The Battle Over Biden’s Currency Comptroller

“It’s not every day that we’re presented with a nomination for a Lenin scholarship recipient who attended the Moscow State University and wants to end banking as we know it in the United States,” South Dakota Republican U.S. Senator John Thune told reporters recently. Senator Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) wants Saule Omarova, Biden’s nominee for comptroller of the currency in the Treasury Department, to turn over a copy of her thesis, “Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in The Capital.” The document was still on Omarova’s CV in April 2017 and two years later, Toomey noted, Omarova was also a member of a Marxist discussion group on Facebook.

If Democrats on the banking committee hold any doubts about Omarova, they are keeping them under wraps. Not so fake Cherokee Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), prime mover of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, who touted Omarova’s “impressive qualifications and expertise in banking.” Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) attributed opposition to “red scare McCarthyism” and hailed Omarova as someone who “fled Communist oppression.”

Trouble is, she didn’t.

Omarova came to the United States on an exchange program with the University of Wisconsin and she lamented the fall of the Soviet Union. In a May 9, 2020 interview with Chris Hayes of NBC News, Omarova said, “I feel guilty for having left the country at such a momentous time, because obviously they couldn’t hold it together without me.” Any true refugee from Communism would have celebrated the fall of a one-party Soviet dictatorship.

The McCarthyism accusation is also off-base.

Wisconsin Republican Joseph McCarthy made wild accusations about the number of Communists in the government during his time, but he didn’t know the half of it. Anti-Communists, particularly New Deal Democrats and trade unionists, considered him a hindrance to the anti-Communist cause. McCarthy and fellow senators never got to question a presidential nominee who wanted to nationalize banks and empower the government to set pay scales and prices.

In the Soviet Union, the ruling Communist Party handed out scholarships primarily on the basis of fidelity to Marxist-Leninist doctrine, not for academic expertise or merit. A ballpark figure for the contributions of Marx and Lenin to economics is zero, so Omarova’s thesis should prove a fascinating read. The Soviet Union was an economic basket case, but it’s the American financial system Omarova views as dysfunctional.

“Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there,” Omarova explains, “market doesn’t always ‘know best.’” And in the old USSR, the government set salaries, “in a gender-blind manner and all women got very generous maternity benefits. Both things are still a pipe dream in our society!”

Omarova claims to be the victim of a double standard as an immigrant, a woman, and a minority. If such is the case, senators might wonder how Omarova managed to gain a job in the Treasury Department.

“I also served in the George W. Bush Administration as a special advisor on regulatory policy to the U.S. Treasury’s undersecretary for domestic finance,” Omarova told the Senate Banking Committee in 2018. Bush’s choice for undersecretary of the treasury for domestic finance was Brian Roseboro, but it’s unclear who wanted Omarova as a special advisor, and why her Lenin scholarship, Marxist thesis, and contempt for the free market were not questioned at the time.

If the nomination reaches the Senate floor, the questions should prove of interest. As the senators might recall, Saule Omarova is not the only person with Leninist credentials to vie for a high government post. Consider the African-American feminist Angela Davis, who defended the all-white, all-male Soviet dictatorship.

In 1979, Davis won the Lenin Peace Prize and the following year ran for vice president on the Communist Party USA ticket under white Stalinist Gus Hall. Davis and Hall lost to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in 1980 and again in 1984. Davis has not run again, but last time around she supported Delaware Democrat Joe Biden.

According to Davis, Biden was the candidate “who can be most effectively pressured into allowing more space for the evolving anti-racist movement.” As parents across the country have noticed, the Biden Junta is all-in with Black Lives Matter and “1619 Project” indoctrination. Davis is clearly one of Biden’s string-pullers, and the nomination of Omarova is doubtless a sign of Davis’ influence.

Meanwhile, U.S. senators may be unaware that Davis’ running mate Gus Hall was also the CPUSA presidential candidate in 1976, and that college student John Brennan voted for Hall. That was Brennan’s right, but it should have disqualified him for any job with the Central Intelligence Agency. If that seems a stretch, consider that Clinton national security advisor Anthony Lake failed to become CIA director partly because he thought Soviet spy Alger Hiss might be innocent. He wasn’t, as Allen Weinstein explained in Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case.

In 1980, the CIA duly hired John Brennan and in 2013, the composite character Barack Obama nominated Brennan for CIA director. The rest, as they say, is history.

Under the composite character president, the possibilities for die-hard leftists were indeed limitless. Under the Biden Junta, with Vichy conservatives lending a hand, Lenin scholar Saule Omarova could get a shot to end banking as we know it in the United States.