A “coup for Citi and catastrophe for consumers,” a transparency advocate said.

Before President Donald Trump was inaugurated, Julie Lindsay, an MD and General Counsel in Capital Markets and Corporate Reporting for Citigroup, was working for the president-elect to fill key posts at agencies that are supposed to oversee banks - including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Federal Reserve, and Treasury’s Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC). The FSOC is made up of regulators from various agencies and monitors the financial system and has broad powers to take action to ensure its stability - such as breaking up big banks like Citigroup if they become too risky.

Today, Ms. Lindsay is back at work at Citigroup, a bank spokesperson said, although she declined to say if Lindsay was paid by the bank while she was working on the transition. Lindsay had been working on the Trump transition, gathering information about the policy direction and potentially drawing up lists of political appointees to serve at the governing body of the at the CFPB.

Transition landing teams do work like gathering information about the agencies and building lists of potential candidates to fill lower-level politically appointed roles. These 2nd and 3rd-tier appointees do not tend to generate much news when they take their jobs, but they are crucial to the policies federal agencies pursue and how vigorously rules are enforced.

Putting a current employee of one of the nation’s largest banks in a position to help pick lower-level appointees at crucial financial regulators sends a strong signal that the president-elect’s new administration will push hard to undo the post-crisis banking reform law, or simply soft-pedal its enforcement.

It also gives Citigroup direct, closed-door access to regulators and their thinking that goes beyond the routine dialogue between an agency and a company it oversees.

Now, before you get your nose bent out of shape over this apparent (obvious) Conflict of Interest, consider this:  Mike Froman, a Citi banker and former Clinton administration Treasury official, was a member of the advisory board for President Barack Obama’s first transition. He later served as Obama’s U.S. Trade Representative.

Jeff Hauser, the head of the Revolving Door Project at the Center for Effective Government, … notes that Lindsay’s work for the Trump transition team staffing and gathering information about the very agencies that oversee her employer is a “coup for Citi and catastrophe for consumers,” Hauser said.

“I suspect that Julie Lindsay will be in for a raise when she returns,” to Citi, Hauser said. He said the move was an example of the largely “scary and formless” way that the Trump administration could undo post-crisis financial rules.

From 2002-2005, Lindsay worked as a staffer for SEC Commissioner Cynthia Glassman, who was appointed by President George W. Bush. Before joining Citi, Lindsay worked at the law firm Hogan Lovells.

Bartlett Naylor, a financial regulation expert at the watchdog group Public Citizen, ….  said that Lindsay’s previous work shows that she puts the interests of big banks first. A “Citi lawyer who also once staffed a conservative Securities and Exchange commissioner during a period when the seeds of the financial crisis were sown,” isn’t likely to have the interests of average Americans at heart, he said.