David Dayen: Mnuchin Lied About His Bank’s History of Robo-Signing Foreclosure Documents

Here, in The Intercept.  Excerpt:

“Did OneWest ‘robo-sign’ documents relating to foreclosures and evictions?” Sen. Bob Casey, D-Penn., asked [Treasury Secretary Nominee Steven] Mnuchin as a “question for the record”.

Mnuchin replied that “OneWest Bank did not ‘robo-sign’ documents * * *

[Dayan reports on] a 2011 consent order issued by the federal Office of Thrift Supervision, which definitively stated that OneWest filed affidavits in state and federal courts “in which the affiant represented that the assertions in the affidavit were made based on personal knowledge or based on a review by the affiant of the relevant books and records, when, in many cases, they were not.”

* * *

* * * OneWest signed and agreed to the consent order, though it never admitted or denied the activity

However, in a Florida foreclosure case, a OneWest employee plainly admitted to robo-signing. On July 9, 2009 – four months after OneWest took over operations from IndyMac, with Mnuchin as CEO – Erica Johnson-Seck, a vice president with OneWest, gave a deposition in which she admitted to being one of eight employees who signed approximately 750 foreclosure-related documents per week.

“How long do you spend executing each document?” Johnson-Seck was asked. “I have changed my signature considerably,” Johnson-Seck replied. “It’s just an E now. So not more than 30 seconds.”

Johnson-Seck also admitted to not reading the affidavits before signing them, not knowing who inputted the information on the documents, and not being aware of how the records were generated. * * *

New York Supreme Court Judge Arthur Schack used the information provided by Johnson-Seck to invalidate OneWest foreclosure cases.

 UPDATE: Ted Frank has pointed out to me a Forbes article describing how Judge Shack has been reversed in two cases for abusing his discretion for relying on newspaper articles and the web on the matter of robo-signing. The article links to the cases in question.

 

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