BUSTED: Elizabeth Warren’s CFPB Used Secret “Slush Fund” To Funnel Billions Into Left

BUSTED: Elizabeth Warren’s CFPB Used Secret “Slush Fund” To Funnel Billions Into Left-Wing Causes

by Joshua Caplan

Was the real reason behind Senator Elizabeth Warren’s outrage over Mick Mulvaney’s appointment as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) about her own political survival?

The New York Post’s Paul Sperry reports that the CFPB is engaged in a wide-variety of corruption.

Everything from amassing secret ledgers to using penalties to ‘launder,’ funds into left-wing causes. Of course, because the CFPB operates independently of the U.S. Government, a full audit of the agency’s balance sheet have never been done. This sad reality may very well change under Mulvaney’s leadership.

New York Post reports:

Bounced business owners and industry reps from secret meetings it’s held with Democrat operatives, radical civil-rights activists, trial lawyers and other “community advisers,” according to a report by the House Financial Services Committee.

Retained GMMB, the liberal advocacy group that created ads for the Obama and Hillary Clinton presidential campaigns, for more than $40 million, making the Democrat shop the sole recipient of CFPB’s advertising expenditure, Rubin says. […]

Funneled a large portion of the more than $5 billion in penalties collected from defendants to community organizers aligned with Democrats — “a slush fund by another name,” said a consultant who worked with CFPB on its Civil Penalty Fund and requested anonymity.

Reports of the CFPB awarding lucrative contracts to left-leaning organizations is nothing new.

The CFPB awarded GMMB, the Obama-Hillary ad firm, a $14.7 million contract for “agency media and resource communication,” in June of 2017 and a $16 million payday to marketing materials about student loans and mortgages.

“Most likely President Trump will not appoint a replacement until Mulvaney has exposed the corruption within it. That sunlight is toxic to Elizabeth Warren and can potentially be politically destructive to the Democrats.” wrote Sundance of Conservative Treehouse on November 27th.

While the amount revealed pales in comparison to what is really ‘under the hood,’ it’s important to remember the CFPB’s activities are shrouded in mystery. Perhaps, not for long if the Trump administration gets its way.
Warren may one day see the sunlight.

Trump is finally fixing this economy-killing agency

By Paul Sperry

December 2, 2017

President Trump’s executive orders slashing onerous Obama-era regulations on industry have been credited with kick-starting the sluggish economy and rocket-boosting the stock market. But there’s one mountain of red tape that’s eluded his machete — the Obama-created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Until now.

Last week, the White House finally wrested control of the mammoth regulatory agency following the resignation of CFPB Director Richard Cordray, an Obama appointee and liberal Democrat who quit his special five-year post early to run for Ohio governor.Trump installed his conservative budget director, Mick Mulvaney, to temporarily take over the powerful agency — which has the authority to determine the “fairness” of virtually every financial transaction in America.

On his first day on the job, Mulvaney instated a 30-day freeze on all new hiring and regulations at the CFPB, triggering a collective sigh of relief from the financial industry.

“It is a completely unaccountable agency, and I think that’s wrong,” Mulvaney explained. “If the law allowed this place not to exist, I’d sit down with the president to try to make the case that other agencies can do this job well if not more effectively.”

Already regulated by half a dozen other federal agencies, bankers have complained the new agency has too much power, is too partisan and has abused its regulatory authority over the past six years. Congressional Democrats established the CFPB in 2011 as part of the post-crisis financial overhaul.

Though most agreed at the time banks required more government supervision, concerns about the CFPB arose when it overstepped its statutory authority and started cracking down on auto sellers in addition to home mortgage lenders. It also has targeted for the first time credit-reporting agencies, while trespassing in the areas of debt collection, student loans, school accreditations and credit unions, among others.
Industry analysts say unduly harsh regulations and unreasonable penalties have driven thousands of banks out of business, denying many areas access to credit. To appease CFPB’s army of regulators, they say, some banks for the first time have had to hire more compliance officers than loan officers — and they, in turn, have to pass those compliance costs on to customers in the form of higher fees and finance charges.

CFPB defenders such as former Democratic Rep. Barney Frank, who drafted the bill creating the watchdog agency, have sought to rebut criticism by accusing Republicans of exaggerating complaints of overregulation.
“In all the years since we created it, they do not give one single example of abuse. They talk about an agency that is ‘out of control,’ it’s a ‘bureaucratic monster.’ You would think there would be some horror stories. You would think they would say, ‘And here’s what they did wrong, it created this sort of problem,’ ” Frank said. “I hope people will ask these critics — what is an example of what they did wrong?”

Actually, there are many. Partisan politics is the main area of complaint, even among former officials.

They say CFPB is a Democrat shop with an anti-business agenda that goes well beyond protecting consumers and includes closing the “wealth gap” and administering “economic justice,” as Cordray has been fond of saying. It hires almost exclusively Democrats and “rejects Republican job applicants,” according to former CFPB enforcement attorney Ronald Rubin. Federal election data show 100 percent of political donations made by CFPB employees during the 2016 election were given to Democratic candidates.

It’s no surprise then that the agency has:

• •Bounced business owners and industry reps from secret meetings it’s held with Democrat operatives, radical civil-rights activists, trial lawyers and other “community advisers,” according to a report by the House Financial Services Committee.
  
