Hillary Clinton Slams Biden Administration for Not Blocking Russian Crypto Access

Everyone who can exert pressure on Putin should be acting urgently, opines the former Democrat presidential candidate.

Former Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has slammed the Treasury Department of the Biden Administration for not locking down the cryptocurrency market that may give the Russians an escape from mounting financial pressure.

Her comments came at a time when the ruble was left reeling as western sanctions on Russia intensified. At the same time, the two most popular, Bitcoin and Ethereum, posted gains of 14% and 11.4%, respectively.

Clinton feels that everyone who can do something to isolate Russia financially should act urgently. “That kind of pressure will absolutely impact Putin,” she said in a recent segment on MSNBC.

Clinton went on further to say that people who live to make money legally should not want the invasion of Ukraine to continue. “We do not need to be descending into some kind of global conflict where dictators can decide that they’re going to try to take over countries just because they wake up one morning, no provocation at all,” Clinton said. She believes it is in the interest of anyone doing legal business to end this conflict as soon as possible.

Disappointed with crypto exchanges

“I was disappointed to see some of the so-called crypto exchanges, not all of them, but some of them are refusing to end transactions with Russia,” Clinton said, undoubtedly referring to the responses of major exchanges to the Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister’s tweet, specifically those ofKraken CEO Jesse Powell and a Binance spokesperson.

Powell believes that banning Russians from doing business with Kraken would hurt their business. A Binance spokesperson shared his opinion, saying that freezing Russian accounts goes against everything bitcoin and crypto stand for.

Don’t give Putin an escape

Clinton acknowledges governments for trying to understand the market to put guardrails in place, as they would for any primary financial market. Additionally, she believes that the U.S. Treasury Department and Europeans should look carefully at how they could stop crypto markets from providing an escape to Russians, both governmentally and privately.

She hopes that somebody in the [U.S.] Treasury Department figures out how to plug “the leaky valves in the crypto market.”

At the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in late Nov. 2021, Clinton said that she hoped nation-states would start paying greater attention to the rise of cryptocurrency. She said then that crypto could potentially undermine the dollar as a reserve currency to destabilize nations, starting with smaller states and then going much larger. Her comments make much greater sense when you consider her view of how social media and cryptocurrencies can be manipulated to influence elections and cause political instability, outlined in an MSNBC interview a few days later.

Her comments appear to come out of a pro-institution stance, opposing the Republicans’ general distrust of institutions fostered by former U.S. President Donald Trump. Trump recently referred to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s move to freeze crypto accounts of Canadian truckers as aligning with “left fascists.”

At the time of going to press, it appears that the Biden administration is in talks with crypto exchanges to block Russians attempting to avoid sanctions.

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