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Saule Omarova, President Joe Biden’s nominee to run the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, has come under fire from the banking industry for views she expressed on whether the Federal Reserve should offer individual bank accounts to Americans. Now, a key Republican is seeking more information on her work as an undergraduate student in the USSR.
Omarova graduated from Moscow State University in 1989 with a degree in philosophy, according to a curriculum vitae posted on the website of Cornell Law School, where she teaches courses on financial regulation. She attended the university on the Lenin Personal Academic Scholarship, which the résumé describes as “the highest academic merit-based scholarship” available to students in the Soviet Union. (She also holds a law degree from Northwestern University in Chicago and a doctorate in political science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.)
Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania wrote to Omarova in an Oct. 5 letter requesting a copy of her thesis, which was titled “Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution in The Capital.”
“While it appears that you have deleted any reference to your thesis in the version of your curriculum vitae (CV) that is currently available on the Cornell Law School website, the paper appeared on your CV as recently as 2017,” the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee wrote, linking to an archived version of the CV that cites the thesis title.
Toomey said he assumed the thesis was written in Russian and would require translation and therefore requested a copy of the thesis last month but received, he said, no “assurances that the committee would receive a copy of the paper in a timely fashion.”
Omarova, born in the then–Soviet republic Kazakhstan, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Biden has faced a challenge in identifying a nominee to lead the OCC, the regulator that oversees nationally chartered banks, who is satisfactory to both the conservative and liberal wings of the Democratic Party. Progressives reportedly thwarted the nomination of Michael Barr, an Obama Treasury Department veteran, calling him too friendly toward large banks. But Omarova’s nomination is no less controversial due to a perception that she’s hostile to the banking industry.
Capital Alpha Partners analyst Ian Katz predicted in September that there was just a 35% chance that Omarova would be confirmed by the Senate. “We don’t think Omarova would get a single Republican vote,” Katz said. “So in a 50-50 Senate, she needs the support of every Democrat. We don’t see it happening.”
