Sunlight is the best disinfectant - unless you're Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Gary Gensler - who scrubbed evidence of a meeting with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from his calendar, along with key details of a meeting with Billionaire leftist-operative George Soros.
He also concealed September 21 meetings with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and former Bill Clinton White House official-turned-DC consultant, Minyon Moore.
Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs executive, Obama administration official, Clinton's 2016 campaign CFO, and FTX associate, essentially had two calendars. His public calendar showed that on Aug. 7, 2021, he only had a staff meeting, while his private calendar lists a meeting with Hillary Clinton, Fox News reports.
Thirteen days later on Aug. 20, 2021, Gensler's public calendar does list a meeting with Soros, but the agenda was hidden. His private calendar reveals that the meeting was held to discuss an upcoming WSJ op-ed Soros was planning to write in which he slammed BlackRock for launching investment products for Chinese customers, while also applauding the company's ESG policies.
Gensler's private calendar revealing the discrepancies was obtained by the watchdog group Energy Policy Advocates and shared with Fox News Digital. The group was only able to obtain the internal records after filing a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the SEC.
In recent days, around the time Fox News Digital contacted the SEC, the agency updated Gensler's public calendar to include his meeting with Clinton in August 2021. As recently as Wednesday the public calendar didn't include the meeting, and archived copies of the webpage from April also list just a meeting with staff. -Fox News
When contacted for comment, the SEC initially lied - saying that the Clinton meeting was visible on Gensler's public calendar. When confronted with screenshots to the contrary, the spokesperson said that the agency updates calendars "from time to time" when inaccuracies are discovered (by watchdog groups?).
Gensler also concealed several September 2021 meetings with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and Minyon Moore - both of which have been now updated on Gensler's public calendar.
"That even George Soros is calling out progressive darling BlackRock for craven blundering is striking — even if it did carry the requisite, tribal praise for BlackRock's truly damaging 'ESG' (environmental, social and governance) campaigning to impose their shared 'climate' agenda on the U.S., an agenda also much to China's delight," said Chris Horner, a lawyer representing Energy Policy Advocates. "That it appears Soros received counsel from Gary Gensler on the mega-donor's call for more SEC powers as a result is truly astonishing."
"This gives further credence to the widespread concern that Gensler is deeply politicizing a supposedly independent commission," he continued. "He may have been Hillary Clinton's ‘Progressive Beacon’ not long ago, but Gary Gensler is now the SEC chairman, and his calendar indicates he knew the purpose of the meeting. It seems important to know whose idea this was, why, what was said arranging it and through what channel."
According to the SEC spokesperson, Gensler has never asked anyone to 'draft or submit' an op-ed, but declined to comment on the meeting with Soros.
Gensler has faced heavy criticism from business groups and Republican lawmakers for pushing progressive policies, including a climate disclosure rule that would require publicly traded companies to share carbon emissions data and other climate information.
Reps. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., and Andy Barr, R-Ky., two top GOP members on the House Financial Services Committee, introduced legislation this month that would limit the SEC's ability to require such climate disclosures. -Fox News
"That this and Gensler's consultation with Hillary were scrubbed from the public version of his calendar is frankly the least surprising aspect of this," Horner continued. "The SEC first told Energy Policy Advocates that the publicly posted calendars were all they would get."
"Energy Policy Advocates challenged that, pointing out that these sanitized versions, typically posted months after the fact, were certainly not produced from memory and the group wanted the originals. Here you see the reason for the scrubbing these internal versions receive."
