Lost Texts Spur Oversight Inquiry Into Former SEC Chair Gary Gensler

Nearly a year of text messages from former Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler were permanently deleted due to agency errors, prompting House Republicans to launch an oversight investigation into regulatory lapses.

Four Republican committee chairs, including House Financial Services Committee Chairman French Hill, informed current SEC Chair Paul Atkins that Congress is investigating the loss of Gensler's communications from October 2022 through September 2023, spanning the agency's most aggressive enforcement push against crypto firms, in a letter sent Tuesday.

"It appears that former Chair Gensler held companies to a standard that his own agency did not meet," the letter says, noting the SEC collected over $400 million in fiscal year 2023 alone from firms for recordkeeping violations.

Gensler's smartphone stopped syncing with the agency's device management system on July 6, 2023, though it "otherwise functioned normally and was used regularly, according to the Office of the Inspector General report released last month.

Despite repeated warnings flagging the device as inactive every two weeks, IT staff took no action for 62 days, the lawmakers’ letter pointed out.

The House letter notes that while former Chair Gensler's staff claimed he "usually texted for administrative reasons," the IG review found "multiple instances of substantive, mission-related communications between Gensler, his staff, his fellow Commissioners, and other senior officials.

“The district court just ordered everyone to appear on October 8 to address the destruction of documents by the Gensler @SECGov as detailed by its own inspector general,” Coinbase CLO Paul Grewal tweeted on Tuesday. “We appreciate the Court’s attention to this matter.”

Gensler's crypto crackdown

The missing communications span a period when Gensler launched an industry-wide regulatory assault following FTX's November 2022 collapse.

Under his leadership, the SEC insisted the crypto industry's business model was "built on non-compliance," with Gensler declaring in a June 2023 CNBC interview, "we don't need more digital currency" beyond the U.S. dollar.

He compared the crypto sector to "the 1920s before federal securities laws were put in place," calling participants "hucksters, fraudsters, scam artists" running "Ponzi schemes."

The agency authorized over 100 enforcement actions against crypto firms during this period, targeting major exchanges including Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance.

Last month, through a third-party research firm, History Associates, Coinbase requested sanctions against the SEC, calling the agency's "destroy-and-delay approach to records" cause for "irreparable harm."

In 2013, while Gensler served as Chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, that agency's Inspector General criticized him for conducting official business through his personal email account, the letter pointed out.

Republicans are now coordinating with the Inspector General to examine whether other senior officials' communications were similarly lost and whether the agency's internal controls adequately protect federal records.

The SEC has undergone a transformation under the Donald Trump administration, with the President appointing Paul Atkins, a crypto advocate and former SEC commissioner, to replace Gensler.

Atkins was confirmed in April and has launched "Project Crypto," a sweeping initiative to relax regulations on digital assets.