Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., is pushing a resolution that would, in part, proclaim House support for legislation to prohibit the president and others from issuing, sponsoring or endorsing cryptocurrencies and other digital assets.
“No one should be in elective office to profit off their position,” Khanna told Fox News Digital during a phone call on Wednesday.
The resolution, if passed, would declare the lower chamber’s support for legislation to bar “the issuance, sponsoring, or endorsing of digital assets (including cryptocurrency, memecoins, stablecoins, tokens, nonfungible tokens (NFTs), digital trading cards, and decentralized finance platforms) by the President, Vice President, Members of Congress, candidates for public office, elected public officials, high-ranking executive branch employees and special government employees, and the immediate family members of each of these.”
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The resolution would also advocate for legislation requiring elected officials, candidates and their immediate relatives to shift their digital assets into a blind trust that is “inaccessible” amid the politician’s candidacy, time in office and two years thereafter.
It would also support mandating “the full and timely disclosure of all cryptocurrency transactions” by politicians, candidates and their families, and express House support for prohibiting foreign investment in digital assets tied to such individuals.
The resolution takes aim at President Donald Trump and his family’s digital asset dealings, saying that “members of President Trump’s family have built a network of opaque and largely unregulated crypto enterprises, including digital trading cards, memecoins, stablecoins, tokens, and decentralized finance platforms tied to their names and likenesses.”
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The president “used the powers of his office and access to him to promote and boost the value of his crypto ventures” and “substantial foreign investment has flowed into Trump-linked crypto projects from entities tied to foreign nations,” the resolution asserts.
It also calls out Trump’s recent move to pardon Binance cryptocurrency exchange co-founder and former CEO Changpeng Zhao.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to the resolution in a statement to Fox News Digital.
“President Trump exercised his constitutional authority by issuing a pardon for Mr. Zhao, who was prosecuted by the Biden Administration in their war on cryptocurrency,” Leavitt said. “In their desire to punish the cryptocurrency industry, the Biden Administration pursued Mr. Zhao despite no allegations of fraud or identifiable victims.”
“The Biden Administration sought to imprison Mr. Zhao for three years, a sentence so outside Sentencing Guidelines that the even the Judge said he had never heard of this in his 30-year career,” she continued. “These actions by the Biden Administration severely damaged the United States’ reputation as a global leader in technology and innovation. The Biden Administration’s war on crypto is over.”
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The GOP currently holds the House majority, making it unlikely that the resolution, which specifically calls out the president, will advance through the chamber.
While the resolution offers a messaging mechanism, the passage of detailed legislation would be required to actually add the items discussed in the resolution into the law.
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