I'm Virginia Allen, I'm Samantha Sharis, and this is the Daily Flutal Top News for Thursday, December 1st.

Here are today's headlines.

U.S. Senators have kicked off the first hearing on the recently bankrupt cryptocurrency firm FTX,

the chairman of the Commonity Futures Trading Commission, Rosston Benham, testified before the Senate Agriculture Committee panel this morning.

The committee questioned Benham about the collapse of FTX and whether it could have been avoided with more government oversight.

Here's what Benham had to say, per Yahoo Finance.

We are here today because the latest events involving FTX lay bear the consequences in demand accountability.

As I have stated publicly many times before, I strongly believe that we need to move quickly on a thoughtful regulatory approach to establish guardrails in these fast growing markets of evolving risk,

or they will remain an unsafe venture for customers and could present a growing risk to the broader financial system.

Failure to act will leave consumers who have made investments in digital commodities largely unprotected,

unlike other federal financial regulators, the CFTC lacks the necessary and direct authority to write rules and to oversee this marketplace.

Instead, we may only reach it through more limited authority activated when fraud or manipulation has already occurred,

while we can and do hold perpetrators accountable when we find fraud or manipulation for the victims of the scheme, it's already too late.

Democrat Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Senator Debbie Stabenow and Republican Ranking Member Senator John Boosman presided over the hearing.

Before the collapse of FTX the two senators introduced a bill that would regulate cryptocurrency markets.

Boosman said in his remarks that the sudden bankruptcy of FTX shows the need for a regulatory framework.

He says that his proposed legislation known as the Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act would offer such a regulatory framework,

but the Wall Street Journal reports that former FTX CEO Sam Bankman Fried and his company backed this legislation,

which raises questions about his influence over the bill.

My colleague Fred Lucas reports that a conservative watchdog group obtained 176 pages of correspondence between Democrat Senator Sheldon White House of Rhode Island and the IRS.

The documents were obtained by the American Accountability Foundation through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Lucas reports that in a January 19, 2021 document, White House asked IRS Commissioner Charles Redig to revoke the tax exempt status of Turning Point USA,

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