chairman, previously served as the Hillary Clinton campaign's chief financial officer. In addition, Sperry reported that SEC Associate Director of Enforcement Melissa Hodgman was married to Peter Strzok, the FBI...

Five U.S.-listed Chinese state-owned companies whose audits are under scrutiny by the U.S. securities regulator said on Friday they would voluntarily delist from the New York Stock Exchange. Oil giant Sinopec (600028.SS) and China Life Insurance (601628.SS), Aluminium Corporation of China (Chalco) (601600.SS), PetroChina (601857.SS) and a separate Sinopec entity, Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Co (600688.SS), each said they would apply to delist their American Depository Shares this month. They will keep their listings in Hong Kong and mainland China. In May, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) flagged the five companies and many others as failing to meet U.S....

Several individuals connected to a 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign plot to cast Donald Trump as a covert Kremlin collaborator are working in high-level jobs within the Biden administration—including at least two senior Biden appointees cited by Special Counsel John Durham in his “active (and) ongoing” criminal investigation of the scheme, according to recently filed court documents. Jake Sullivan, who now serves as Biden’s national security adviser, and Caroline Krass, a top lawyer at the Pentagon, were involved in efforts in 2016 and 2017 to advance the Clinton campaign’s false claims about Trump through the media and the federal government, documents...