House Majority Whip Torches Gensler, Calls SEC Chair An 'Incompetent Cop On The Beat'

The U.S. House Majority Whip and Congressman for Minnesota Tom Emmer torched Gary Gensler, the current chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and called him an "incompetent cop on the beat" after the chairman appeared at the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services hearing Tuesday.

In a Twitter thread containing scathing criticism of Gensler, which was posted on the heels of the SEC chairman's appearance at the Congress and related to the chaos that rocked the crypto sector last year, the House Majority Whip said the financial regulator's chief is "actively putting everyday Americans in harm's way."

Aside from calling Gensler an "incompetent cop on the beat," Emmer alleged that the SEC chair has been "pushing American firms into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party."

A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, Gensler was nominated by President Joe Biden to run the agency where he faced slight opposition from Congress as Democrats were in control at the time he was appointed.

While Gesler sits at the helm of the agency for more than two years now, Representative Emmer believes that the chairman has "finalized ZERO rules for crypto companies to comply with...yet he abuses the SEC's enforcement powers against them."

The Congressman called Gensler "'cop on the beat' when the biggest crypto frauds collapsed, doing nothing to stop these criminals before they defrauded Americans," adding that the agency's chairman is "often contradicting himself, which only instills further chaos in the marketplace."

Emmer also alleged that Gensler has been "pushing innovation into the hands of a communist country, the United States' number one adversary."

On Tuesday, Republicans on the Financial Services Committee headed by GOP committee chair Patrick McHenry penned a letter to the SEC chairman, lambasting the way he handles regulation in the cryptocurrency space and for forcing digital asset trading platforms to register under his non-existent registration process.

Earlier this month, Emmer accused Gensler of regulating the crypto space in bad faith when he was a guest on the crypto podcast "Unchained."

"This guy, in my mind, is a bad-faith regulator. He's been blindly spraying the crypto community with enforcement actions while completely missing the truly bad actors," Emmer told Unchained host and crypto journalist Laura Shin.

"This is clearly not the way the government should be serving Americans, and that it sends a clear message, I believe, to the broader crypto community, and that directly is "Gary Gensler is not regulating in good faith," the House Majority Whip added.