Gary Gensler Might Go Down as Worst SEC Chair in History: Tom Emmer

The Republican House Majority Whip made the comments to Breitbart News on Tuesday, stating, “Gary Gensler might go down as the worst SEC chair in history.”

Emmer accused Gensler of deliberately covering up his actions and being “less than honest,” characterizing it as part of a broader pattern of questionable behavior by the Biden administration.

The outburst followed last week’s report from the SEC’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) on a year’s worth of missing texts from Gensler’s government-issued smartphone.

Gary Gensler might go down as the worst SEC chair in history.

The loss of nearly a year’s worth of text messages during his tenure is just another example of the less-than-honest behavior that marked the Biden administration.https://t.co/B1JF2mpAtV

— Tom Emmer (@GOPMajorityWhip) September 9, 2025

Missing Message Scandal

The SEC watchdog revealed that the IT department mistakenly wiped Gensler’s messages, erasing records tied to crypto enforcement actions and transparency. The data loss was exacerbated by poor change management, inadequate backups, ignored system alerts, and unaddressed vendor software flaws, it stated.

Around 1,500 messages from colleagues and other records were recovered, and around 38% of them concerned critical SEC action and conversations about suing digital asset platforms during the Biden administration’s war on crypto. Emmer said it was “just more fuel for the fire that he was running his own show.”

“I would argue that he was less than honest all the way through and this, this just smells. It smells when they talked about wanting to have a transparent, open-door policy. There’s nothing transparent about what that guy was doing.”

Emmer concluded that the Trump administration is undoing “all of this garbage that we dealt with for the last four years.”

This is just another example of less-than-honest behavior by the Biden administration, and in this particular case, “one of the worst bureaucrats that I’ve ever dealt with,” he said.

Double Standards at the SEC

At the same time the messages went missing – between October 2022 and September 2023 – the SEC cracked down on the use of messaging apps by banks and financial institutions.

Several prominent investment banking and financial institutions, including Barclays, Bank of America, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, UBS Securities, and Cantor Fitzgerald, were charged with violating record-keeping and books-and-records laws under the Securities and Exchange Act.

“Finance, ultimately, depends on trust. By failing to honor their recordkeeping and books-and-records obligations, the market participants we have charged today have failed to maintain that trust,” Gensler said at the time.