PRESS RELEASE
Mnuchin Senate Committee Vote Not Scheduled, as He Comes Under Scrutiny and Heavy Fire
Jan. 27, 2017 (EIRNS)—As of the end of this week, a vote in the Senate Finance Committee on the nomination of Steve Mnuchin to be Secretary of the Treasury is still not scheduled, and may not occur until sometime in early February. A LaRouchePAC activist reported this week, that the members of the Committee are receiving waves of calls in opposition to Mnuchin. The LPAC organizer himself contacted all the offices, many of which were swamped. Many Democrats have not only announced opposition to Mnuchin, but are submitting new or repeat-questions.
No Republicans have announced opposition to Mnuchin’s confirmation, though Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) reportedly asked the nominee rough questions about the housing crisis in Nevada that Mnuchin could not answer. Many Republicans are on the hot seat, because they rightly hate George Soros, and Mnuchin is a thoroughly-pedigreed Soros operative.
Mnuchin submitted his written responses to questions—a 117-page document—to the Committee on Monday (Jan. 23), but committee Democrats have resubmitted some of the questions, charging that many of his answers were either inadequate or outright false. According to a report in The Intercept, Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) charged that some of his "answers to basic questions are at war with facts." During his confirmation hearing, Casey had asked Mnuchin if OneWest Bank, which Mnuchin lead from 2009 to 2015, had engaged in so-called "robo-signing" of documents without proper review, in essence, creating false evidence that was submitted to courtrooms and county offices during the foreclosure crisis in 2009. Mnuchin denied that OneWest had engaged in such practices, despite "abundant" evidence to contrary, including at least one affidavit by a OneWest employee in 2009.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) also accused Mnuchin of lying. "Mnuchin ran a bank that was notorious for aggressively foreclosing on homeowners, and now he’s lying about his bank’s dismal track record in his official responses to the Finance Committee," she said in a statement to The Intercept. "Working families simply cannot trust him to be the country’s top economic official."
According to a report in Bloomberg News, the Democrats are also seeking new answers on a number of other matters, including the matter of separating commercial from risk-investment banking, namely the Glass-Steagall question. Bloomberg reports this as, whether or not Mnuchin believes that the Volcker Rule provides an essential "bright line" to protect banks with insured deposits against proprietary trading risks, and whether he supports reinstating the separation between commerce and banking activities.
