SEC Director of Enforcement resigns after a few days on the job | Hacker News Reader

SEC Director of Enforcement resigns after a few days on the job

sec.gov

128 pointsbalozi65 comments

DC Judge Royce Lamberth on April 26 set in motion a sanctions probe affecting Alex Oh, who'd joined the SEC as enforcement chief from the law firm Paul Weiss. Lambeth's order: https://courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.14559/gov.u... Oh today announced her resignation

https://twitter.com/MikeScarcella/status/1387524397993545728

edit: I dont understand it either, heres a longer article about it

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/business/sec-enforcement-...

I need a decoder ring for this. This is a court order in some case v Exxon. Whats it got to do with FISA or Clinton?

Nothing?

Alex Oh worked for a law firm which represents Exxon. That law firm was accused of obstructing a deposition to avoid providing answers to the other side. [1]

>ORDERS defense counsel to show cause by May 14, 2021 why sanctions should not be imposed under Rule 11 (b)(3) for alleging that plaintiffs' counsel was agitated, disrespectful, and unhinged during the deposition despite a lack of record evidence supporting those allegations. See Mem. Op. 29-31. >ORDERS defendants to serve a copy of this order on Ms. Oh.

Was Alex Oh specifically responsible for this conduct? The order doesn't say.

What does this have to do with Clinton? Nothing, except in a six-degrees-of-kevin-bacon sense.

[1]: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.14559/g...

He was senior enough to share the blame because was more likely aware if not involved.

Melissa Hodgman is Peter Strozk's wife. Peter was (is??) the FBI-counter-intel agent notorious for his work on "Crossfire Hurricane," the Hillary Clinton email server, the "lying to the FBI" charges against Michael Flynn, and the questionable representations made repeatedly by the FBI to the FISA court.

by "notorious" you mean in the far right muck making mschine

sounds like a purely left-wing characterization of the facts

No, the far-left actually distrusts the FBI and intelligence agencies (it always has since at least Vietnam) and called out Russiagate as a mostly fabricated distraction from the evils of neoliberalism and globalization. It's the centrists who promote hate against Russia and China.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WRoTGlQ4JMA

jeez.. apparently this is all true:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Strzok

I am surprised that someone married to this person is acting as a high-ranking official in the executive branch of government controlled by the Democratic party

The surprises never end.

Hodgman has been at the SEC for years, that's not a partisan position. And she held the same office under Trump.

What does any of this have to do with the SEC? You're also passing credence that Peter Strozk is somehow notorious but I don't think that is by any means a universal truth. In my (mostly) independent circles he's just an agent who put some idiotic personal opinions on a government cellphone. His work has seemed to bear truth, and if anything things that couldn't be directly proven were withheld, which would be the mark of a good investigator.

The scare quote are flying pretty fast there. It's worth pointing out that Strzok's crime consists of personally being a democrat (probably) and thinking that the target of his investigation (Trump) was guilty. In the world of partisan media, of course, that's essentially capital treason. But to the rest of us? Meh.

Let's be honest: There are probably republicans in the government right now texting each other about how they hate Biden. And no one does, or should, care.

What?!????

The judge wrote an explanation but hasn't released it yet, because it's under seal.

>ORDERS the parties to meet and confer and to file a joint report by May 6, 2021, informing the Court whether they object to any portion of the Memorandum Opinion being unsealed. ...

The case in question is an important one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doe_v._Exxon_Mobil_Corp.

Edit - link that works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doe_v._Exxon_Mobil_Corp%2E (thanks layer8)

For some reason your Wikipedia link doesn't include the period at the end.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doe_v._Exxon_Mobil_Corp.

edit: maybe a bug with the way HN handles the text to HTML.

i think microsoft started the trend of link-ifying URLs in outlook text emails reader and excluding .,)]

after that started, every PM/exec just want it to work like it works everywhere-else. Everywhere-else being their corporate email client, and then it comes full circle and indeed does work like that everywhere.

Let’s see if this works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doe_v._Exxon_Mobil_Corp%2E

Yes! You can work around the issue by encoding the trailing dot as %2E.

And in Outlook you can enclose URLs in <…> delimiters.

