Trump’s Pick For Key Bank Regulator Is A Foreclosure Kingpin, Of Course

WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump’s choice to lead a key bank regulation agency spent the first half of this decade running a bank that illegally foreclosed on hundreds of thousands of Americans, often using forged and fraudulent documents.

In 2013, halfway through Joseph Otting’s time running OneWest Bank, Otting purchased a Las Vegas “resort lifestyle home” with a “heated pool,” “double doors forged of wrought iron and glass,” “professional-grade theater,” and “far-reaching views of both the golf course and the mountains” for more than $2 million. Today, as he awaits confirmation to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the house stands as a monument to the money he made from pushing people out of their homes.

During his tenure, Otting and OneWest Chairman Steve Mnuchin, who is now the Treasury secretary, signed a legal agreement in 2011 with a federal oversight body now under the control of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency declaring that, under their leadership, OneWest used “robosigning” practices that led to inaccurate documents being used to push hundreds of thousands of American homeowners into foreclosure and out of their homes. As Otting and Mnuchin have both stated, they did not agree with or acknowledge the findings of that legal agreement when they signed it.

In March, a subsidiary of OneWest agreed to an $89 million settlement with the Department of Justice for defrauding the government out of insurance payments from the Federal Housing Administration. The bank, which is now owned by CIT Group, is also accused of racial discrimination in a complaint to the Department of Housing and Urban Development and remains under investigation by the attorney general of New York.

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