• •Retained GMMB, the liberal advocacy group that created ads for the Obama and Hillary Clinton presidential campaigns, for more than $40 million, making the Democrat shop the sole recipient of CFPB’s advertising expenditure, Rubin says.
  
• •Met behind closed doors to craft financial regulatory policy with notorious bank shakedown groups who have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal grant money to gin up housing and lending discrimination complaints, which in turn are fed back to CFPB, according to Investor’s Business Daily and Judicial Watch.
  
• •Funneled a large portion of the more than $5 billion in penalties collected from defendants to community organizers aligned with Democrats — “a slush fund by another name,” said a consultant who worked with CFPB on its Civil Penalty Fund and requested anonymity.

What’s more, CFPB has secretly assembled giant consumer databases that raise individual privacy as well as corporate liability concerns. One sweeps up personal credit card information and another compiles data on as many as 230 million mortgage applicants focusing on “race” and “ethnicity.” Yet another database of consumer complaints contains more than 900,000 grievances against named financial companies without any vetting to determine their merit, points out Alan Kaplinsky, lead regulatory compliance attorney at Ballard Spahr LLP.

Before Cordray’s departure, CFPB was preparing to launch a crackdown on banks who deny loans to “minority-owned businesses,” according to a CFPB notice and Ballard Spahr.

His exit gives Trump an opening to overhaul the agency, which he calls “a disaster,” as part of his sweeping regulatory reforms. According to the Federal Register, which records government regulations, rules on Obama’s watch hit an all-time high, imposing a cumulative burden of $890 billion on businesses.

In contrast, Trump has vowed to “put the regulations industry out of business,” which he says will lead to more jobs and higher wages.

“If you’re wondering about his commitment to deregulation, don’t,” Mulvaney told a libertarian group earlier this year, “because this is one of the things he pounds on again and again and again” in White House meetings.

Paul Sperry is the author of “The Great American Bank Robbery: The Unauthorized Report About What Really Caused The Great Recession.”
http://archive.is/M0tRE#selection-1053.0-1317.2

It turns out Democrats love ‘dark money’

By Paul Sperry

November 29, 2017 | 6:39pm

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, arguably the most outspoken Democratic critic of secret money in politics, last month sent a plea to donors to help counter “buckets of right-wing dark money” spent by “the Koch brothers and their shady network of outside groups” to unseat leftist giants like her.

But now, in a fit of hypocrisy, a top protégé of Warren is using secret money to protect her and President Barack Obama’s anti-business brainchild, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, from duly coming under the control of the Trump administration and its regulatory reforms.

Before stepping down as CFPB’s overzealous first director over Thanksgiving, Obama appointee Richard Cordray hand-picked a successor, Leandra English, to preempt an appointment by President Trump.

Undeterred, Trump installed his budget director, Mick Mulvaney, to temporarily run the powerful agency, which has the authority to determine the “fairness” of virtually every financial transaction in America.
But English, who previously served in the White House as a senior Obama adviser, insisted she was the “rightful” acting director, and filed a temporary restraining order against Trump to block Mulvaney from taking over. A federal judge denied the order Tuesday, but her legal team has vowed to continue fighting, arguing Trump is attempting an “end-run” on the bureau.

English is represented by Gupta Wessler, known inside the Beltway as the “anti-Trump law firm” for its many other lawsuits against the president. Only, she’s not paying the firm. And the bureau isn’t picking up the legal tab; its general counsel sides with the president.

So who’s funding this extraordinary legal battle with the White House? English’s lead attorney, Deepak Gupta, refuses to say.

“I’m not going to describe [the financial] arrangements,” he said Tuesday in a tense exchange with CNBC anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera. “I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to be talking about that on TV right now.”
All he’d disclose is that they had set up a “structure” similar to a “legal defense fund” to cover his fees, but he wouldn’t name any of the donors contributing to the fund.

Hmm. Anonymous donors. Mysterious funding. Shady network of outside groups. Sounds a lot like the “dark money” Gupta’s former boss Warren complains is “unduly influencing our political system” and “destroying democracy.”

Gupta worked directly under Warren, who was tapped by Obama to set up the CFPB in 2011 and who is now publicly backing English’s claim to control the bureau. Before founding his law firm in 2012, Gupta served as CFPB’s senior litigation counsel and senior counsel for enforcement strategy.

Gupta sits on the board of several left-wing groups. Warren worked directly with Americans for Financial Reform, a cabal of anti-Wall Street progressives, to help draft the legislation that created the CFPB.
They’re protecting not just their grip on a powerful agency but also a little-known but massive slush fund set up to fund leftist groups like theirs.

The agency — whose apparatchiks have given nearly all donations to Democrats — forces financial institutions it prosecutes to donate to third-party community organizers. Penalties in such cases are deposited into the bureau’s now-$170 million-plus Civil Penalty Fund, which has, in turn, channeled almost $30 million to “consumer advocacy” groups.

Which groups? The agency won’t say. The fund has avoided independent audit.

This is the fiefdom Democrats are hypocritically protecting with their own dark money.

All those complaints about “big secret funding” were just to vilify GOP donors, and all that talk about the “rule of law” was empty rhetoric. Democrats don’t want the rule of law, they want to make their own law — through unconstitutional entities like CFPB, which is simply social engineering masquerading as consumer protection.

https://nypost.com/2017/11/29/it-tur...ve-dark-money/

Democrats love that drug cartel money.