By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: May 5, 2025 ~
Congressman Sean Casten, Democrat of Illinois
Donald Trump’s assault on the rule of law is now the ubiquitous and defining feature of his administration. That assault also represents the gravest threat to the national security of the United States, its economic standing, and the stability of the U.S. financial system.
Take, for example, what has happened recently.
Last Wednesday, Congressman Sean Casten, Democrat of Illinois, stated the following in an open meeting of the House Financial Services Committee:
“For the first time in my memory, foreign investors are not only fleeing U.S. equities but are fleeing U.S. Treasuries. I met with banks last week – banks under our jurisdiction – who said that the international community is putting a risk premium on investments in the United States because of regulatory risk and because they question whether the rule of law that they depend on to execute contracts in the United States will be executed as it will be in European markets where that capital is running to.
“So, if you need to tell yourself before you go to bed that you’re a deficit buster, fine, but just acknowledge you’re lying. This is not about deficit busting. This is about making rich people richer, and that’s it.”
Casten was referring to the latest efforts of the Trump administration to gut regulatory agencies that provide oversight of Wall Street’s entrenched history of fraud and lawlessness.
The ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), released a statement last week explaining the latest assaults as follows:
“Now is the time for Congress to step up. Instead, Committee Republicans are cosigning this destruction and helping Trump and Co-President Elon Musk dismantle the agencies responsible for helping bring down costs, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau [CFPB]. Today, they are slashing the Bureau’s budget by 70%…
“Republicans are also pushing to gut the Financial Stability Oversight Council and Treasury’s Office of Financial Research – agencies designed to prevent another financial crisis like in 2008. They are eliminating funding for affordable housing construction despite a national homelessness crisis. And they are so desperate to do Trump’s bidding that they’re eliminating another agency that doesn’t cost taxpayers anything, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board [PCAOB], which oversees auditors to prevent frauds like Enron and ensure that companies controlled by the Chinese Communist Party are on the up and up.”
The plan to kill the PCAOB has received scant media coverage but the language to kill its independence and fold it into the Securities and Exchange Commission appeared in a Memorandum released by the Republican leadership of the House Financial Services Committee last Wednesday.
Neutering the PCAOB would be completely in line with Trump’s efforts right out of the starting gate. On February 10, Trump issued an Executive Order that suspended the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) for 180 days, giving an all clear to U.S. corporations to bribe officials in foreign countries to get business deals approved. The order bars federal prosecutors from starting any new FCPA investigations, enforcing new actions and orders a review of existing FCPA investigations to “restore proper bounds” on applying the FCPA law.
In early March the Trump administration gutted another anti-corruption law, the Corporate Transparency Act, which had become law in 2021. Its goal is to curb anonymous shell companies from money laundering in the U.S. behind a curtain of darkness. It requires that the true owners of these shell companies file beneficial ownership information into a federal registry established by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and it imposes stiff fines and up to two years in prison for failure to do so.
Quietly, with little public notice, on March 2 Trump’s newly installed Treasury Secretary (hedge fund honcho Scott Bessent) announced that he would not enforce the Corporate Transparency Act as the law was written. The statement from the Treasury Department said this:
“The Treasury Department is announcing today that, with respect to the Corporate Transparency Act, not only will it not enforce any penalties or fines associated with the beneficial ownership information reporting rule under the existing regulatory deadlines, but it will further not enforce any penalties or fines against U.S. citizens or domestic reporting companies or their beneficial owners after the forthcoming rule changes take effect either. The Treasury Department will further be issuing a proposed rulemaking that will narrow the scope of the rule to foreign reporting companies only. Treasury takes this step in the interest of supporting hard-working American taxpayers and small businesses and ensuring that the rule is appropriately tailored to advance the public interest.”
In May of last year, Trump was unanimously convicted on 34 felony counts by a 12-member jury in New York of falsifying business records. His credentials on what constitutes ethical business practices would thus seem to be highly suspect.
Last evening, the CBS News program, 60 Minutes, aired a segment on Trump’s assault on law firms, including Big Law firms, which had taken on clients whose interests were adversarial to Trump’s personal, business or political interests.
In recent weeks, Trump has signed Executive Orders that barred these law firms from the grounds of federal courthouses where they need access in order to represent clients and threatened to cancel the federal contracts of their clients. A senior partner at one of the law firms told 60 Minutes that within hours of the Executive Order being signed by Trump, his major clients were threatening to drop the firm as its counsel.
Mark Elias, one of the lawyers targeted by name in Trump’s Executive Orders, agreed to be interviewed by 60 Minutes. Elias had this to say:
“It is trying to intimidate them the way in which a mob boss intimidates people in the neighborhood that he is seeking to either exact protection money from or engage in other nefarious conduct. I mean, the fact is that these law firms are being told, ‘If you don’t play ball with us, maybe somethin’ really bad will happen to you.’ ”
John Keker is a prominent attorney and Democrat in San Franciso. He was asked by the 60 Minutes moderator of the segment, Scott Pelley, this: “If the president brings the legal profession to heel what situation is the country in then?”
Keker responded: “No rule of law. You’re in a dictatorship. That’s what’s happened in China. It happened in Russia. These are legal systems that look like legal systems, but in fact are controlled by a dictatorship.”
On May 1, Newsweek reported on a new poll that found that 52 percent of Americans view Trump as a “dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy.”
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