Vice President JD Vance issued a warning for Biden administration regulatory holdovers, including those behind efforts to use threats on banks to enforce government’s political will.
“This is my vow to every single person here: You will never see this administration trying to handicap your community or diminish the impact it’s had on the economy,” Vance told the Bitcoin 2025 conference at the Venetian in Las Vegas.
“Instead, we reject the Biden administration’s legacy of death by a thousand enforcement actions. We reject regulators.
“Maybe, maybe the most important thing that we did for this community, we reject regulators. And we fired Gary Gensler, and we’re going to fire everybody like him.”
Gensler was former President Joe Biden’s chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) who was behind Operation Choke Point 2.0 to target and debank the digital asset ecosystem.
Vance equated to regulatory actions against Bitcoin to those brought against law-abiding gun owners in the U.S. under the original Operation Choke Point during former President Barack Obama’s administration.
“You know the Secret Service is a little bit nervous because I told them these Bitcoin guys really like guns,” Vance joked at the start of the 24-minute speech. “But they really like the president and vice president of the United States, too, so I think we’re doing OK.”
Vance’s speech highlighted three administration priorities on Trump’s campaign vow to make Bitcoin great in America:
- Break down regulatory barriers.
- Institutionalize cryptocurrency.
- Provide regulatory clarity.
“Our administration, we prioritize eliminating the rules, the red tape and the lawfare that we saw aimed at crypto by our predecessors,” Vance said. “We’re ending the weaponization of federal regulations against this community.
“To put it simply: Operation Choke 2.0 is dead, and it’s not coming back under the Trump administration.
“And by the way, it’s crazy that was ever even controversial. The idea of using the regulatory power of the government to crush an industry and to crush people who espoused a view that you didn’t like – it’s crazy.
“But let my words today serve as Operation Choke Point, let me serve it its obituary.”
Biden administration regulators like Gensler use “consumer protection” as a guise for their abuses of power, Vance concluded.
“And we know that people like Gary Gensler, the game that they played is that, under the pretense of consumer protection, they attacked every single effort to democratize our financial markets – and that is over America,” Vance said. “I grew up in a working-class family. I believe that America is a place where anyone should be able to make a fortune, no matter where you grew up, what degree you may or may not have.
“And in recent years, I’m hard-pressed to think of a better place to do so than right here in the digital assets industry.”
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