Sen. Pat Toomey, ranking Republican on the Banking Committee, requested President Joe Biden’s pick for comptroller of the currency, Saule Omarova, to hand over a copy of the thesis she wrote while attending Moscow State University titled: Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in The Capital.
Omarova was born in Soviet-controlled Kazakhstan and attended college on the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship. She graduated in 1989 before the fall of the USSR and is now a law professor at Cornell University. Her nomination has caused some controversy given her academic musings, including advocacy for ending banking “as we know it.”
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Toomey, who will lead the GOP charge against Omarova’s nomination, sent her a letter on Wednesday that seeks more information about her thesis. He asserted she deleted references to it on the current iteration of her curriculum vitae, although argued the paper was included in her CV as recently as 2017.
“Given that your thesis was written while you were a student at Moscow State University in the late 1980s, I assume that it was written in Russian and will require translation,” the Pennsylvania lawmaker said, adding that committee staff had previously reached out about the thesis. “Unfortunately, we have not received any assurances that the Committee would receive a copy of the paper in a timely fashion.”
The Washington Examiner contacted Cornell University to request a copy of the thesis in question but did not immediately receive a response.
Omarova’s nomination has courted controversy given a recent paper she authored titled, “The People’s Ledger: How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy.” In it, Omarova offers a blueprint for “radically reshaping the basic architecture and dynamics of modern finance.”
She advocates handing the Federal Reserve near-total control of the U.S. financial system and suggests the Fed’s balance sheet should be reimagined to operate as “the ultimate public platform for both modulating and allocating the flow of sovereign credit and money in the national economy.”
Her past tweets about the Soviet Union have also drawn scrutiny.
“Until I came to the US, I couldn’t imagine that things like gender pay gap still existed in today’s world. Say what you will about old USSR, there was no gender pay gap there. Market doesn’t always ‘know best,’” she wrote amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Toomey is requesting a Russian-language copy of her college thesis and an English copy, should it exist, before Oct. 13.
