House Crypto Hearing Explodes as Dems Storm Out Over Trump's Crypto Ties

The House crypto regulation hearing turned into a political firestorm on Tuesday when Rep. Maxine Waters and fellow Democrats staged a dramatic walkout. Their beef? President Donald Trump's shady involvement in the crypto world.

The joint session, thrown together by the House Financial Services and Agriculture Committees, was supposed to hash out a fresh draft of market structure legislation. This bill would split the digital asset oversight duties between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. But things went off the rails fast.

The debate on regulatory frameworks? Put on hold by a wave of political drama.

Waters, the top Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, kicked things off with a bang, formally objecting to the whole shebang right from the start.

“I object to this joint hearing because of the corruption of the President of the United States and his ownership of crypto and his oversight of all the agencies,” she declared before storming out with other Dems in tow.

In the middle of a fiery back-and-forth, Waters wouldn’t let up, hammering on about Trump’s sketchy crypto connections.

Partisan concerns over crypto

This walkout came after Waters had already given Committee Chair French Hill a heads-up that she’d fight the session tooth and nail if Republicans didn’t throw in some language about Trump’s crypto cash.

And those connections? They’ve been under the microscope lately, with Trump and Melania dropping their own memecoins, and a pro-Trump financial outfit, World Liberty Financial, rolling out a stablecoin.

Trump even threw a crypto fundraising dinner Monday night, with tickets going for a cool $1.5 million a pop.

Hill clapped back, defending the bipartisan push of the legislative efforts, claiming the new draft "places universal requirements on issuers of all stripes" and shouldn’t be thrown off course by political squabbles.

Democrats against GENIUS

Democrats are also sounding the alarm on the GENIUS Act, a proposed stablecoin bill aiming to set federal standards for issuance and compliance. Over the weekend, Democratic senators like Mark Warner and Raphael Warnock raised red flags about beefing up anti-money laundering rules and tightening the screws on foreign issuers.

Waters is gearing up for a separate “shadow hearing” to spotlight what she calls the conflicts of interest around Trump’s crypto dealings.

Joint hearings in the House need everyone to play nice, but at the time of writing, the hearing was still going strong.