House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) told Breitbart News that Gary Gensler “might go down” as the “worst SEC chair in history” after an SEC Inspector General report found that “avoidable errors” led to the loss of one year of Gensler’s text messages.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Inspector General released a report last week that found that in July 2023, Gensler’s smartphone stopped communicating with the agency’s mobile device management system. One month later, the SEC Office of Information Technology (OIT) instituted a new policy that would remotely wipe any SEC mobile device that did not communicate with the mobile management system for at least 45 days. In September, Gensler sought help from OIT to recover applications that were not on his smartphone, who “hastily performed a factory reset of the smartphone,” which led to the loss of one year’s worth of text messages.
The inspector general’s review found that the SEC OIT did not back up Gensler’s text messages, nor did the OIT remove the texting application from SEC devices. Although there was some success in recovering text messages, the inspector general review found the “recovery effort was not all-inclusive; for example, Gensler did not provide input into the list, and the original list did not include his fellow Commissioners. Gensler’s staff acknowledged that the list was ‘meant to be a floor, not a ceiling,’ and their effort could not identify and/or recover all missing text message exchanges.”
Gensler’s office said that he and his staff usually texted for administrative purposes, such as scheduling calls and meetings. However, the inspector general wrote “our review found multiple instances of substantive, mission-related communications between Gensler, his staff, his fellow Commissioners, and other senior officials, adding an additional layer of uncertainty to the effectiveness of the recovery process and the exact nature of the text messages that remain missing.”
Recovered text messages included conservations involving Gensler and his staff about when the SEC would file an action against a crypto trading platform and other official actions.
Emmer, a staunch critic of Gensler, told Breitbart News, “Hillary Clinton did the same type of garbage. This is what dishonest people do when they don’t want the truth to be discovered. They try to cover their trail as they clean up the mess they’ve left behind. Gary Gensler, he might go down, arguably, as the worst SEC chair in history.”
He continued, “I would argue that he was less than honest all the way through and this, this just smells. It smells when, they talked about wanting to have a transparent, open-door policy. There’s nothing transparent about what that guy was doing. And this is just, it’s just more a fuel for the fire that he was running his own show and he was doing some things that were less than forthright, and now he’s hiding it. He’s covering it up.”
He added, “Gensler was simply following the business model of the Biden administration, whether it was trying to weaponize government against Donald J. Trump in every which way to try and stop him from ever getting back to his rightful place in the White House.”
Emmer concluded, saying that the Trump administration is undoing “all of this garbage that we dealt with for the last four years. So this just another example of, I think, less than honest behavior by the Biden administration, and in this particular case, one of the worst bureaucrats that I’ve ever dealt with.”
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on X @SeanMoran3.
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