Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, we have heard several times this legislation is better than the status quo. There are a whole lot of reasons that is not true, but I want to focus specifically on this bill's utter failure to address the use of cryptocurrency by terrorists, foreign adversaries, and criminals. By the way, Treasury asked us specifically to address those issues with a whole bunch of reasonable changes. We introduced amendments. Every one of those amendments was rejected. The anti-money laundering provisions that are in this bill simply duplicate existing requirements. Yet, the bill's supporters have actually argued, and Treasury has agreed, that the status quo is not sufficient to address the challenges created by cryptocurrencies. How do we know that cryptocurrencies are a problem for money laundering? Because the bad guys love crypto. Let's give some examples. North Korean hackers have stolen $3 billion in cryptocurrency since 2017. White House national security officials said last year that crypto theft and cybercrime have funded half of North Korea's nuclear program. Russia and Venezuela are both using crypto to evade U.S. sanctions. Venezuela recently said that because of the bite of sanctions, they are now moving to accept payments in crypto because that allows them to get money that we, in Washington, cannot track. The Treasury Department is reviewing more than $20 billion of cryptocurrency that was laundered through a Russian-based cryptocurrency exchange.…”