Treasury secretary nominee Steven Mnuchin lied in his written responses to the Senate Finance Committee, claiming that “OneWest Bank did not ‘robo-sign’ documents,” when ample evidence proves that they did.
Mnuchin ran OneWest Bank from 2009 to 2015 in a manner so ruthless to mortgage holders that he has been dubbed the “Foreclosure King” by his critics.
The robo-signing scandal involved mortgage companies having their employees falsely sign hundreds of affidavits per week attesting that they had reviewed and verified all the business records associated with a foreclosure — when in fact they never read through the material and just blindly signed off. Those records, in many cases, were prepared improperly, but the foreclosures went ahead anyway because of the fraudulent affidavits.
Mnuchin on the Hill
Scott Applewhite/AP
Mnuchin replied that “OneWest Bank did not ‘robo-sign’ documents, and as the only bank to successfully complete the Independent Foreclosure Review required by federal banking regulators to investigate allegations of ‘robo-signing,’ I am proud of our institution’s extremely low error rate.”
But even that review – which was not really so “independent,” since the banks hand-picked and paid for their own reviewers – found that nearly 6 percent of the OneWest foreclosures examined were not conducted properly.
And what sparked that review was a 2011 consent order issued by the federal Office of Thrift Supervision, which definitively stated that OneWest filed affidavits in state and federal courts “in which the affiant represented that the assertions in the affidavit were made based on personal knowledge or based on a review by the affiant of the relevant books and records, when, in many cases, they were not.”
This is the very definition of robo-signing. OneWest signed and agreed to the consent order, though it never admitted or denied the activity
However, in a Florida foreclosure case, a OneWest employee plainly admitted to robo-signing. On July 9, 2009 – four months after OneWest took over operations from IndyMac, with Mnuchin as CEO – Erica Johnson-Seck, a vice president with OneWest, gave a deposition in which she admitted to being one of eight employees who signed approximately 750 foreclosure-related documents per week.
“How long do you spend executing each document?” Johnson-Seck was asked. “I have changed my signature considerably,” Johnson-Seck replied. “It’s just an E now. So not more than 30 seconds.”
Johnson-Seck also admitted to not reading the affidavits before signing them, not knowing who inputted the information on the documents, and not being aware of how the records were generated. And she acknowledged not signing in the presence of a notary. This resulted in false affidavits being submitted in court cases that attempted to take borrowers’ homes away.
New York Supreme Court Judge Arthur Schack used the information provided by Johnson-Seck to invalidate OneWest foreclosure cases. He also dismissed a separate foreclosure where Johnson-Seck both assigned a mortgage to Deutsche Bank and executed an affidavit on behalf of Deutsche Bank in the same case.
OneWest continued filing sketchy documents for years, even after Johnson-Seck revealed the robo-signing scheme. According to a Reuters investigation in 2011, OneWest issued “foreclosure documents of questionable validity,” including filing mortgage assignments that establish ownership of the loan months after the foreclosure action, meaning OneWest (by their own evidence) didn’t own the loan at the time they decided to foreclose on the property.
Tara Bradshaw, a spokeswoman for Mnuchin during the transition, said she no longer works on the matter and referred all questions to the Treasury Department. The Treasury Department press office did not respond to a request for comment.
Mnuchin’s definitive – though false — statement about robo-signing stands in contrast to some of his other responses to questions for the record. Those he just ducked.
Responding to Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., who asked how many Nevada homes were in OneWest Bank’s portfolio and how many Nevadans suffered foreclosure at the hands of OneWest, Mnuchin replied, “Because I am no longer employed by or affiliated with CIT Group, I do not have access to this information.” CIT purchased OneWest in 2015, and Mnuchin left the bank’s board in December.
That was the eighth time that Heller has asked these questions of Mnuchin, according to Senate testimony.
Mnuchin used the same excuse to decline to give information about nationwide foreclosures or federal investigations into OneWest to Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio.
