Steven Mnuchin, Donald Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury designee, is in hot water over allegations that his OneWest Bank engaged in misconduct while foreclosing on mortgages in the State of California. This according to a memo written in 2013 by lawyers in the California attorney general’s office which was revealed by The Intercept.
The memo alleges that Mnuchin's bank illegally backdated key documents and effectively gamed foreclosure auctions. https://t.co/N8fH5lf3Zv
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Thank you.— The Intercept (@theintercept) January 3, 2017
The allegations include the backdating of foreclosure documents to a time before OneWest acquires the mortgages in question. “Because it would have been impossible for OneWest to sign the instruments before it became an operational bank, ” four deputy attorneys general from the Consumer Law Section wrote in the memo The Intercept says. “We deduced that the instruments were backdated.”
Tara Bradshaw, a spokesperson for Steve Mnuchin, said that “state attorneys general have no jurisdiction to investigate federally chartered banks like OneWest. When OneWest pointed that out to the California attorney general’s office, they withdrew their subpoena.”
However, it was already widely reported that Steve Mnuchin was actually one of the people who profited from the mortgage defaults during the whole subprime mortgage debacle, while throwing people out of their homes.
Mnuchin was part of a group of investors who bought a bankrupt mortgage bank called IndyMac Bank for pennies on the Dollar and renamed it OneWest. They then proceeded to foreclose on the mortgages, evict the homeowners and resell the properties while making a tidy profit for themselves. According to Financial Times, Steven Mnuchin’s group actually tried to foreclose on one woman’s mortgage over a debt of 27 Cents. You heard that right.
After chasing down 90 year old Ossie Lofton over the 30 Cents that she forgot to add on to the end of one check which she wrote them, the firm then made the foreclosure notice after she mistakenly wrote $.03 on a second check rather than $0.30.
So he already has a great deal of baggage when it comes to ethics problems. Mnuchin is, after all, the man who Senator Elizabeth Warren called “the Forrest Gump of the financial crisis — he managed to participate in all the worst practices on Wall Street.”
Treasury Secretary nominee Steven Mnuchin is prepared & ready to implement President-elect Trump’s economic agenda. https://t.co/1nQPuEQEMd pic.twitter.com/JWc84Mitlp
— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) December 20, 2016
Meanwhile Mnuchin will not respond to a letter sent to him by Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Bloomberg reports. The Senator asked for an answer by January 6. Brown is especially concerned with how Mnuchin’s OneWest regional bank made a fortune from foreclosing on 36, 000 mortgages in the wake of the 2008 subprime mortgage debacle.
The letter stated, “A Treasury Secretary is expected to be an expert in financial market operations and regulation, in addition to industrial and international trade policy, terrorist financing and sanctions, and tax and fiscal policy. I am currently unaware of your views and record on a host of these issues.”
Mnuchin’s spokeswoman Tara Bradshaw told Bloomberg, “Mnuchin will work with Senator Brown within the protocol of the finance committee — and will not be providing written answers in advance of a deadline yet to be established by the finance committee.”
