Kirsten Gillibrand, Crypto’s Favorite Democrat

Photo: Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times/Redux

At first, Maple was by my side. Kirsten Gillibrand’s Labradoodle pressed himself against my legs, happily accepting scratches and offering up a stuffed animal he hoped I would tug from his mouth (I obliged). New York’s junior senator, her once-blonde hair now closer to the white of Maple’s coat, then sat down across from me in her office, ready to explain how cryptocurrency had become one of her most prominent legislative priorities.

It was not an obvious place for her to end up. Two decades ago, Gillibrand won election to the House as a right-leaning Democrat from a conservative upstate district. After her appointment to Hillary Clinton’s vacated Senate seat three years later, she moved sharply left, emerging as a leading voice against sexual assault in the military and on college campuses. At the height of the Me Too movement, she led the charge in calling for Senator Al Franken to resign, then ran for president in 2019 as a staunch progressive, describing some of her former positions as moral failings and warning against “circles and systems of power” sustained by “corruption and greed.” Today, she is the Democratic Party’s leading champion of an industry notorious for fraud, spectacular collapses, and scams — and the eye-watering sums it spends to win the favor of politicians in both parties.