Wednesday’s post, Donald Trump Has an Enormous and Very Dangerous Wall Street Blind Spot, highlighted the fact that the bank run by Trump’s Treasury Secretary nominee, Steven Mnuchin, was given a pass by California attorney general Kamala Harris, despite the discovery of over a thousand legal violations. Kamala Harris has since been (s)elected to the U.S. Senate.
Let’s recap some of what we learned:
In the memo, the leaders of the state attorney general’s Consumer Law Section said they had “uncovered evidence suggestive of widespread misconduct” in a yearlong investigation. In a detailed 22-page request, they identified over a thousand legal violations in the small subsection of OneWest loans they were able to examine, and they recommended that Attorney General Kamala Harris file a civil enforcement action against the Pasadena-based bank. They even wrote up a sample legal complaint, seeking injunctive relief and millions of dollars in penalties.
But Harris’s office, without any explanation, declined to prosecute the case.
continue reading