President Donald Trump’s negotiators on the U.S. Senate’s crypto market structure bill refuse to sign off on legislation that goes after the president directly for his digital assets business ties — one of the chief points Democrats have demanded in talks over how the U.S. industry should be governed.
Some of the earlier proposals for the ethics provisions in the bill — especially those proposed by Senator Adan Schiff of California — were “completely outrageous,” Patrick Witt, the executive director of the President’s Council for Advisors for Digital Assets, told CoinDesk TV in an interview Tuesday at the Ondo Summit in New York.
“We’ve made clear that there are red lines,” he said. “We’re not going to allow the targeting of the president individually or his family members.”
He said he’s hopeful that Democrats will be pitching more reasonable versions “that feel a little bit closer to something that could ultimately be agreed to.” And he said he thinks a solution will be found.
“But at the end of the day, this is not an ethics bill,” he said.
Witt led a meeting of crypto policy experts and representatives of the U.S. banking industry on Monday, where the digital assets insiders left frustrated that the bankers hadn’t yet come to the table to offer a way forward on their stablecoin yield disagreements.
He told CoinDesk that the meeting “exposed some new areas of agreement,” but the White House is trying to thread the needle between bankers worried about protecting their own deposit businesses and clearing a path for stablecoin products
“We’re trying to broker a deal,” he said. “My No. 1 job is to get a bill to the president’s desk. He wants to see this bill get done.”
But it’s the Senate Democrats who may pose the tougher sell at this stage, as they continue to push for crypto limits for senior government officials, along with other major requests.
In the earlier proposals that would have limited government officials’ spouses from industry involvement, “a lot of senators’ wives and husbands maybe would have been put out of work by that,” Witt said.
Democrats met with industry representatives on January 16, two days after a Senate Banking Committee hearing on advancing the legislation fell apart. And the Democratic lawmakers are planning to meet again on Wednesday to keep talking about their approach, according to a person briefed on the plans. If they can’t embrace a compromise bill in the Senate Banking Committee, the legislation may have to be advanced with only Republican support, as a similar version already was in the Senate Agriculture Committee.
In the end, though, legislation will have to have significant Democratic support to pass the Senate, which generally demands a 60-vote majority to approve a bill. The White House directed industry insiders to get their compromise ideas together by the end of February, according to people familiar with the discussion. The longer this legislative process drags on, the harder it’ll be to pass a bill before Congress departs to campaign for this year’s midterm elections.
Witt was also asked on Tuesday whether he’d be willing to identify how much in crypto the U.S. government currently holds, an especially relevant figure in light of the ongoing presidential plan to set up federal stockpiles.
“No,” he said. “I’m not going to go into that.”
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