President Biden’s controversial, Soviet-born pick to lead a key branch of the Treasury Department admitted in a newly unearthed video that she “wants” traditional fuel industries “to go bankrupt,” the New York Post reported. Saule Omarova, Biden’s pick to be the comptroller of the currency, was filmed calling coal, oil and gas “troubled industries” in which “a lot of the small players … are going to probably go bankrupt.” “At least, we want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change, right?” she said in the now-viral clip. The Cornell University law professor made the remarks in February during a “Social Wealth Seminar” event hosted by the Jain Family Institute. By Thursday, it had been viewed more than 1.5 million times on Twitter after being shared by the American Accountability Foundation (AAF). Proving it wasn’t “a slip of the tongue,” the AAF posted a second clip in which Omarova said that “the way we basically get rid of those carbon financiers is we starve them of their sources of capital.” It comes as at least three Senate Democrats — Jon Tester of Montana, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia — have raised concerns with the White House over Omarova’s nomination, stressing that the “list may grow in the coming days.”
