What did he know about foreclosure fraud, and when did he know it?
Andrew Levitin at Credit Slips looks at Sen. Scott Brown's tenure as a
real estate attorney during the mortgage fraud crisis. Brown says he worked with local banks and many mortgage companies, including with Fidelity National, a large real estate services company. At the time, Fidelity was the parent company of LPS. LPS, in turn, was one of the leading offenders in foreclosure fraud.
That led Levitin to ask some key questions.
Who were those "mortgage companies" that he worked for? It's nice that Brown named a bunch of local banks, but I wonder what lies under the "mortgage company" label? What did Scott Brown understand about the mortgage market he was facilitating? Did he recognize that there was a bubble? (He was a town property assessor at one point, so one would think he'd notice this sort of thing.) If not, what does that say? And if so, what does that say? How many predatory loans did Scott Brown facilitate? How many of the loans where he handled the closing resulted in foreclosure? What would he say to those families that lost their homes to predatory loans?
Since Brown has raised the issue of character and integrity in this race, he should be asked these questions. He was working with these companies at the height of the robo-signing, foreclosure fraud crisis. Was Brown blissfully unaware of the problems in the mortgage industry, or was he turning a blind eye? Given that he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer, it's entirely likely he wasn't catching on to the larger picture, but was merely a useful player for these mortgage companies.
There is one thing we do know, as pointed out by
David Dayen. When Congress was working on the Dodd/Frank financial reform legislation to address some of the abuses in the banking system that drove them to seek profit in mortgage fraud, Scott Brown was working to weaken that law on behalf of the financial firms.
He brags a lot about how his vote broke a filibuster against Dodd/Frank. What he doesn't brag about is how he used his vote to force a weaker law on behalf of the financial industry, once again playing the role of useful tool. It's no wonder Brown's the darling of the financial sector.
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