There’s draining the swamp….and then there’s filling the swamp with Wall Street bankers who cut corners to foreclose on people faster- and then lie about it to the US Senate.
Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary nominee, appears to be testing the waters to see just how much lying he can do and still secure votes from GOP senators- even those who are facing tough re-election campaigns like Senator Dean Heller in Nevada.
At his confirmation hearing in January, Senator Bob Casey from Pennsylvania directly asked him whether he robo-signed, and he responded“OneWest Bank did not ‘robo-sign’ documents...”
He must have forgotten about this pesky little settlement with regulators in 2011 for robo-signing?
His signature is the first one on the consent decree.
And, perhaps he wasn’t counting on the media fact-checking his claims?
Well, they did.
First in Ohio, the Columbus Dispatch:
But a Dispatch analysis of nearly four dozen foreclosure cases filed by OneWest in Franklin County in 2010 alone shows that the company frequently used robo-signers.
Next up, in Maine, at the Portland Press Herald, they found that the notorious robo-signer Erica Johnson Seck also robo-signed documents that paved the way for Mnuchin’s bank to foreclose on families in Maine.
In the OneWest case, a bank vice president named Erica A. Johnson-Seck testified in a 2009 deposition that she often signed more than 750 foreclosure affidavits a week and even changed her signature to a hastily scrawled “E” so she could sign the documents more quickly, typically in less than 30 seconds. She also said that she didn’t review the underlying documents and that a witness and notary who also signed the documents did not actually see her sign the papers as they were supposed to do.
In Maine, Johnson-Seck’s “E” shows up on dozens of mortgage assignments in 2009 and 2010, when mortgages were shifted from IndyMac, the failed mortgage company that Mnuchin and others bought in 2009, to OneWest, the new name for the company after its sale by federal regulators.
How much more evidence to senators need that Steve Mnuchin wasn’t being honest with them?
And, do they care that they were lied to?
Or do they only care when the media starts pointing it out to them?