Rubio questions Biden's Soviet-born nominee’s communist policies, sympathies

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) accused Saule Omarova, President Joe Biden’s nominee for Comptroller of the Currency, of promoting communist financial policies in a tweet on Friday. 

“Saule Omarova supports abolishing private bank accounts, using govt to bankrupt energy companies & creating a Soviet-style “National Investment Authority,’” Rubio specifies in his post. “She supports communist policies & a communist should not be our Comptroller of the Currency.”

Saule Omarova supports abolishing private bank accounts, using govt to bankrupt energy companies & creating a Soviet style “National Investment Authority”

She supports communist policies & a communist should not be our Comptroller of the Currency

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) November 19, 2021

This refers in part to Omarova’s 2021 paper titled “The People’s Ledger,” which argues the Federal Reserve should take over consumer bank deposits and become “the ultimate public platform for generating, modulating, and allocating financial resources in a modern economy,” according to the Wall Street Journal editorial board. 

Rubio is the son of Cubans who fled to the United States in 1956 shortly before Fidel Castro rose to power and established a communist state. Castro appointed Che Guevara, who as chief of Cuba’s central bank seized American banks using armed militias in 1960. 

Omarova is a law professor at Cornell University and was born in Kazakhstan when it was under the former Soviet Union. She spoke in her confirmation hearing Thursday of how her family had died in Stalin’s purges and how she was raised by her grandmother. 

“I grew up without knowing half of my family. My grandmother herself escaped death twice under Stalin,” Omarova said. “This is what seared in my mind. That's who I am.”

Rubio’s tweet comes a day after Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) accused her directly during her confirmation of being a communist. 

“I don’t know whether to call you ‘professor’ or ‘comrade,’” Kennedy said after saying she had joined a Marxist Facebook group in 2019 to discuss “socialist and anti-capitalist views.” Omarova responded that she was not a Communist, did not subscribe to the ideology and did not remember joining any such Facebook group. 

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is an independent bureau within the Treasury Department that “charters, regulates, and supervises all national banks and federal savings associations as well as federal branches and agencies of foreign banks.” It supervises about 1,200 financial institutions.