President Donald Trump’s negotiators on the US Senate’s crypto market structure bill are refusing to approve legislation that directly attacks the president over his business ties to digital assets – one of the main points Democrats have demanded during negotiations over how the US industry should be governed.
Some of the earlier proposals for the bill’s ethics provisions — particularly those proposed by Sen. Adan Schiff of California — were “completely outrageous,” Patrick Witt, executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets, told CoinDesk TV in an interview Tuesday at the Ondo Summit in New York.
“We made it clear there were red lines,” he said. “We are not going to allow the president to be targeted individually or his family members.”
He said he hoped Democrats would present more reasonable versions “that seem a little closer to something that could ultimately be accepted.” And he said he thought a solution would 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 from the U.S. banking industry on Monday, where digital asset insiders left frustrated that bankers had yet to come to the table to propose a solution to their disagreements over stablecoin performance.
He told CoinDesk that the meeting “revealed new areas of agreement,” but the White House is trying to move the needle between bankers keen to protect their own deposit businesses and pave the way for stablecoin products.
“We are trying to negotiate a deal,” he said. “My number one job is to bring a bill to the president’s desk. He wants this bill to pass.”
But it’s Senate Democrats who might be the toughest sell at this point, as they continue to push for crypto limits for top government officials, along with other major demands.
In previous proposals that would have limited the involvement of government officials’ spouses in the industry, “a lot of senators’ wives and husbands might have been put out of work because of that,” Witt said.
Democrats met with industry representatives on Jan. 16, two days after a Senate Banking Committee hearing on the legislation’s progress failed. And Democratic lawmakers plan to meet again Wednesday to continue discussing their approach, according to a person briefed on the plans. If they fail to pass a compromise bill in the Senate Banking Committee, the legislation may have to be advanced with Republican support alone, as a similar version already was in the Senate Agriculture Committee.
Ultimately, however, the bill will need significant Democratic support to pass the Senate, which typically requires a 60-vote majority to approve a bill. The White House has asked industry players to put together their compromise ideas by the end of February, according to people familiar with the matter. The longer this legislative process drags on, the more difficult it will be to pass a bill before Congress hits the ground running for this year’s midterm elections.
Witt was also asked Tuesday if he would be willing to identify how much crypto the U.S. government currently holds, a figure that is particularly relevant in light of the president’s ongoing plan to build federal stockpiles.
“No,” he said. “I’m not going to bring that up.”
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