Similarly, when Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., asked Mnuchin if he believes that his former employer Goldman Sachs “acted responsibly and ethically when it bet against the same securities it was selling to its customers,” Mnuchin declined to answer, saying “I left Goldman Sachs nearly fifteen years ago” and was not in a position to comment.
Mnuchin was forced to respond to The Intercept’s publication of a leaked memo alleging that OneWest committed numerous violations of California’s foreclosure processes, including routine backdating of documents to speed up foreclosures. Sen. Casey asked about that, but Mnuchin insisted that “OneWest did not engage in ‘backdating.’” He explained that the bank assumed control of foreclosures initiated under IndyMac, its predecessor, and had a power of attorney to “step into those actions effective as of the date they were initiated.”
But that’s not what the investigators in the California Attorney General’s office alleged in their memo. They claimed that the substitutions of trustee documents in OneWest’s name were not created on the effective date written on the document. They argued that was done deliberately to cover up the lack of a substitution of trustee earlier in the foreclosure process.
Demonstrators during a protest in Sacramento, Calif., in 2012.
In a world with its priorities properly ordered, THE INTERCEPT’s Glenn Greenwald would be heading up an international consortium of investigative journalists working on the current Brazilian corruption cases with many intersection points being the Panama Papers consortium of leaked documents examining Global Shadow Banking.
Where is Brazilian Oiligarch Eike Batista and where are his billions? He was last seen visiting some of his off-shored portion of Brazil’s national wealth in the Cayman Islands flying on his German passport to NYC to visit another portion of Brazil’s national wealth.
This is directly relevant to the U.S. legislative and cabinet appointment limbo as Shadow Banking’s role in Global Finance and international monetary policy colors our perceptions of newly-selected CEO in Chief and his Corporate Caliphate Viziers who comprise our nation’s Board of Directors. For so many election cycles our corporate-captured, regulatory-captured news media have given voice to middle America’s desire to see the PUBLIC INTEREST pursued in the manner of a successful business-person. “Run the country like a business!” Be careful what you wish for muddle America. Here we are.
Let us compare how Germany’s private Deutsche Bank which on the one hand presses for further AUSTERITY POLICIES that chokes off money circulating on Main Street so it can get funneled into off-shore hoarding accounts and denying any write-downs to the PUBLIC INTEREST of EU member states like GREECE.
Meanwhile Deutsche Bank has sought bail-outs to Vulture Fund investors.
These Vulture Fund Global Investors are like the oligarchs gambling in Monte Carlo. They have a lot of unproductive capital to lose. They are seeking high yield\high risk bonds and other financial instruments and were sold on the decades-long hopelessly corrupt Greek government has handled the fate of an EU member state versus how it handles high risk\high yield loans to an irresponsible trans national oligarch who is now the Public Servant in Chief of the U.S. (holders of the World’s Reserve Currency).
From Bloomberg News 12-22-2016 (c) Kerri Geiger, Greg Farrell and Sarah Mulholland headlined key words: “Trump May Have a $300 Million Conflict of Interest With Deutsche Bank”
“‘Looks Terrible’
“When you have political appointees making decisions about banks that the president owes a lot of money to, it looks terrible,” said Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota who was the chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush. “The U.S. government is dealing with regulatory and criminal issues with the big banks all the time, and if he owes them a lot of money, there might be an incentive to favor less regulation and less enforcement for the banks.”
“Deutsche Bank declined to comment. Alan Garten, general counsel of the Trump Organization, said the loans are modest in the context of Trump’s multibillion-dollar empire, and the effort to shift away from a personal guarantee isn’t significant because the loans were structured to become standard debt eventually, following completion of the projects.
“Read more: A QuickTake Q&A on Trump’s many conflicts
“The scramble to restructure is the latest chapter in Trump’s fraught relationship with Deutsche Bank, one of the few financial institutions on Wall Street that still does deals with a man long known as a publicity-seeking and unconventional real-estate developer who didn’t hesitate to sue his lender eight years ago.
