Last week, I wrote two posts that, taken together, may have seemed far-fetched. In the first, I described SEC enforcement staff being sidelined in their own settlement discussions. In the second, I argued that something was deeply wrong at the SEC, that Margaret Ryan’s abrupt departure had the unmistakable smell of something rotten, and that the official explanation was fiction dressed up as a press release.
It all sounded implausible. It wasn’t.
Reuters has now confirmed what many of us suspected: Margaret Ryan didn’t just quietly resign. She clashed, repeatedly and directly, with Chair Atkins over cases with ties to President Trump, including Justin Sun and Elon Musk. She wanted to pursue fraud. She was told, in effect, not to.
