Exclusive: The legal woes are piling up for Wall Street’s top cop.
On Thursday afternoon, 18 states filed to sue the Securities and Exchange Commission and its five commissioners accusing them of unconstitutional overreach and unfair persecution of the $3 trillion cryptocurrency industry under the leadership of agency chief Gary Gensler, FOX Business has learned.
Led by Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman, the lawsuit was jointly filed in a Kentucky district court in partnership with 17 other Republican attorneys general from Nebraska, Tennessee, West Virginia, Iowa, Texas, Mississippi, Montana, Arkansas, Ohio, Kansas, Missouri, Indiana, Utah, Louisiana, South Carolina, Oklahoma and Florida.
The complaint was filed in collaboration with crypto advocacy group DeFi Education Fund, which advocates for sound policy in the decentralized finance space.
Notably, the lawsuit alleges that the agency’s industry-wide crackdown on U.S. crypto companies is unconstitutional because it violates fundamental principles of federalism, which ensure that government agencies operate within their constitutionally defined roles.
Gensler, in his …