“Deutsche Bank also lends to Trump’s extended family, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Weeks before the election, the bank refinanced most of the $370 million of debt against retail spaces Kushner’s company owns in midtown Manhattan.
“Angry Bankers
“Trump’s dealings with Wall Street stretch back decades to his attempt to build an Atlantic City casino empire. That badly timed push forced him to renegotiate with creditors when he couldn’t pay back billions of dollars in loans. His major backers in that era included Citbank, Chase Manhattan Bank and Bankers Trust — a bank that was acquired by Deutsche Bank in 1999 — and the debacle left a trail of angry lenders.
“Deutsche Bank’s relationship with Trump actually predates its Bankers Trust purchase. In 1998, a small group of its real-estate bankers led by Mike Offit underwrote a $125-million loan for renovations on Trump’s building at 40 Wall Street. Trump showed up at Offit’s office, his reputation badly bruised. Deutsche Bank’s fledgling property business — in operation for only a year at the time — was the only group willing to take on Trump, Offit said in an interview.
“I had one way to succeed — that was to make this thing big and profitable,” said Offit, who is now retired and has written a novel about Wall Street. “If I was super conservative and wasn’t willing to do some unusual stuff, how was I going to compete?”
If you still believe after the Trump’s Swamp Cabinet appointments in campaign wizard Steve BREITBART Bannon’s claims that he is working for the salvation of the U.S. Working Class, then go ahead and double-down on the BRAZIL MODEL OF GOOD GOVERNMENT.
You will get no argument from me that we the Working Class had our Post WW II Keynesian SOCIAL CONTRACT shredded by our DEM\GOP Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle Dum political DUOPOLY. That the U.S.-led world’s Post WW II escape from the Feudal Order of the Robber Barons via the first widespread growth in a Middle Class with access to affordable higher education were all left behind by the Wall Street-worshipping Crony Neo-Lib\Con Con of Democrats headed by Hillary and the House of ‘Free Trading\Anti-Protectionist’ Clinton, right through her hijacking of the PUBLIC INTEREST when with Senator Chuckie “Credit Card Statement Box” Schumer they and the NY STATE DEMOCRATIC MACHINE accelerated the PRIVILEGING of PRIVATE INTERESTS OVER THE PUBLIC INTEREST.
Meanwhile we Wage Slaves were left behind more openly by every GOP-controlled CHAMBER OF COMMERCE back to the Nixon era’s infamous LEWIS POWELL MEMO to the National Chamber of Commerce that led to Nixon rewarding a PRIVATIZING hustler like Lewis Powell with no judicial experience to the Supreme Court and who was then approved by sold-out Democrats already compromised by trans national Big Bid-Net. Dems put the working class on SNAP food stamps to bring equity to THE GREAT DIVERGENCE, and where would we go for an OPPOSITION PARTY? Into Steve Bannon’s cynical monetizing of White Rage arms, apparently.
Global Shadow Banking and Brazil’s richest Oiligarch Eike Batista now on the lam from Brazil’s own massive attempt to clean up the government that pauperized what should be one of the wealthiest countries on earth, Eike Batista traveling on his German passport between his off-shore accounts in the Cayman Islands and his NYC Shadow Bankers should be followed very closely with an eye on fellow Cayman’s Shadow Banking and Deutsche Banking Oligarch In Chief of Trump’s Swamp.
Go Minimum Wage working man and woman now represented by Labor Secretary of Carl’s Jr Board of Directors Puzder; Go Steve Bannon the Goldman Sachs Harvard Business School Great White Hope of Under-Educated Amurika, turn trillions of Privatized infra-structure long-deferred into the biggest bonanza for Wall Street and the Cayman Islands we’ve ever seen. And with the post WW I GLOBAL GREAT DEPRESSION ushered in by un-regulated rule by the Wall Street Robber Barons, the fortunes of Fascists like Franco, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and their main energy contractor from Kansas the KOCH OIL SERVICES Corporation LLC are looking mighty bullish.
