Kamala Harris Eyes Anti-Crypto Wally Adeyemo for Treasury Secretary, Sparking Debate

• Democratic Party’s candidate Kamala Harris is said to be considering crypto critic Wally Adeyemo for the Treasury Secretary role.

• Fascinatingly, this contradicts the recent Crypto4Harris Group launched to build the broken relationship between the Democratic party and the crypto industry. 

The current Vice President of the US and Democratic Party nominee for the upcoming presidential election, Kamala Harris, has triggered mixed reactions among the crypto community with recent reports that she could consider Wally Adeyemo for the Treasury Secretary role when she becomes president. Fascinatingly, this comes after we reported that Harris could consider anti-crypto Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) as her running mate. 

According to reports, Wally Adeyemo, the Deputy Treasury Secretary, has positioned himself as an adherent critic of the crypto industry. He supports stringent measures that discourage the use of digital assets because they pose a danger to national security. 

His Previous Positions on Crypto

In his recent testimony before the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Adeyemo noted that some affiliated terrorist groups, such as Al-Qaeda, operate a Bitcoin money laundering scheme using social media platforms to solicit donations. He also referenced some reports that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force (IRGC-QF) has been transferring crypto to Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in Gaza. 

Not just that, Adeyemo testified that some state actors like North Korea and Russia have leveraged the power of the asset class to evade sanctions and render all measures useless. 

An excerpt of his testimony reads:

The DPRK, which through numerous complex state-sponsored cyber heists, can acquire, launder, and store illicit revenue. It relies on anonymity-enhancing technologies like mixers to hide the sources of its funds. And it leverages over-the-counter digital assets traders to acquire fiat currency. In addition, we’ve seen Russia increasingly turning to alternative payment mechanisms—including the stablecoin tether—to try to circumvent our sanctions and continue to finance its war machine.

In his proposed measures, Adeyemo urged the committee to focus on three reforms: introducing secondary sanctions tools to target foreign digital asset providers that facilitate illicit finance, modernizing and closing gaps in existing authorities by extending their powers to cover key players and core activities, and finally, addressing jurisdictional risk from overseas crypto platforms. 

Is Kamala Harris For or Against the Industry?

Contrary to ongoing speculations, the Democratic Party appears to be building a good relationship with the crypto industry through the recently launched Crypto4Harris Group. To push this agenda, a town hall meeting has been scheduled for next week, with renowned investors like Mark Cuban and Anthony Scaramucci expected to participate. 

According to Fox Business journalist Eleanor Terret, the leading organizers of the Crypto4Harris Group are key industry figures like Crypto Council CEO Sheila Warren as well as former Chainlisys executive Amanda Wick. However, a section of the crypto community believes that this initiative is to reduce the dominance of Donald Trump’s influence on the industry while merging the crypto administration and the Harris team. 

In our recent publication, we observed that Trump is also considering JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon for the Treasury Secretary role. Expectedly, this also generated mixed reactions, as Dimon is known for his long-term skepticism of crypto. However, Trump argued that Dimon “has changed his tune a little bit.”