The White House's crypto adviser, Patrick Witt, defended Wednesday against accusations that President Donald Trump's own crypto ties contributed to last week's defeat of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, going gloves-off in Washington appearances this week, including an event in which he argued the president's cooperation was unprecedented.

"Democrats made it a political issue," Witt said at the Financial Markets Quality conference hosted at Georgetown University, suggesting that Democratic senators were disingenuous in light of the major housing bill that recently passed without similarly delving into government ethics, despite Trump's status as a real-estate developer. "Why was that bill okay to pass without a stringent, draconian ethics division?"

The Clarity Act negotiations were never able to get over the ethics debate — unrelated to its core market structure provisions — that it needed to address the crypto conflicts of interest of senior government officials. The president was the primary target of that effort, and at a couple of recent points in the legislative talks, he'd agreed to concessions that would have saddled him with some crypto limits.

"The president agreed to not one but two different ethics provisions that were unprecedented in nature," Witt said. Apart from an eventual willingness to submit to rules that would have forced Trump to divest crypto interests or place them in a blind trust, the White House was also ready to concede to letting state attorneys general pursue the federal government if it failed to police ethical lapses, he said.

"That is without a doubt the most unprecedented, far-reaching, stringent, restrictive ethics provision that has ever been agreed to by any president," Witt said.

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