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The S.E.C. Was Tough on Crypto. It Pulled Back After Trump Returned to Office.

Anonymous Mon 15 Dec 2025 02:49:58 No.1465689 View View Reply Original Report

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/14/us/politics/sec-crypto-firms-trump-investigation.html

A cryptocurrency firm run by the billionaire Winklevoss twins was facing a punishing federal lawsuit. After Donald J. Trump returned to the White House, the Securities and Exchange Commission moved to freeze the case.

The S.E.C. had also sued Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, but then dropped the case altogether under the new administration.

And after a yearslong legal fight with Ripple Labs, the new S.E.C. tried to reduce a court-ordered penalty against the crypto firm, seeking to soften the blow of the punishment.

The agency’s pullback from these cases illustrated a wide-ranging transformation in the federal government’s treatment of the crypto industry during President Trump’s second term, a New York Times investigation has found.

It is unheard-of for the agency to retreat from a swath of lawsuits against a single industry. And yet, The Times found that the S.E.C. had eased up on more than 60 percent of the crypto cases that were ongoing when Mr. Trump returned to the White House, moving to pause litigation, lessen penalties or outright dismiss the cases.

The dismissals were particularly unusual, The Times found. Under Mr. Trump, S.E.C. dismissals came at a far higher rate for crypto firms than other cases.

And although the particulars of the crypto lawsuits differed, many of these firms had something in common: financial ties to Mr. Trump, the self-described crypto president.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 15 Dec 2025 02:50:19 No.1465690 Report

Quoted By:

The S.E.C., the top federal regulator that polices wrongdoing in the financial markets, is no longer actively pursuing a single case against a firm with known Trump ties, The Times found.

It backtracked against every firm that either has relationships with the Trump family’s crypto businesses or has donated to his political causes. The agency’s only remaining crypto cases are against little-known defendants without clear ties to Mr. Trump.

The S.E.C. outright dismissed seven crypto cases. Five have known
Trump ties.

It moved to freeze, proposed favorable settlements in or conceded seven other crypto cases. Three have known Trump ties.

That leaves nine cases from which the agency did not retreat. None have known Trump ties.

In a statement, the S.E.C. said that political favoritism “had nothing to do with” how it handled crypto enforcement, and that the agency was pivoting for legal and policy reasons, including concerns about its authority to police the industry. The S.E.C. noted that the agency’s current Republican commissioners fundamentally disagreed with filing most crypto cases long before Mr. Trump embraced the industry, and that it “takes securities fraud and investor protection seriously.”

There is no indication that the president pressured the agency to go easy on specific crypto firms. And The Times did not find evidence that the firms had tried to influence the cases against them through donations or business ties to Mr. Trump, some of which were made after the S.E.C. pivoted in their cases.

But Mr. Trump is both a crypto industry player and the industry’s top policymaker, a president who stands to profit from companies that his administration oversees. The fact that many of the firms sued by the S.E.C. have connections to him demonstrates the conflict in a president’s pushing policy that dovetails with his interests.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 15 Dec 2025 02:51:19 No.1465691 Report

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In the early days of his second term, the White House declared that the president would be “halting aggressive enforcement actions and regulatory overreach that have stifled crypto innovation.”

While the S.E.C.’s abandonment of some individual crypto cases has garnered public attention before, an analysis of thousands of court records by The Times along with dozens of interviews laid bare the previously untold scope of its rollback this year and the boon to Mr. Trump’s industry allies.

All of the defendants named in The Times’s investigation have denied wrongdoing, and many have maintained that they were accused of mere technical violations. Some firms whose cases the agency backed away from had no apparent ties to the president.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, disputed that Mr. Trump and his family had any conflicts of interest. She said that Mr. Trump’s policies were “fulfilling the president’s promise to make the United States the crypto capital of the world by driving innovation and economic opportunity for all Americans.”

Mr. Trump’s administration has softened crypto oversight across the board, including at the Justice Department, which shuttered a crypto enforcement unit. But the changes this year at the S.E.C. marked an especially sharp reversal.
During the Biden administration, according to The Times’s analysis, the S.E.C. brought on average more than two crypto cases a month — in either federal court or its in-house legal system. Even in Mr. Trump’s first term, the agency averaged about one a month, including the high-profile case against Ripple.

