By Chris Prentice and Echo Wang
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Jay Clayton, President Donald Trump’s pick as U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said the office is well positioned to focus on national security and combating terrorist financing and money laundering.
Trump last week nominated Clayton, former chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. The agency is known for its approach to financial crime and an unusual degree of independence from the rest of the Justice Department.
“New York City is the hub for capital flows and communications, which makes that oversight of the police and prosecutorial function particularly important,” Clayton said Wednesday at an event at the Japan Society in New York.
“It actually continues to prove that we follow the rules of the road here in the U.S.”
Trump has announced several top appointments in the weeks since he won the election. On Wall Street, investors are focused on his upcoming picks for treasury secretary and the heads of the top financial regulators.
When asked for details about his possible plans for SDNY, Clayton told Reuters: “It’s a great office. The staff, their qualifications, their experience.”
Clayton, a lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell who specializes in mergers and capital raisings, also said the regulatory regime for mergers and acquisitions is likely to accelerate during the next administration, with possible exceptions when transactions raise trade and consumer protection issues.
“If you want your M&A deal to go through and you want the government to feel good about it, make sure you have the consumer on your side,” he said.
Clayton also spoke about cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, which some financiers have been skeptical about.
“I’m not surprised that people are wrong,” he said. “Now it provides a function that we really didn’t have before, which is a fairly frictionless lubricant between economies.”
Trump has vowed to make the US “the crypto capital of the planet.” In September, Trump and his sons announced a new crypto company, World Liberty Financial. Crypto investors have welcomed the change in tone after several years of heightened scrutiny from regulators.
(Reporting by Chris Prentice and Echo Wang; Editing by Lananh Nguyen and Peter Graff)