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Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Shifters
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa
Media Discussion List
There’s lies, dammed lies and statistics.
And there there is Stephen Moore.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?421959-4/washington-journal-stephen-moore-discusses-president-trumps-economic-policies
LYING.
it’s now the american way to power and position
teaches children that telling the truth is for losers
gee, i wonder how that evolves
It’s humorous to watch the anti-Trump activists try to salvage one win to cover all the butt-hurt loses they have suffered. The worst Mnuchin did was too aggressively carry out the directive he and other mortgage lenders were given by Obama/Geithner to ‘foam the runway’ and quickly clear the people who had already lost their homes and their paper trails. HAMP was designed to get those who were already headed to foreclosure to line up and let the lenders know who was coming and organize for the rush.
The one class action suit on this issue in California was thrown out because there was no harm shown to the previous homeowners because they had already defaulted on their loans.
The politicians harping on this dead story gain some phony solidarity points with the rubes in their states but Mnuchin should be confirmed easily.
It’s like you think your ignorance on this issue is a virtue. Or you’re a paid propagandist.
Would you like a list of the “class action suits” brought by everybody from pension funds to almost every AG in almost every state that resulted in 10s if not 100s of billions of dollars of settlements from the mortgage and banking industries since 2008 regarding their practices?
Or did the mortgage and banking industries just pay all those settlements because their lawyers weren’t good enough to get those suits thrown out on the idea “no harm was shown” either on a FRCP 12(b)(6) motion for failure to state a claim or on summary judgment?
You should probably stop peddling your fucking nonsensical bullshit before I have to pull your pants down in front of all these nice folks.
I’m sure you have sources for your claims but I was addressing the topic of robo-signing in the state where his bank was located. There were many other fines and penalties for other infractions but this post is about the one practice that had no shown negative effect on already failed and no longer owning previous homeowners.
Nearly everyone was involved in shady bubble behavior leading up to this crisis including homeowners who stripped about $5trillion in equity from their homes and never had to pay back their share if they were foreclosed on.
The other thing that seems to be inferred in these stories is that the lenders somehow made money clearing these mortgages by finishing the foreclosure process. One West bank was salvaged from the smoking ruins of Indy Mac that collapsed because of mortgage loses and that process was very expensive.
If you continue these frantic Chihuahua like attacks on my trouser cuffs we may have to get you a fancy little muzzle.
Homeowners lost their down payments, all the mortgage payments they did make, and their homes. How does this translate to said homeowners getting equity? By the way, there are homeowners who were sued for the remainder of the mortgage for houses they no longer owned.
One West was not the only bank that did robo-signing. My lawyer friend temporarily worked for one for just a few months, but the bank continued to use her name and signature and falsely claimed she was a vice president on top of that. They weren’t prosecuted either.
You or some other shill that thinks just like you tried bringing this up before.
Whatever harm that may have been committed or complicity that you think homeowners had in this fiasco, the fact remains that under the current lawmaking paradigm, homeowners had no ability whatsoever to substantively affect how the laws governing mortgage creation, their subsequent management, or how they were packaged as credit products afterward.
The vast majority of homeowners were simply following the rules that the neoliberal corporatists had already created. And because of that, they were the overwhelmingly majority of victims, not the other way around.
Again, demonstrating your ignorance of the law. It isn’t a question, at least not a legal question, of whether there was a “shown negative effect” as a function of a “false affidavit”.
A false affidavit submitted to a court of law does two things–as a legal matter–one it uses the false affidavit unlawfully flips the civil burden of proof (do you understand what that legal concept means–I doubt it) from the Plaintiff (i.e. the bank attempting to foreclose) to the Defendant, and it is a statutory violation of law to submit a false affidavit under any circumstance subject both the party and the lawyer representing them to legal sanctions. You fucking moron. And I know that because I personally litigated 100s of these cases against the banks.
