Mnuchin, Price Are Perfect Reflections Of Trump's Business Practices

The Trump transition team has been pretty thorough in vetting Trump’s appointees, making sure they all adhere to Trump’s standards of corruption, conflicts of interest, and self-dealing. Yesterday, it was Treasury Secretary nominee Steve Mnuchin’s day to have his Trump-worthy talents exposed as reports of widespread fraud and abuse of the foreclosure process while Mnuchin was the CEO of OneWest bank. An investigation in California indicated that OneWest may engaged in over 5,500 foreclosure sale violations and that virtually every single one of the 35,000 foreclosures in California was based on illegally back-dated foreclosure documents. Some of the back-dating was just blatantly falsified, showing dates on supposed OneWest documents that preceded the actual formation of the bank. A OneWest Vice President admitted under oath that she robo-signed up to 6,000 foreclosure documents a week, not even bothering to read the false documents that she was signing and attesting to. In addition, OneWest engaged in “credit bids” that allow the owner of the foreclosed property to make an initial bid to keep the property in the foreclosure process. These credit bids have the additional advantage of not being subject to the normal real-estate transfer taxes. OneWest used these credit bids to purchase houses where it was not actually the mortgage holder and therefore not the owner of the property. They were merely a servicing agent for the real owner. The bank then forged back-dated documents to make the foreclosure look proper, all the while saving on taxes. In essence, OneWest stole these properties. Lastly, let’s not forget that Mnuchin also uses his personal foundation for self-dealing, just like Trump. When OneWest was purchased by CIT, Mnuchin used money from his foundation to fund astroturf groups that wrote letters in support of the merger to regulators. Mnuchin received an $11 million payout when that merger finally went through, probably a good return on his illegal investments.

Yesterday, we learned that Health and Human Services nominee Tom Price has apparently been consistently violating the STOCK Act while overseeing the House Budget Committee. Over the past four years, Price has apparently traded in over $300,000 worth of nearly 40 healthcare related stocks while he was working on legislation that directly effected the companies involved. The STOCK Act was passed in 2012 specifically to block members of Congress from using the securities markets to benefit from the inside information that they have as legislators. Under pressure from Republicans, the Act was expanded to include the President and Vice-President, something that will probably be an issue for Donald Trump. While an investigation might show that these transactions were legal, the sheer number of companies involved would potentially indicate something more sinister was going on. Chuck Schumer is demanding an investigation by the independent Office of Congressional Ethics before Price’s nomination can move forward. It’s probably no coincidence that the House wanted to gut that office as the first action in the new session. That move, which would have quashed any independent investigation of Price, was blocked by a huge public outcry and the unwillingness of even some Republicans to go along.

One last point needs to be made about Mnuchin and the abuses at OneWest. The state of California had a difficult time investigating OneWest’s practices because the current law does not allow a state to issue subpoenas for a national bank without first initiating a lawsuit. This makes it quite difficult for state investigators to actually discover whether a bank is committing crimes in their state. In fact, OneWest successfully sued the state in order to stop it from collecting documents about OneWest from loan processing companies. In essence, federal law was protecting OneWest from a serious investigation. Former federal prosecutor Mark Zanides provided a comment on OneWest’s foreclosure abuse saying, “The foreclosure statutes establish a proper way to do things that will ensure that all parties are treated fairly. If you ignore that, you’ve reduced yourself to a banana republic, where courts sworn to uphold the law are precluded from doing so by being given documents that are false.” Like most of the press today, Zanides does not seem to understand that, in many ways, Republicans have already turned America into the banana republic he describes.