She Runs S.E.C. He’s a Lawyer. Recusals and Headaches Ensue.
Their legal careers, and by extension their marriage, are the stuff of lore. Mary Jo White leads the Securities and Exchange Commission; her husband, John, practices law at an old-guard firm as elite as the corporations it represents. Together, they are a legal power couple that straddles Wall Street and Washington like few others.
Their careers, however, can at times collide, generating headaches for the S.E.C. as it pursues wrongdoing in the nation’s financial markets, according to interviews with lawyers and a review of federal records. In the nearly two years since Ms. White took over the agency, she has had to recuse herself from more than four dozen enforcement investigations, the interviews and records show, sometimes delaying settlements and opening the door, in at least one case, to a lighter punishment.
The interviews and records detail for the first time the extent of Ms. White’s recusals and the implications of her absence. When ethics rules force her out of cases, the S.E.C. loses her expertise as a former federal prosecutor who has pledged a tough line on Wall Street, underscoring the unintended consequences of recruiting government officials from the small world of the legal elite. . .
Like her Democratic colleagues, Ms. White, a political independent, typically supports large financial penalties. The agency’s Republican commissioners, Daniel M. Gallagher Jr. and Michael S. Piwowar, are decidedly more skeptical. In a speech from 2013, Mr. Gallagher raised concerns about “eye-popping” corporate penalties — or what he called “shareholder penalties, since that’s what they are.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/business/dealbook/sec-hamstrung-by-its-leaders-legal-ties.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Not good, imo. I've liked and supported her, as did my (now deceased) husband who worked there, but these issues seem to handicap this important agency too much.
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