Banking Regulator Nominee: "Senator, I'm not a communist."

"I don't know whether to call you professor or comrade," Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) said Thursday during a confirmation hearing for Saule Omarova, the president's nominee to serve as Comptroller of the Currency, the nation's top banking regulator.

"Senator, I'm not a communist. I do not subscribe to that ideology. I could not choose where I was born," replied Ms. Omarova, who was born in Kazakhstan. "My family suffered under the communist regime."

The nominee has taken heat from Republicans over an academic paper she recently wrote on the banking system as well as papers she wrote while in college. close