The Biden administration's moves to cover depositors and investors of the collapsed Silicon Valley Bank is "another gift to the rich" that will be funded by taxpayers, Sen. Marsha Blackburn said Thursday on Newsmax.
"You look at those depositors and investors with Silicon Valley Bank, and you have tech people that are involved in green energy," the Tennessee Republican told Newsmax's "Wake Up America." "They have a board that is very much involved with Democrat politics, you have DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] and ESG [environment, social, and governance] at the top of their to-do list. That's what they were concerned about."
Blackburn added that taxpayers in her state shouldn't have to bail out SVB or Signature Bank, which the New York Department of Financial Services seized Sunday after SVB's collapse last Friday.
"Everyone contributes to this fund, but it's not their problem in Tennessee," said Blackburn. "It is the problem of the depositors and the investors and the board of directors and the management team of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank."
The SVB collapse, Blackburn said, is due to a lack of supervision.
"Whether it was the California regulators or the San Francisco Fed in the case of SVB, there was just not the supervision that should have been," she said. "They knew the bank had had fast growth. They knew the bank was looking at bonds and placing their money in bonds. They knew that this was setting up a liquidity issue.
"It is now coming to light that SVB had gone a month or so ago over to Goldman and said, 'How do we deal with this?' They knew that there was an issue, and neither the San Francisco Fed nor the California regulators would step up to do something."
Blackburn also discussed a letter that she and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., sent to Pinterest CEO Bill Ready to voice concerns about the safety of children after an NBC News report showed that adult male users were able to create boards on the site that were "dedicated to the sexualization of underage girls" and images of young girls were found being suggested by Pinterest's recommendation engine.
"Sen. Blumenthal and I have worked on this issue of kids' online safety in a bipartisan manner" for the past few years, and have "investigated and held hearings on all of these social media platforms," Blackburn said. "The pedophiles are tracking and stalking children, threatening children, and this is all coming from social media platforms.
"And then to hear this from Pinterest that as you've got parents that are probably doing innocent pins of their children, they are being accessed by pedophiles who are building libraries of these photos."
About NEWSMAX TV:
NEWSMAX is the fastest-growing cable news channel in America!
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.