Steven Mnuchin is headed toward a confirmation vote this week without answering Democrats’ last-minute questions about his former bank’s foreclosure practices.
Democrats last week boycotted a Senate Finance Committee vote on the nomination, and said Mnuchin had yet to provide critical information about his tenure as CEO of the bank OneWest from 2009 to 2015. They accused him of misleading the committee about foreclosures undertaken by the bank, which he purchased from the government after it was bailed out during the financial crisis that saw foreclosures soar.
Democrats still haven’t received answers about those questions this week, according to an aide for Ron Wyden of Oregon, the ranking Democrat on the committee.
In particular, Democrats asked Mnuchin to explain why he told them that OneWest had not engaged in “robo-signing” mortgage documents, or signing foreclosure documents in large numbers without verifying that the underlying information is correct.
Mnuchin said that the bank did not engage in those practices. Several news reports, however, led Democrats to challenge Mnuchin’s claim.
One, published in late January by the Columbus Dispatch, was an analysis of court documents related to foreclosures in one Ohio county that found instances of robo-signing, including three foreclosures that were thrown out by judges specifically because of robo-signing.
And on Monday, the Portland Press Herald reported that a OneWest employee known for robo-signing foreclosure documents was likely the signatory to documents for OneWest foreclosure’s during Mnuchin’s tenure.
That employee, then-vice president for bankruptcy and foreclosure Erica Johnson-Seck, said in a 2009 deposition that she signed 6,000 foreclosure documents a week, merely scanning them before signing off on them.
Democrats sought to tie Mnuchin to the tragedies of the foreclosure crisis soon after his nomination, referring to his bank as a “foreclosure machine” and soliciting stories from customers mistreated by the bank.
For their part, Republicans have cast the objections as more about Trump than Mnuchin. Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the committee chairman, faulted Democrats for not bringing up the specific questions during the hearing or before boycotting the committee vote.
On Monday evening, Mnuchin’s nomination was caught up in the larger, intensifying Democratic opposition to his Cabinet selections, which saw senators planning Monday to stay on the Senate floor late into the night to speak in opposition to the confirmation of Betsy DeVos as education secretary. Democrats could push a vote on Mnuchin to as late as the weekend, but with Republicans in control, delaying the vote is the only option left for Democrats.