HN's primitive URL parsing definitely doesn't derive from Microsoft :)

I did some work on it last year to take care of the worst omissions, and angle brackets should also now work to demark tricky URLs but there are still some edge cases. For example, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doe_v._Exxon_Mobil_Corp.> should work, but doesn't (yet!)

Edit: now it does. So should these:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_A*>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Weinberg#"Don't_trust_any...>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Northern_Railway_(U.S.)>

<https://developer.android.com/reference/android/location/Loc...>

They are all cases of URLs that don't get picked up correctly by HN's current parser. At least now they work with angle brackets.

It seems very unlikely that Exxon can be sued by folks living overseas in US courts for things govt members (members of their military) were involved in to benefit exxon, or am I not following this?

China clears and relocates folks all the time, I've never heard of those folks being able to sue in the US even if the removals benefit a US company.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_Tort_Statute (it's a complicated issue, and people are still arguing over the circumstances when this can apply). (It was narrowed quite a lot in 2013: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiobel_v._Royal_Dutch_Petroleu...)

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sec-enforcement-chief-alex-oh...

"Before joining the SEC, Oh was a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, where her corporate clients included Exxon Mobil Corp. In that role she was defending the oil company against two-decade-old allegations that it supported killings and tortures in Indonesia, court documents show."

More context here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-sec-enforcement-director-al...

That is helpful! Thank you.

> Ms. Oh decided to resign after a U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, in an order issued Monday, questioned her conduct during a deposition in a case filed against Exxon Mobil Corp. Ms. Oh’s law firm, Paul Weiss, represents Exxon.

I wonder what they saw...

they havent done their job at all. from tesla to spacs to crypto to GME.

What does/should the SEC have to do with crypto (in general; they obviously have some oversight for COIN)?

Crypto is a security. I’m under the impression that crypto is just a massive fraud, market manipulation, including insider trading. The whole MtGox debacle[0] cemented then idea in my mind that crypto is shady AF.

[0] Lest we forget, the original largest crypto exchange was named “Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange”.

SEC themselves ruled they don't consider BTC and ETH a security and they are currently going after XRP because they consider that to be a security.

MtGox has been dead in over 7 years, I'm not sure how that's relevant today when we have well regulated exchanges.

> we have well regulated exchanges

Are you referring to crypto exchanges as "well regulated"?

If so, can you give an example of one that fulfills that description?

Coinbase [1], Gemini [2], Kraken [3]. The ones that don't abide by the rules get shut down very quickly [4][5].

1: https://www.coinbase.com/legal/faq

2: https://support.gemini.com/hc/en-us/articles/204734485-Is-Ge...

3: https://support.kraken.com/hc/en-us/articles/360031282351-Is...

4: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-12/crypto-ex...

5: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/84020/binance-blocking-u...

I'm guessing Coinbase, Kraken and "Binance US" which is totally not the same company as Binance because that one was banned by the NYAG, it just happens to have the same name and owners but it's totally not the same company. Very well regulated.

Going back a bit further, lest we forget the huge amount of Viagra and Penis enlargement scams that was in this Internet thing during the 90s! I'm under the impression that this internet thing is just a massive fraud and scam .

Lest we forget, the original largest crypto exchange was named “Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange”

One of the largest tech companies in the world is named after a fruit.

Another is named after a very large number

A third started by selling books, is now the largest cloud infrastructure company in the world, and is named after a jungle.

Whether or not BTC or MtGox or both are/were scams, names tend to be pretty irrelevant these days.

> and is named after a jungle.

I thought it was named after a river?

The Amazon river runs through the Amazon... I'm not sure if the land area got the name from the river or the other way around. I see some mention of the company name referring to the river, but I wasn't sure if that was apocryphal, and I always associated the river and land together as part of the same thing. I could be wrong, in which case the company is named after a river, and shares the name with a jungle.

Bezos would have us believe that the region is named after the company

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/apr/25/amazon-d...

It was a repurposed trading platform originally for MTG

It was, and at best it had all the security of a comic book shop. At worst it was an inside job.

The idea that it was "an inside job" is laughable. Mark Karpeles was a doofus who got in over his head, churning out php scripts, while bounding up and down on his exercise ball chair. I remember that Roger Ver hostage video like it happened yesterday. For it to be "an inside job", they'd have to effectively be secret geniuses operating on time scales that have never been seen in events of this nature.

