Sen. Elizabeth Warren is lining up crypto ventures linked to President Donald Trump’s family as early oversight targets for when she takes control of the Senate Banking Committee in January, a Warren Banking aide told Politico’s Morning Money on Nov. 9.
“Big Tech CEOs, Administration officials, Trump family crypto businesses, Wall Street executives, and giant corporations should preserve their documents and prepare to answer tough questions,” said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans have not been announced.
Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, has been the panel’s ranking member, the top member of the minority party on the panel, since January 2025. Her party’s sweep of the Nov. 3 midterms gives Democrats the Senate majority, and with it the chair. Mike Katz, a partner at law firm Manatt, predicted the crypto focus days earlier. “I think targeted oversight is going to happen,” Katz said on Unchained, adding that “especially in the crypto world, it’s going to be focused around the Trump family” and deals such as World Liberty Financial.
Trump defended his World Liberty Financial stake in a 60 Minutes interview that aired Nov. 8, saying he knows “nothing about it” and that “My sons run the company.”
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) is favored to chair the House Financial Services Committee, and Sherrod Brown, a former Senate Banking chair who won an Ohio Senate seat on Nov. 3, is seen as a likely chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee. Both panels also write crypto rules.
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Prediction Markets Next
The aide told Politico that Warren also wants to end a “Wild West-style lack of oversight” in prediction markets, where, in the aide’s telling, insiders have cashed in. The sector is already fighting state regulators: a federal appeals court on Nov. 3 declined to pause New York’s enforcement action against Kalshi and Connecticut’s actions against Kalshi and Coinbase.
Beyond Crypto
Crypto is one item on a long list. The aide said affordability will anchor the agenda, including a cap on credit card interest rates and a bipartisan housing bill with Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who is expected to become ranking member. Warren also plans to flag private credit and a possible artificial intelligence (AI) bubble as risks to financial stability, and to keep pushing limits on exports of advanced AI chips, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang among expected oversight targets.
The aide told Politico that Warren “will look to advance legislation on these issues and have a robust hearing schedule with the public and private sectors.”
Whether the rest of the committee’s Democrats follow is an open question. Justin Slaughter, a senior advisor at crypto venture firm Paradigm, said on the same Unchained episode that Warren wants “a very fierce oversight effort, in part to lay the groundwork for what 2028 is like for Democrats.” He described newer members as lawmakers “who do not want to be part of a holy war against all of corporate America.”
Related Listen: Why Sherrod Brown May Not Be Crypto’s Biggest Problem in the Senate