Prove it. Otherwise you’re a bald-faced liar.
The “lenders” or do you mean the “present beneficiary” of the note? Because if you had the slightest clue what you were actually talking about, which you don’t because as I indicated you’re either full of shit or a paid propagandist on this topic, you would know that the original “lender” (who actually really never provided the money for most loans, which came from “warehouse” pools of funds from big banks, pension funds and high net worth individuals and hedge funds as a tax avoidance plan) is so rarely the “present beneficiary” i.e. the holder of the note (at least nominally), which is in about 99% of all mortgage loans in this country a REIT or other mortgage backed security trust. Original “lenders” (at least the nominal ones on paper) were never actually the ones funding the loans (or rarely), and the day they were inked at escrow were sold/purchased by trusts. And you’d know that, and know the legal implications of that as a function of negotiable paper law, if you weren’t a fucking moron with no clue about what you’re talking about as a legal matter.
So fucking what? Is that your justification for One West’s unlawful activity. If so you’re not only a moron with know clue about the law in this country, but your also an immoral shitstain, because what can’t you then justify in the name of recouping “expenses”.
You’re fucking nobody to me slick. I actually sued every single one of the major banks and lenders in this country, and understand precisely what happened and why not withstanding your little know-nothing bullshit you like to spread in this Dayen threads.
And any time you’d like to come out from behind your anonymity to demonstrate who actually knows what they are talking about, I use my real name and occupation to post and am happy to go a few rounds with you any time you’d like, in any forum, venue or court of law you’d like.
Your opinion on this topic is literally misinformed and moronic, and substantiated by nothing but your misinformed beliefs. So maybe you should shut your yappy little trap before I make it my mission to demonstrate your ignorance on every thread I happy to notice you sharing said moronic opinions.
M’kay little anonymous buddy?
and murdering palestinians for their land is legal
sounds like you are beckoning the piper
Of course, he lied. He IS a part of the Trump administration is he not?
Where are the criminal prosecutions???
This isn’t a minor paperwork problem. An affidavit is basically sworn testimony. Filing a false affidavit with a court is therefore tantamount to perjury, which is a FELONY in most jurisdictions.
Due to the fact that an affidavit is a sworn statement, it usually requires that the document be notarized. There is evidence that the statements were not only false, but that they were improperly notarized as well. This is only a misdemeanor, but it’s still a crime.
These mortgage companies had employees sign thousands of these things. Why aren’t all the people involved now sitting in prison? Due to the fact that we’re talking about thousands of individual instances of crime, why aren’t the banks being investigated and prosecuted under the RICO laws?
the democrats will have to push for them, instead of adopting obama’s “look forward not backward” get out of jail card. will they?
“Where are the criminal prosecutions???”
When the wife of the head of the GOP is/was sitting on the board of Wells-Fargo, one wonders not at all.
The corruption is complete.
It’s a degree of separation. Mnuchkin didn’t actually sign a false affidavit, it was the under-underlings. Respondeat superior seems to be a dead letter these days.
Shame. It is worse in some ways if they did not know.(What else might they “not know” about?)
What’s truly ironic is any fucking “centrist” Dem that says to anyone “but, but, but, the Democratic party is so much better than the GOP.”
My question is “better at what”? Maintaining the appearance they actually give a shit about America’s working class. At least everyone knows the GOP despises them up and down the party.
More importantly what’s the over/under on how many votes Mnuchin will get from the Democratic party Senators?
My guess is, given Nikki Haley was approved 96-4 (those four being part of the oh so powerful Democratic resistance to Donald Trump’s agenda), and the fact Sens. Warren and other prominent “progressives” gave no push back to Ben Pyramids Carson, I’m guess Mnuchin gets approved 92-8.
Hell DeVos probably gets approved 90-10.
We should get a pool going exactly how limp the Democratic senators resistance to Trump will really be.