In contrast, the S.E.C. has not brought a single crypto case, as defined by The Times, since Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, even as it has continued filing dozens of cases against other types of defendants.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 15 Dec 2025 02:52:20 No.1465692 Report

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Crypto cases brought by the S.E.C. under Trump and Biden:

Trump’s first administration: 50 cases

Biden administration: 105

Trump’s second administration: None

In a statement, Paul S. Atkins, Mr. Trump’s newly appointed S.E.C. chairman, contended that his agency was simply reining in the prior administration’s overzealous stance toward the crypto industry. The Biden-era S.E.C., he asserted, had used its enforcement powers to dictate new policy.
“I’ve made clear that we would end regulation by enforcement,” Mr. Atkins said in the statement.

While crypto firms hailed what Mr. Atkins has called a “new day” for their industry, career S.E.C. lawyers who had brought some of these cases have expressed alarm at the pullback. They fear that the agency — created nearly a century ago at the height of the Great Depression to protect investors and oversee the markets — has emboldened the crypto industry in ways that could harm consumers and threaten the broader financial system.
Christopher E. Martin was a senior trial counsel at the S.E.C. and led the case against one of those crypto firms. He retired after the agency dropped the suit this year.

“It was a complete surrender,” he said of the S.E.C.’s broader retreat.
“They’ve really just thrown investors to the wolves.”

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 15 Dec 2025 02:53:20 No.1465693 Report

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“We’re not looking to be unregulated; we’re looking for clear regulations that we can operate under,” said Summer Mersinger, the chief executive of the Blockchain Association, an industry trade group.
Last year, the tide began to turn for crypto, once Mr. Trump flipped from crypto doubter to evangelist.

In a speech in July 2024, he promised crypto enthusiasts that the “persecution” against their industry would stop, saying that “on Day 1, I will fire Gary Gensler.”

The S.E.C. is an independent agency composed of five presidentially appointed commissioners, including a chair who often reflects the views of the administration that appoints him or her. The commissioners vote on cases — whether to bring, settle or dismiss them — but career enforcement officials actually do the investigating, a system that allows for priorities to change while traditionally avoiding wild swings in political whims.

But after Mr. Trump triumphed at the ballot box for a second time, a sobering reality set in at the S.E.C. Mr. Gensler announced his departure soon after the election. And working in the crypto unit, once a career launchpad, was suddenly perceived to be a liability.

During the presidential transition, Mr. Gensler’s enforcement chief, Sanjay Wadhwa, implored enforcement staff to “do the work the American people are paying us to do,” according to people with knowledge of his comments who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private meeting.

Some of the staff, however, got cold feet.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 15 Dec 2025 02:54:21 No.1465694 Report

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One of the crypto team’s senior leaders took an unannounced multiweek vacation, the people with knowledge said, and did not respond to emails about the cases. Another senior official refused to sign her name to one of the few crypto cases the agency brought after Election Day. Other officials stopped working on crypto cases altogether, stymying Mr. Gensler’s final push.

Victor Suthammanont spent a decade at the agency, most recently as Mr. Gensler’s enforcement counsel. Through two prior administration changes, he said, the staff stayed the course.

“But this transition wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen,” Mr. Suthammanont said, while declining to discuss specific cases. “The climate changed immediately.”

There was no turning back once Mr. Trump was sworn in. He named Mark T. Uyeda, one of the S.E.C.’s Republican commissioners, as the agency’s acting chairman until the president’s nominee, Mr. Atkins, received Senate approval.

Mr. Uyeda had long objected to the agency’s approach to crypto cases. And in a statement to The Times, he said that Mr. Gensler was adopting novel theories “in ways not supported by existing law.”

But Mr. Gensler had made clear in a 2022 speech that he saw it the opposite way. “When a new technology comes along, our existing laws don’t just go away,” he said.

By early February, Mr. Uyeda had sidelined Jorge G. Tenreiro, the agency’s head of litigation who had previously helped lead the crypto unit and oversaw most of the cases. Mr. Tenreiro was reassigned to the I.T. department, seen within the agency as a demeaning demotion.

Without Mr. Tenreiro, the agency began dropping investigations into crypto firms that were facing potential lawsuits. While some investigations have continued, at least 10 firms announced that they were no longer under scrutiny, including one just last week.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 15 Dec 2025 02:55:21 No.1465695 Report

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Mr. Uyeda soon faced a tougher decision: what to do with Biden-era lawsuits that the agency was still pursuing in court.

While the S.E.C. routinely drops investigations, dismissing an ongoing case was rare and would require approval from the agency’s commissioners.

