President Biden’s controversial pick to serve as a top Treasury Department official has not turned her thesis about Karl Marx over to the Senate Banking Committee, effectively ignoring a request from top Republican lawmakers.
Saule Omarova — a law professor at Cornell University and a 1989 graduate of Moscow State University — has generated suspicion over her apparent sympathy toward the Soviet Union and its purported gender equality. She has likewise called for the bankruptcy of oil companies to fight climate change and pushed for the Federal Reserve to manage consumer bank deposits.
Norbert Michel — who leads the Cato Institute’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives — told The Daily Wire on Wednesday that if she is appointed as Comptroller of the Currency, Omarova will have “enormous discretion to direct banking activity through examination and enforcement actions, including which types of customers banks lend to.”
In addition to her other controversies, Omarova has ignored requests from Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) — the Ranking Member of the Senate Banking Committee — to turn over her thesis, entitled “Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in Das Kapital.” Omarova wrote the paper during her time at Moscow State University, where she benefited from the V.I. Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship.
“While it appears that you have deleted any reference to your thesis in the version of your curriculum vitae (CV) that is currently available on the Cornell Law School website, the paper appeared on your CV as recently as April 2017,” Toomey wrote on October 6, asking her to submit a copy of the thesis to the Senate Banking Committee by October 13.
A Toomey spokesperson confirmed to The Daily Wire on Wednesday that Omarova has still not provided lawmakers with a copy of the document.
Meanwhile, in a New York Magazine article that dismisses concerns about the radical nominee as “ludicrous red-baiting,” Omarova claimed that she does not have the thesis.
“It was a written-exam type of thing,” Omarova told the outlet. “We were assigned mandatory topics, and I got assigned something about Karl Marx, economic theory, I don’t even remember. Nobody took it seriously; it was not meant to be an actual academic exercise. All you had to do was basically copy from whatever the textbook said, and that was that. So I wrote that paper, got my degree. Literally the next day, I forgot about it, just like every other graduate in my class forgot about their papers.”
Omarova is slated to appear before the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday. A member of Toomey’s office told The Daily Wire that Republicans will question Omarova on her proposals to nationalize retail banking, use the government to allocate credit and capital, place government officials on the boards of important banking organizations, employ government price-setting, and leverage central planning for the “greening” of the economy.
Though opposition to Omarova’s nomination is unrelated to her status as a Kazakh-American, Senate Republicans also expect to be labeled with a variety of “isms” by their Democratic colleagues.