In 2018, Paul Atkins was paid $1,450 an hour to be an expert witness by Devon Archer’s lawyers as they tried to undermine accusations that their client defrauded a Native American tribal entity and others out of $60 million.
While Mr. Archer was convicted anyway, he was pardoned by President Trump in March.
And last week, with Mr. Atkins serving as the Trump-appointed chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, his agency moved to dismiss a civil case against Mr. Archer related to the same fraud.
Mr. Archer had earned fans in Mr. Trump’s circles by providing information about the dealings of his onetime business partner Hunter Biden, the son of former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., but the Bidens were not implicated in the fraud that was the subject of the S.E.C. enforcement action.
An S.E.C. spokesman said Mr. Atkins recused himself from the decision to drop the case. But the episode highlighted critics’ concerns about the deregulatory instincts and Wall Street connections of Mr. Atkins, who built a lucrative career advising some of the very financial interests he is now meant to oversee.
Since before Mr. Atkins’s confirmation hearing, Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, has pushed him for information about a consulting firm he owned called Patomak Global Partners and chided him for not being more forthcoming.
“Now we all know why,” Ms. Warren said in a statement to The New York Times on Tuesday. She accused Mr. Atkins of leading a “weaponization of the S.E.C. to serve his Wall Street friends at the expense of Main Street investors.”
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The post The S.E.C. Dropped a Complaint Against Its Chairman’s Former Client appeared first on New York Times.