In one of the highest-profile crypto cases, the S.E.C. had sued Coinbase, the largest crypto exchange in the United States, for failing to register with the agency. The company mounted an aggressive defense during the Biden years, persuading the judge overseeing the case to let a higher court review it before going to trial.

Now, with the S.E.C. in the Trump administration’s hands, Coinbase was one of the first in line seeking a dismissal.

Traditionally, the S.E.C. chairman’s office would stay out of these types of negotiations, leaving it to the career officials overseeing a case. But an official from Mr. Uyeda’s office was present for some of the talks with Coinbase, alongside enforcement lawyers.

“We were very careful to make sure that the acting chair’s office was kept up to speed on what was going on and apprised of all of it,” Paul Grewal, the company’s chief legal officer, said in an interview.
Mr. Uyeda called it “entirely appropriate” for his staff to participate in those meetings.

The S.E.C. under Mr. Uyeda was initially reluctant to abandon the case. Its opening offer to Coinbase was to simply pause the litigation, a person familiar with the matter said.
But Coinbase balked at a delay.

The S.E.C. then returned with a more generous proposal. It would dismiss the case, so long as the agency had the power to revive it later if the agency’s leaders changed their minds.
Coinbase would not settle for that, either.

“We were absolutely clear — either they would surrender or we would keep litigating because we had nothing to negotiate,” said Mr. Grewal, a former federal judge.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 15 Dec 2025 02:56:22 No.1465696 Report

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The S.E.C. eventually backed down. By that point, the agency had only two Republicans and one Democrat, after Mr. Gensler and another Democrat left.

Without addressing any particular decision, Mr. Uyeda said that it was “inappropriate to continue such cases, particularly if the S.E.C. were to disavow the underlying theories in the near future.”
But Caroline A. Crenshaw, the remaining Democratic commissioner, said in an interview that the agency had given all the advantage to the industry.

“They can effectively get away with anything,” she said.

The industry saw the Coinbase dismissal as a white flag.

Lawyers for other crypto firms sought similar deals. And by the end of May, the agency had dropped six other cases.

The Times’s analysis of court records underscores just how noteworthy that was.

Under Mr. Biden, the S.E.C. did not voluntarily dismiss a single crypto case still pending from the first Trump administration, though it did drop the case against one defendant who had died and part of another in response to a judge’s adverse ruling.

Yet, during the second Trump administration, the agency dismissed 33 percent of the Biden-era crypto cases it had inherited. It dropped just 4 percent of the cases against other industries.

While the S.E.C. has vowed to continue pursuing fraud, it nonetheless dropped the lawsuit against Binance. In that case, the S.E.C. said a pair of related entities had fraudulently misled customers about their efforts to prevent manipulative trading.

The S.E.C. also petitioned a judge to freeze a fraud case against the crypto mogul Justin Sun and his Tron Foundation, one of four cases the agency handled that way in hopes of striking a deal. Agency officials have yet to announce a resolution of the case.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 15 Dec 2025 02:57:25 No.1465697 Report

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All told, the Trump S.E.C. inherited 23 crypto cases — 21 from the Biden years and two from the first Trump term. It pulled back from 14 of them.

Eight of those were against defendants who formed ties to the president or his family, either before or shortly after their cases were resolved.

Mr. Sun, for example, has bought $75 million worth of World Liberty’s digital token. His company, Tron, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. In court papers, Mr. Sun and Tron said the S.E.C. lacked evidence of fraud and jurisdiction to sue.

And just weeks before the Binance case was dismissed, the firm participated in a $2 billion business transaction that used digital currency from World Liberty. That deal is poised to generate tens of millions of dollars a year for the Trumps.

A spokesman for World Liberty said that “there is zero connection between World Liberty Financial and the U.S. government,” adding that the firm “has no influence on policy or decision-making by the administration.”

In a statement Binance said the S.E.C.’s action against it was “a product of the war on crypto.”

In March, the S.E.C. abandoned a case accusing Cumberland, a crypto trading firm, of acting as an unregistered securities dealer.

About two months later, DRW, its parent firm, invested nearly $100 million in the Trump family’s media company.
DRW officials said that the company was offered the opportunity to invest only after the case ended, and that the lawsuit was dismissed purely because the allegations were false.

In the case against Ripple, which donated nearly $5 million to the Trump inaugural, the agency tried to undo its own efforts.

