Matthew Cunningham-Cook is a journalist and active in the labor movement. He has been published in The American Prospect, The Nation, The Intercept, In These Times, The Lever, Jacobin, Al Jazeera, and The New York Times. The views expressed are his own.
Rep. Angie Craig is getting desperate. In a recent interview with KAAL in Austin, Minnesota, she stated that Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, her Democratic primary rival to fill Tina Smith’s U.S. Senate seat, “is going to have to accept accountability for the massive widespread fraud in Minnesota and not doing more sooner about it.”
Left unmentioned is that Craig is arguably the biggest Democratic champion of the most widespread fraud of the century, and perhaps in modern history: cryptocurrency.
Unlike gold or platinum, which have critically important industrial uses, crypto has no use value in society. The only thing that crypto works for is for tax evasion (for the wealthy) or for separating fools from their money (everyone else). In 2025 alone, Americans lost $80 billion to crypto scams, according to an estimate from the Consumer Federation of America. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, scored a $1.4 billion crypto windfall last year.
If you take a look at Craig’s issues page, the first thing you see is not the congresswoman’s position on any issues, but a “redbox” detailing her criticisms of Flanagan—feeding information to any super PAC about how she wants them to attack the lieutenant governor. Look further down, and you find that Craig doesn’t mention the issue that has consumed much of her time in Congress: making it easier for the cryptocurrency industry to fleece ordinary Americans.
Showcasing her commitment to bipartisanship, Craig worked with a noted fascist, Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN), to introduce the Clarity Act, serving as the only high-ranking Democrat on the original bill. The Clarity Act is the most sweeping piece of pro-crypto legislation to be passed under the Trump administration, and there is currently a massive full-court press by the industry to pass it after Craig shepherded it through the House last July.
Craig’s role as the high priestess of the Clarity Act epitomizes our nation’s pay-to-play activities. In 2024, crypto-backed super PACs spent $1 million on bribes advertisements backing Craig’s reelection; she earned an "A" grade from the Stand With Crypto Alliance. Instead of championing SNAP with her legislative energy as the top Democrat on the Agriculture Committee, she’s championing crypto. Why? Poor kids don’t have a super PAC.
Craig has gone so far overboard for the industry that she has sacrificed relationships with powerful colleagues like California Rep. Maxine Waters, the top Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, getting into a heated argument with the far-more-accomplished Waters in a House Democratic caucus meeting last year. What was the argument about, exactly? Waters and other senior Democrats like Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes wanted stronger protections in legislation to bar Trump from profiting off crypto. True to form, Craig was opposed for further accountability for Trump.
Adding to concerns about the Clarity Act, the National Consumers League pointed out that “the bill still contains a ‘DeFi Loophole’ that explicitly exempts developers of decentralized platforms. This allows all sorts of illicit actors—organized crime, human traffickers, and terrorist organizations—to route money through platforms where no central entity is held accountable.”
That Craig would be advancing pro-terrorism legislation is particularly ironic, as she was one of just 22 Democrats in the House to vote to censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) in 2023, ostensibly because Tlaib was spreading “disinformation” about Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The Wall Street Journal reported that Hamas collected $41 million in crypto donations from 2020 to 2023.
Denouncing her colleagues for being a voice of conscience about a war that has now killed 73,000 Palestinians, 21,000 of them children? Yes. Enabling donations to designated terrorist organizations? Also yes, for Angie Craig.
But the terrorism component is just the tip of the iceberg. As someone who has been writing about our nation’s FUBAR finance industry for over a decade, I can state with “clarity” that crypto represents an enormous structural danger to our economy. By facilitating the allocation of retirement assets to the industry, as Craig’s legislation would do, Craig is recreating the same conditions that caused the 2008 financial crisis.
How, exactly? The ‘08 collapse was caused by the rise of exempting derivatives from securities regulation, in the form of the Commodities Futures Modernization Act. In 1999, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, under then-Chair Brooksley Born, was exploring regulating derivatives, which are complex financial products based on contracts that are executed under certain market conditions. Under the influence of Epstein BFF Larry Summers, then serving as treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, Congress immediately passed the Commodities Futures Modernization Act, barring the CFTC from regulating the over-the-counter derivatives market.
That enabled an orgy of speculation over the next nine years, much of it indirectly coming out of Americans’ retirement funds. The result was the 2008 financial crisis. Enabling the same type of gambling on crypto could only result in disaster.
But by the time that rolls around, Craig is hoping to be safely ensconced in a six-year term in the Senate, which even if she only serves one term, is usually a ticket to untold riches to last a lifetime. It’s the rest of us who will be left holding the bag. Nice work if you can get it.
