

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) speaks about raising wages on Jan. 7 at Gallaudet University in Washington. (AP/Jose Luis Magana)

Elizabeth Warren is fed up with the woman President Obama assigned to keep an eye on Wall Street.

Warren gave Mary Jo White, whom Obama nominated to the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a piece of her mind in a harshly worded letter dated Tuesday that runs 13 pages.

"To date, your leadership of the Commission has been extremely disappointing," wrote Warren, who voted to confirm White. "You have not been the strong leader that many hoped for -- and that you promised to be."

Warren added that in key areas, White has "broken your promises" on issues ranging from compensation disclosures to requiring that companies found of violating securities law admit guilt.

The commission is one of several federal agencies responsible for holding investors and banks to account for recklessness and fraud. Warren, widely admired on the left for her unrelenting criticism of Wall Street's misdeeds, listed several areas in which she said White has been giving the banks a free pass.

It isn't the first time Warren has suggested that Obama, his administration and his appointees aren't giving the financial sector the kind of tough love that makes for smoothly functioning markets.

Most recently, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts argued that Obama is negotiating a trade deal in the Atlantic that would let banks undermine the Dodd-Frank law reforming their industry. Earlier this year, she objected to Antonio Weiss, a former banker who Obama wanted to serve in Treasury Department, saying that he was too close to Wall Street.

Weiss eventually backed out. He's now a counselor to the department, a less formal position.

Warren leveled the same type of accusation that she brought against Weiss at White this week. Warren wrote that because White had previously worked as a lawyer representing big banks, and because her husband is also a lawyer at a firm with clients in the financial industry, she has had to recuse herself in multiple cases.

"The impact of a recusal on the operations of the SEC can be quite damaging," Warren wrote, causing commission ties that impede the agency's ability to seek tough settlements.

The rest of Warren's beef: She complained that the commission under White still hasn't put in place a rule requiring corporations to reveal how much their chief executive officers make compared to their average employees. She said White is allowing major banks that have committed fraud to get away with a slap on the wrist, without admitting they did anything wrong.

White responded to Warren's letter, not making any apologies. "Sen. Warren's mischaracterization of my statements and the agency's accomplishments is unfortunate, but it will not detract from the work we have done, and will continue to do, on behalf of investors," she said in a written statement.

The commission hasn't been idle, writing dozens of new rules for the financial industry and bringing more than 1,400 cases since White's confirmation in April 2013. By leaving the commission to work out many of the gory details of financial reform, Congress not only handed the commissioners and the staff an enormously complicated task, but also gave the banks another chance to lobby against the new rules if they didn't like how things were going.

Warren has also objected to the commission's decision to offer waivers to big financial companies that settled or are convicted of securities crimes. In general, Wall Street companies with clean records are able to bypass certain requirements that can be onerous to raise capital and participate in the financial markets. But if they face an SEC sanction and admit wrongdoing, they generally lose access to these rights.

In her letter, Warren writes that the commission has allowed 20 firms to maintain their favored status, receiving special waivers. "Moreover, under your leadership," Warren writes to White, "the SEC, for the first time since 2005, has once again begun granting waivers for companies guilty of criminal misconduct," citing waivers to UBS, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Deutsche Bank.

This story has been updated to more precisely describe Warren's critique of the SEC's granting of waivers for financial companies that admit to wrongdoing.