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The Senate Banking Committee has scheduled Paul Atkins’ confirmation hearing for tomorrow at 10:00 am Eastern.  While Atkins is widely expected to be confirmed, it looks like he should nevertheless be prepared to heed Bette Davis’s famous warning to “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”

That’s because earlier this week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D. Mass) lobbed in a 34-page letter raising questions about Atkins’ record and potential conflicts of interest.  After offering perfunctory congratulations on his nomination, Sen. Warren got quickly to the point:

While you have extensive experience in financial services and capital markets, I have concerns about your record. You have been involved as a regulator or key adviser in historic failures of the financial system, including as an SEC Commissioner in the years before and during the 2008 financial crisis and as an adviser to the cryptocurrency platform FTX before and during its sudden collapse in 2022. You have also advocated for weaker SEC rules, including for Chinese accounting companies in the United States, at your corporate advisory firm. You were an architect of Project 2025 and received “special mention” for your extensive contributions.

You also have significant potential conflicts of interest through your work on behalf of corporate interests—and a long record of advocating for weaker protections for investors and weaker rules to prevent wrongdoing by giant corporations. This record raises questions about your judgement and your ability to serve as an effective SEC Chair if you are confirmed.

You can just feel the love, can’t you? Anyway, Sen. Warren follows this up with 32 pages of interrogatories questions on these and other topics that she asks Atkins to be prepared to respond to during tomorrow’s confirmation hearing (mind you, the letter was sent on Monday). She also asks him to provide written responses to these questions prior to the Senate Banking Committee’s vote on his nomination.  I’m betting this will make for some great cable news soundbites, which after all is the point of a confirmation hearing, right?  Fasten your seatbelts indeed.

– John Jenkins