President Joe Biden’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced it hired Melissa Hodgman to lead the agency as its acting director of the Division of Enforcement last week.
“Melissa’s dedication to investor protection, broad experience in the Division, and proven track record of collaboration and creative problem solving make her ideally suited to this role,” SEC Acting Chair Allison Herren Lee celebrated in a statement. “As Associate Director, Melissa has overseen a wide range of complex and programmatically important matters, and has been a leading voice in the Division on critical issues of diversity, hiring, and labor-management relations.”
Hodgman, according to the agency press release, has been with the SEC since 2008 as a longtime bureaucrat engaging in a wide range of litigation. Hodgman is also married to another, better-known longtime Washington bureaucrat, Peter Strzok, made famous for his role in the FBI’s deep-state Crossfire Hurricane operation, which featured a witch hunt investigation that sought to incriminate President Donald Trump.
Before being fired from the FBI, Strzok rose to prominence when it was revealed that Strzok had conspired with an FBI colleague-turned-mistress over the course of the investigation, as they tried to oust the elected president. Text messages that emerged in the summer of 2018 from an Office of Inspector General’s report revealed the two began conspiring the summer before Trump even won the November election. Page resigned from the FBI, only to later be hired by MSNBC, while Special Counsel Robert Mueller removed Strzok from the Russia investigation.
The pair had since become widely mocked by the president when railing against the Russia hoax and became the subject of the theatrical play “FBI Lovebirds: UnderCovers,” which was performed at the Conservative Political Action Conference last year.
