Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson blamed the viral “Oreo” exchange with a lawmaker on Tuesday on not being able to hear the question properly.
Carson confused REO, an acronym used to describe foreclosed-on property, with the Oreo cookie, during an appearance before the House Financial Services Committee.
“The fact of the matter is I was having difficulty hearing her and of course I’m very familiar with foreclosed properties and with REOs,” Carson said on Fox Business on Wednesday.
“I’ve read extensively about them, knew about them even as a teenager, there was a lot of blighted areas in Detroit where I grew up,” he continued. “But what is interesting is that you know, when a family gets into a problem with their mortgage and it’s backed by our agency, we go through a lot of procedures with the banks to make sure that they don’t get foreclosed upon and the few cases when they do obviously we’re able to sell those properties very quickly. And the REO portfolio just over the last 10 years has dramatically decreased by tenfold. You know 65,000 down to 6,500.”
Carson’s explanation differs from the one given by Housing and Urban Development. Spokesman Raffi Williams told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday: “Given the amount of acronyms used in Washington, when the secretary has conversations about foreclosed properties he calls them what they are: foreclosed properties.”
The viral exchange took place between Carson and Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., a consumer finance expert who before joining Congress this year was California’s independent monitor of banks who oversaw a $25 billion foreclosure settlement. She asked Carson to explain the disparity in REO rates.
[Also read: House Democrats accuse Ben Carson of throwing children on the street with immigration rule]
I asked @SecretaryCarson about REOs – a basic term related to foreclosure – at a hearing today. He thought I was referring to a chocolate sandwich cookie. No, really. pic.twitter.com/cYekJAkRag
— Rep. Katie Porter (@RepKatiePorter) May 21, 2019
Carson told Fox Business he suspects Porter is no longer up to speed on the topic and offered to help.
“I suspect when Katie Porter was an expert in this area, things were very different,” Carson said. “That’s why I invited her to speak with our staff that deals with these so they can bring her up to date. Maybe she would then be able to understand what’s going on.”
The retired neurosurgeon and former presidential candidate also castigated the media over the unflattering coverage of the hearing.
“First of all it was three-and-a-half hours of testimony so you can see that some of the networks are only interested in those kinds of sound bites that they can use to ridicule,” he said.