Crypto ICOs have been deemed to be a security offering, and are being regulated as such by the SEC.

Are you just listing things you don't like?

The government's job isn't to ban a list of things that other people get excited about, but which frustrate you.

If they would increase penalities and enforcement around failures to deliver we'd know they actually cared about a functioning market.

Too many attorney's, not enough CPA's / Economists or investors in their staff.

They operate within the constraints of thier authority and resources. Complain to you congress person and or senator.

I see r/superstonk is leaking.

Which I've never heard of.

The idea you can sell something you don't own AND then fail to deliver it, is ridiculous. The fact that only bigger players can get away with this largely penalty free is even sillier and increases market fragility.

Niiiice I love a power vacuum and distraction at the SEC!

Good opportunity to install a crypto-sympathizer and drop all the ICO cases. Gary Gensler would totally be down to get Brian Brooks in that role! The lawyer that was doing the first Bitcoin ETF applications for Gemini back in 2018 works at the SEC now too, I think in or near the division of enforcement!

Well, it's not like the SEC does anything meaningful these days anyway. Along with the FCC and FTC. In fact, I can't think of anything meaningful any of these agencies have done in recent history.

Edit: It's interesting this post in particular was so divisive. We don't have a well functioning market, my phone is effectively worthless these days, and monopoly and over-regulated corporate practices effect my day-to-day life in the most mundane of ways. But apparently that's not a good opinion here to share. OK.

They keep the honest people honest.

Which is good, but they don't keep the dishonest people from dishonest practices, protect citizens from risk, nor protect consumers from antitrust practices anymore, respectively, it seems.

I think that was the GP's point. They're implying that the agencies only engage in redundant work, not significant work.

OP's statement should be read as such:

"They make rules for people that follow rules. If you don't follow rules, then their rules do not apply to you."

The implication is that they lack will, capability, or force.

I think it's mainly capability. I know an SEC lawyer; he's successfully prosecuted a number of insider training cases, but thinks the SEC doesn't have the resources to take on really big players if they put up a fight, because they can overwhelm the SEC with legions of top lawyers and stalling tactics that can make cases take forever. The IRS is the same way; they've been cut way back so they can't effectively fight wealthy cheaters, so they mainly audit poor people for claiming the earned income tax credit incorrectly; those are easy cases for them to bring. A lot of this is because the IRS and SEC have been gutted by Congress to benefit their wealthy contributors.

This is not uncommon in USA regulation. I have an official letter from the head of enforcement for Missouri Department of Natural Resources saying that if a polluter doesn't stop polluting after they ask nicely, DNR won't make them stop.

> Which is good

Only if rule-following is == honesty.

There are probably honest people who can't afford to follow the rules (literally, in the sense of paying for the labor to check boxes on forms correctly) and dishonest people who can afford to cleverly check boxes on forms.

> I can't think of anything meaningful any of these agencies have done in recent history.

How much have you looked into it?

The SEC has done things about ICOs

This is just not true. From firsthand experience and just any basic research.

From a complete layman, Do you have any good data points to start research for this topic?

My initial thoughts are scanning through news websites.

At a first pass, https://www.sec.gov/news/pressreleases lists at least 8 enforcement actions in the month of April alone, along with a few other things.

The JOBS act?

Crowdfunding? Test the waters most recently? Expanding who is an accredited investor? No-action letters to various cryptos? The list goes on...

If you don't think the SEC are keeping busy you probably haven't been looking very hard. Ignoring enforcement which someone else mentioned, they are the only thing stopping exchanges charging every human on the planet $1000 each time they blink.

It's a full time job in itself, and the SEC can be quite heavy-handed in increasing competitiveness despite a continuous onslaught of lawsuits from incumbents every time they sneeze. Recent examples include approving an IEX order type that fundamentally undermines a traditional business model for the exchanges (but is beneficial to just about everybody else), and the new market data initiative approved last year which should greatly reduce extortionate rentseeking on the part of the exchanges, while forcing them to share data with the public (depth of book) that previously cost 6 figures per exchange per user annually. Both of these generated immediate lawsuits from NYSE

If you'd like a better sense of what they do, they have a number of RSS feeds: https://www.sec.gov/about/secrss.shtml.

Most of the time, what I see is press releases about scammers they caught.

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