When Donald J. Trump was campaigning to return to the White House, he promised a major policy shift toward cryptocurrencies. It was a reversal for Mr. Trump. He had once been a skeptic of digital currencies, but by 2024 his family had become a crypto-industry player.
He set his sights on the Securities and Exchange Commission, the top federal regulator that polices wrongdoing in the financial markets. During the campaign, Mr. Trump promised crypto enthusiasts that he would stop the “persecution” and that “on Day 1, I will fire Gary Gensler,” the S.E.C.’s chair at that time.
The New York Times set out to understand — and quantify — just how much things had changed within the agency’s glass-walled facade after Mr. Trump resumed office.
To do so, The Times compiled a database of all crypto-related enforcement actions from the three most recent presidential administrations.
The reporters spent several months examining more than 10,000 agency announcements and hundreds of federal court cases. The reporters also conducted dozens of interviews with current and former government officials and industry players.
Reporters reviewed all news releases and litigation releases issued by the S.E.C. since Jan. 20, 2017, the beginning of the first Trump administration. They also searched CourtListener, a database maintained by the nonprofit Free Law Project, for cases not announced in those releases. In addition, The Times examined enforcement actions brought through the agency’s administrative proceedings, which are cases overseen by its own administrative law judges.
Reporters manually reviewed each case’s material to determine if it met The Times’s definition of a crypto case. That would be any enforcement action the S.E.C. brought against a person or company that produced, sold or facilitated the loan or sale of a crypto asset, or a case in which the S.E.C. classified crypto assets as securities. Cases that met this definition included those against token issuers, crypto exchanges, crypto brokers and dealers, as well as crypto lenders and established crypto mining ventures.
This definition included both prominent crypto firms as well as some small-time operators accused of operating fraudulent schemes. The definition excluded a case the S.E.C. filed this year against a firm that planned to issue crypto assets but never did. The Times also excluded cases against defendants who merely invested in or traded crypto.
All told, The Times identified 27 crypto-related federal court cases initiated under Mr. Trump’s first administration and 69 under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., but none under the second Trump administration as of Sept. 30, 2025, the end of the federal fiscal year. Reporters also identified 23 crypto-related administrative proceedings filed under the first Trump administration, 36 under Mr. Biden and, again, zero under the second Trump administration.
But the reporters also wanted a benchmark. How has the current administration’s S.E.C. handled the crypto cases it inherited differently than other cases left over from the Biden administration?
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To determine that, The Times examined the dockets for all federal court lawsuits brought by the S.E.C. between Jan. 20, 2021, and Jan. 19, 2025, when Mr. Biden was president. The reporters focused on cases with any docket activity since January 2024. Of those, they reviewed cases where at least some portion of the defendants’ liability had not yet been adjudicated when the new Trump administration took over.
A few more details about how The Times determined which cases were inherited:
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When determining if a case was complete, reporters did not consider the portion of a case pertaining to fines or other financial penalties, only the portion involving whether a defendant was liable.
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Reporters considered cases as settled or stayed on the date the parties agreed to that action, regardless of when a judge approved it. For example, in one crypto case filed during the Biden administration, the S.E.C. formally settled shortly after Mr. Trump’s 2025 inauguration. But that settlement was agreed to under Mr. Biden, according to documents and interviews, so it is not counted as a case inherited by the current administration.
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Cases appealed by defendants were counted as a continuation of the original case, rather than a separate case.
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The Times excluded cases that judges had stayed or administratively closed as of Sept. 30, 2025 because parallel criminal proceedings took priority.
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From its review, The Times excluded so-called subpoena enforcement actions, in which the S.E.C. filed a lawsuit to force someone to respond to a subpoena, as well as cases in which the S.E.C. designated a receiver to manage and distribute funds to victims of an alleged scheme.
When the reporters were done, they had identified 262 Biden-era S.E.C. federal court cases — crypto and otherwise — that remained active when Mr. Trump resumed office.
The reporters then examined the federal court docket history for each of those 262 cases, and categorized the outcomes — as of Sept. 30, 2025 — of the portions inherited by the Trump administration. The table below tallies those statuses. Cases that fell into more than one category, such as those settled for some defendants but ongoing for others, were classified as “mixed.”
The Times classified cases that were appealed under Mr. Biden and remained pending as of Sept. 30, 2025, as “ongoing, still pursuing” under Mr. Trump. A case the agency won under the second Trump administration that was on appeal as of Sept. 30, 2025 was classified as “S.E.C. win, case on appeal.”
The Times classified cases where the S.E.C. had partially won and partially lost a request for summary judgment as “mixed.” If the case was later settled, however, it was classified as “settled.”
The reporters considered the S.E.C. to have “pulled back” on a crypto case if it was categorized as “dismissed voluntarily,” “stayed, working to resolve” or “S.E.C. conceded.” Although settlements can benefit the plaintiff, the defendant or both, The Times classified certain settled cases as enforcement pullbacks if it determined that the S.E.C.’s proposed terms were favorable to the defendant.
After all that, the reporters used an artificial intelligence tool to help them check their work. Specifically, they used OpenAI’s GPT-5 large language model to review reporters’ manual classifications of whether a case was crypto-related, whether it was inherited by the next administration and how liability was decided. To do so, reporters provided the model with documents from each case and a detailed methodology. When the model output and The Times’s manual classification diverged, reporters reviewed the discrepancies.
Of the 23 crypto cases the current S.E.C. had inherited (21 from Biden and two from the first Trump administration), the agency pulled back from 61 percent of them, The Times found. Reporters noticed that many of those cases had something in common: defendants with ties to Mr. Trump. (For the crypto cases that the S.E.C. did not pull back from, The Times found no such ties.)
The Times considered two main types of ties: financial relationships with the Trump family’s businesses or contributions to his political causes. To document those connections, The Times reviewed records of contributions to Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign, political committees that support him, the White House ballroom and his inaugural fund. Reporters also identified which exchanges list cryptocurrencies that are linked to the Trump family. In addition, they reviewed regulatory filings, among other public records, to identify any deals between the defendants and the Trump family’s ventures.
All of the companies named in The Times’s investigation denied wrongdoing, and the S.E.C. said Trump ties played no rule in how the agency handled cases.
Andrea Fuller is a data journalist at The Times, using data analysis to make sense of complex topics.
The post How The Times Analyzed the S.E.C.’s Cryptocurrency Enforcement appeared first on New York Times.
