Here’s the question you have to ask yourself about the Biden White House: Did it understand that singling out the crypto industry for persecution was inappropriate?

That is, did people inside understand that putting the screws to companies that were operating within the bounds of the law was just really not what government is supposed to do?

Because, look, that’s not what an American government is supposed to do. Rule-of-law means equal treatment, that government does not pick winners or guarantee losers.

So, if you accept the proposition that they knew what they were doing was not appropriate, then the fact that the administration and its agencies never actually explicitly forbade any crypto market activity makes sense.

When power wants to act inappropriately, it prefers not to spell it out. Power likes a nudge.

“By utilizing the banking system to enforce ideological goals, the Administration bypassed Congress, undermined due process, and threatened the principles of a free market economy. These backdoor efforts to debank politically disfavored industries corrode the public’s trust in our financial regulators,” staff report, House Committee on Financial Services, Dec. 2025.

All it takes to see that the Biden White House’s campaign to shut crypto companies out of banking services was coordinated and widespread is to look at publicly available documents.

The Republican-led House Committee on Financial Services came out with a report Monday, “Operation Choke Point 2.0: Biden’s Debanking of Digital Assets.”

Debanking, in plain English: Creating friction around using financial services, like checking accounts or payroll or money transmission. Remember, it’s not legal to transact digitally in the United States without intermediaries, so denying banking services basically means shutting a company out of doing business at all.

Obviously, this is a political document, one that comes from the currently ruling party. That party has a drum to beat. They want to keep crypto voters and crypto money on the elephant’s side. So, it’s legitimate to take their characterizations with some skepticism.

Fair.

But if you just look at the publicly available documents that they compiled in this report, a picture comes clear. We knew about all these documents, but they came in dribs and drabs, some without fanfare.

The message the administration was sending to American banks and financial institutions: Do you want this headache? Is it worth it? Because we’ve already made working with these companies hard, but we can make it harder any time we want.

The enforcement actions, the lawsuits, the busts, those were sexy. The state vs. people. Sometimes we even got a perp walk.

But that wasn’t what really mattered.

So we’re going to go through the timeline. I’m going to do this in plain English, which might sacrifice a little precision, of course. But if you want to read all the bureaucrat gobbledygook, I have provided links to the primary documents, and there’s even more citations in the House report.

It’s the story that’s needed here. Anyone who needs the specifics can go to the sources. This post has the legal weight of a fat sack of nothing, but we’re doing this for history’s sake.

• November 18, 2021. OCC Interpretive Letter 1179. Brian Brooks, the previous Comptroller, had put out some letters offering guidance for supervised institutions to engage in some basic services: crypto custody, holding stablecoin reserves (like short-term Treasuries) and participating in stablecoin networks. This letter reined that all back in, requiring supervisees to check with the agency first. The seek-permission-for-everything-but-never-get-it era had begun.

• March 9, 2022. Biden’s Executive Order 14067. The order seemed to open the door for reasonable policy on cryptocurrency, but it called for a long study period first. This was when I noticed the way the Biden administration liked to namecheck financial innovation but also pair it with comments about instability and crime as well. Before lone, I would see that it did that every time, which proved to be telling.

  • Notably, the first two reports the White House wanted to see pertained to fighting financial crime committed with digital assets. Looking back, that foreshadowed the following. Benefit of the doubt? Denied.

• March 31, 2022. SEC Staff Accounting Bulletin 121. This one said that banks who wanted to custody crypto assets had to offset them on their own balance sheets, as if they were liabilities. Which strongly discouraged the most well-established custodians from providing these services to products consumers might use.

So. Are we still calling what Nic Carter dubbed Operation Choke Point 2.0 a conspiracy theory?

Look: When the joint statement came out, the whole crypto industry had had a full year of throwing tens of billions of dollars worth of assets in the garbage. We could see that one actor in particular had behaved very, very badly. Criminally, in fact.

The government needed to be seen taking some kind of action. We all want to give political leaders the benefit of the doubt. But I knew when I saw the joint statement from the big three banking regulators that this was more than that.

But if the public was skeptical about the Choke Point narrative, I understand. However, once you lay it all out, it becomes hard to see policymakers taking a breather while they sorted out how to proceed with orderly blockchain regulation.

This was a coordinated effort to sink a disruptive industry. Disruptive, but not illegal.

After all, if the administration wanted to ban crypto, it could have brought a measure to Congress at any time. We could have had that conversation the appropriate way.

But they didn’t do that, did they? The administration could have proposed anything they wanted to Congress, except policymakers knew that if a legislative process really got rolling, the Biden administration was not going to come out with a product it liked.

“Regulators used this discretion to exert substantial pressure on financial institutions—often through informal guidance, such as interagency statements or interpretive letters—to discourage these entities from engaging in digital asset-related activities,” from the House report.

This quote lays out the real story.

The enforcement actions, the lawsuits, the busts, those were sexy. The state vs. people. Sometimes we even got a perp walk.

But that wasn’t what really mattered.

What mattered were a dozen boring memos. Boring to everyone but compliance departments, that is. To compliance departments, these notes were flashing neon warning signs.

If you’ve taken Economics 101 then you have had this drilled into you: A little bit of friction goes a long way. But these policymakers were not deploying a little bit. They were capable of infinite friction.

So what happened? Banks backed down. Serving crypto clients might have been lucrative, but it wasn’t worth all the agency hassles.

Power prefers to suggest rather than direct, because if it doesn’t have to come out with an explicit order, it’s harder for anyone to hold it accountable.

In the depths of the Biden years, especially after Marc Andreessen went on Joe Rogan and started talking about debanking, the enforcers of conventional wisdom rallied to call his accounts misinformation.

Banks were not following edicts to avoid crypto, we were told. It’s just that crypto tends to attract suspicious activity, and that mess is more trouble than it’s worth for banks, they said (is it, though?).

Which was nonsense in the way those writers meant it, but it was not nonsense in fact. It was too much trouble to serve this industry, but not because their businesses weren’t worth banking. Crypto businesses were too much trouble because the prudential regulators had contrived to make it too much trouble.

And as these documents show, they didn’t “conspire” to do it. All of this is right out in the open. No need for a smoke-filled room when you can get away with press releases. It’s just that all the policies were issued slowly enough, in boring, low-profile documents that were sprinkled heavily with immaterial caveats.

Watching the debanking policies roll out was like watching mold grow on bread. You could be convinced that nothing was actually happening as long as you were staring, but if you play back the tape on super-speed?

It’s pretty gross.

Was the coordinated anti-crypto initiative illegal? I doubt it. That’s not the point.

It’s just very disappointing.

1 Fun fact: You have to go to the Wayback Machine to find the joint statement now. The Fed has deleted it from their site. It should be here, with a big WITHDRAWN stamp across it. But this one is just gone.