Democrats tried their hardest on Thursday to draw attention to Steven Mnuchin’s track record on foreclosures as CEO of the bank OneWest, but whether it hurts his odds of confirmation as treasury secretary remains to be seen.
Scrutiny of OneWest’s foreclosure practices was a running theme throughout the five-and-a-half-hour hearing. Democrats had spent days preparing the line of criticism, even hosting a forum at the Capitol with OneWest foreclosure “victims” on Wednesday. Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, kicked off the proceedings with his opening statement Thursday.
Under Mnuchin, Wyden said, OneWest “churned out foreclosures like Chinese factories churned out Trump suits and ties.”
Throughout the hearing, Mnuchin defended his record, but he also took pains to express regret at the hardships experienced by some of OneWest’s customers whose foreclosures were carried out improperly.
“It’s not that I’m defensive,” the nominee said at one point in response to Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, reeling off a list of negative findings about OneWest’s foreclosures. “I’m proud of our results.”
Democrats have accused Mnuchin of running a “foreclosure machine” at OneWest, and they provided specific examples of people unfairly foreclosed on or whose cases were particularly sympathetic.
Mnuchin defended himself by saying that the bank’s practices were scrutinized by regulators. “We lived in a glass house, and we were constantly viewed by the regulators,” he told Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J.
Furthermore, the mortgaging servicing unit responsible for the problems wasn’t even the business that he wanted to be in, he said, but it was included in the deal when he bought the failed bank IndyMac from federal regulators and converted it to OneWest. He simply wanted to be a regional banker, he said.
He also said he could not address some of the specific cases mentioned by senators, for legal reasons. He did however, express sorrow over the “terrible” foreclosure of “Octomom,” the woman who became famous for having octuplets.
But Mnuchin simply apologized for the instances in which people had their houses foreclosed on because the bank messed up their paperwork. “I earnestly feel terrible for any mistakes at the bank,” he told Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla.
The toughest questions came from Brown, who is also a member of the Senate Banking Committee. Mnuchin avoided having to face questions from Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who is not on the finance committee, although she got in a series of digs on Twitter as the hearing unfolded.
When Mnuchin makes mistakes on complicated paperwork, he asks for forgiveness. When his customers made mistakes, he took their homes.
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) January 19, 2017
One Republican also raised concerns about OneWest’s foreclosure practices: Sen. Dean Heller, from the hard-hit state of Nevada. Heller remonstrated Mnuchin for having failed to answer his questions about how many Nevada customers were foreclosed on by OneWest.