During the first Trump term, the S.E.C. accused Ripple of depriving investors of material information in selling its crypto token. Last year, after rejecting some of the agency’s accusations, a federal judge ordered Ripple to pay a $125 million penalty for some securities violations.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 15 Dec 2025 02:58:26 No.1465698 Report

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Yet after Mr. Trump returned to the White House, the S.E.C. tried to reduce the punishment to just $50 million. The judge chided the government for its change of heart and rejected the new deal.

Ripple had argued to the judge that it deserved a lesser penalty, partly because the S.E.C. had moved to dismiss similar complaints against other crypto firms that were sued later. It ended up paying the full penalty.

The president’s media company said in July that it planned to include Ripple’s cryptocurrency in an investment fund open to the public.

In an interview, Hester M. Peirce, a Republican commissioner who is leading the S.E.C.’s new crypto task force, said that the decision to backtrack from many of these cases was rectifying a wrong. They should not have been filed in the first place, she said.

“I would say that the drastic action happened in the prior years, namely, bringing cases that we didn’t have a legal basis for,” she said, adding that she believed the cases stifled legitimate innovation.

Ms. Peirce said that political or financial considerations had no bearing on the situation. “We are looking at the facts and circumstances and making a decision on that,” she said, not “who the person knows.”

Few crypto industry players are closer to Mr. Trump than Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss.

The twins, who founded and run Gemini Trust, donated to a fund-raising committee that backed his re-election campaign and other Republican organizations. They chipped in funds for the construction of a White House ballroom, a pet project of the president’s. They also backed a new exclusive club in Washington, Executive Branch, partly owned by Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son.

In addition, the brothers’ investment firm recently put money into a new crypto mining company called American Bitcoin; Eric Trump, Mr. Trump’s second son, is a co-founder and chief strategy officer of the firm, and Donald Trump Jr. is an investor.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 15 Dec 2025 02:59:27 No.1465699 Report

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The president has repeatedly sung the twins’ praises, describing them as brainy male models.

“They’ve got the look. They’ve got the genius. Got plenty of cash,” Mr. Trump said at a White House event.

But Gemini Trust had legal trouble. In December 2020, Gemini and another firm, Genesis Global Capital, agreed to offer Gemini customers the chance to lend their crypto assets to Genesis. Genesis, in turn, lent the assets to bigger players.

Genesis paid interest to the customers, who were promised the option to withdraw their assets at any time, while Gemini got a cut for its role as intermediary. Gemini touted the program as a way for account holders to earn interest rates of up to 8 percent.

Peter Chen, a data scientist in San Diego, said in an interview that he trusted Gemini enough to turn over more than $70,000.

“They gave me the impression that they were clean, followed the rules and were among the most regulated of all the crypto firms,” he said.

Then in late 2022, Genesis, facing bankruptcy, froze the accounts of 230,000 customers.

A 73-year-old grandmother pleaded with Gemini to return $199,000, her life savings. “Without that money I am doomed,” she wrote, according to a lawsuit filed by New York authorities.

Genesis reached a $2 billion settlement with New York in May 2024 and customers eventually got their money back. Gemini struck its own deal with the state to pay up to $50 million, if needed, to cover any remaining losses. It acknowledged no wrongdoing, blamed Genesis for the debacle and noted that no customers lost money in the end.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 15 Dec 2025 03:00:27 No.1465700 Report

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But the S.E.C. had also sued the two companies, accusing them of the unregistered sale of crypto. On social media, Tyler Winklevoss called the lawsuit a “manufactured parking ticket.”

While Genesis settled, Gemini was still fighting the lawsuit until this April, when the S.E.C. moved to freeze the case to hammer out a resolution. The agency disclosed in September that it had struck a deal with Gemini, which the commissioners must still vote on.

The S.E.C. told the federal judge overseeing the case that the agreement “would completely resolve this litigation.”

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 15 Dec 2025 03:00:34 No.1465701 Report

Quoted By:

>>1465689
Trump is doing too much good to have pesky things like the SEC and/or the law get in the way of all the profit he makes from creating shitcoins. Way to go mister president! This is increasing the GDP I think

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 15 Dec 2025 03:05:08 No.1465702 Report

Quoted By:

Classic pay 2 play.
Remember when trump accussed everyone else of that?
Another accusation is a confession.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 15 Dec 2025 10:26:29 No.1465770 Report

Quoted By: >>1465821

chuds will ignore this.

Anonymous

Anonymous Mon 15 Dec 2025 16:24:31 No.1465821 Report

Quoted By:

>>1465770
And they are trying to slide it now too.

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The S.E.C. Was Tough on Crypto. It Pulled Back After Trump Returned to Office.