Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren rally by Capitol Hill on March 22 as part of a national day of action against President Donald Trump's SEC pick. | John Shinkle/POLITICO Warren, Sanders seize on SEC nominee to attack Trump

President Donald Trump is betraying his populist pledge to rein in Wall Street with his nominee to head the SEC, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders said on Wednesday.

At a campaign-style rally outside the Capitol, the lawmakers portrayed high-powered lawyer Jay Clayton as unfit to chair the agency that polices the stock market because he has represented many of the nation’s biggest banks.


“How many people seriously believe that someone who has spent 25 years hobnobbing with these giant, Wall Street bankers is suddenly going to get tough on his buddies?” Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, asked the crowd. “We cannot afford to have an SEC chairman who will not stand up to Wall Street.”

Clayton will go before the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday for a confirmation hearing, where he will face tough questions from Warren and other Democratic lawmakers.

For more than 20 years, he has worked for law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, where his clients included Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Deutsche Bank and UBS. His wife works for Goldman Sachs but has said she will resign if he is confirmed.

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Speaking before the crowd of about 100, Sanders quoted Trump’s statements from a January 2016 campaign rally in Iowa where the future president said: “I'm not going to let Wall Street get away with murder. Wall Street has caused tremendous problems for us.”

“Now, [Trump] wants Goldman Sachs’s go-to lawyer, Jay Clayton, to lead the SEC,” Sanders said. “Clayton is the Wall Street establishment that Donald Trump said he was going to take on.”

Sanders also stressed that Clayton represented Valeant Pharmaceuticals, “a company that increased the price of its lead-poisoning drug from $950 to $27,000 a year over a two-year period.”

During his testimony on Thursday, Clayton will emphasize the need for tough enforcement on the financial industry, according to excerpts of his opening statement provided to POLITICO.

“I am 100 percent committed to rooting out any fraud and shady practices,” Clayton will say. “I recognize that bad actors undermine the hard-earned confidence that is essential to the efficient operation of our capital markets. I pledge to you and the American people that I will show no favoritism to anyone.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks during a rally opposing President Trump's nominee Jay Clayton to be Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 20. | John Shinkle/POLITICO

Clayton is the latest in a string of people in Trump’s administration who came from Wall Street. They include National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Dina Powell, a top national security adviser.

Democrats cannot stop Clayton’s Senate confirmation unless three Republicans oppose him, which is unlikely. Mnuchin, a former Goldman banker, was confirmed as Treasury secretary with all but one Democrat voting against him.

So the Sanders and Warren rally appeared to be part of a broader attempt to score political points for battles down the road.

“We want a government, we want [a] SEC, that doesn’t work for Wall Street," Warren said. "We want one that works for the American people.”