[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 25 (Monday, February 13, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1112-S1121]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                      Nomination of David Shulkin

  Madam President, I want to take a moment to address the nomination of 
Dr. David Shulkin to be confirmed soon as the next Secretary of the 
Department of Veterans Affairs. We all know the Veterans Affairs 
Department faced a number of challenges in recent years: long waiting 
times, disability claims backlogs, issues related to accountability, 
whistleblowers, and the quality of care. The list is too long. As the 
second largest Federal agency, employing more than 350,000 people 
across America and serving as our largest integrated health care 
system, some challenges are unavoidable.
  As the VA provides for the brave men and women who fought and 
sacrificed for this country, as well as their families, it is critical 
that it be held to a high standard. We in Congress must work to ensure 
that, in addition to holding the Department to a high standard, we also 
ensure that it is well funded and that it has the tools and flexibility 
to do the job.
  It is critical that we strengthen the VA system and not weaken it 
through privatization, which would only lower the quality of health 
care for our veterans. That is why I am pleased with the nomination of 
Dr. Shulkin by President Trump to be the next Secretary of Veterans 
Affairs.
  Despite years of people playing politics with the VA--efforts which 
have only been counterproductive and have made it difficult for the VA 
to fill critical vacancies--and despite months of President Trump's 
talking about privatization without offering real solutions, today we 
have a nominee who appears to understand that, while there is a role 
for expanded care options, weakening or dismantling the VA is not the 
answer. I was heartened by Dr. Shulkin's commitment during his hearing 
in the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee on February 1, where he said: 
``The Department of Veterans Affairs will not be privatized under my 
watch.''
  Dr. Shulkin may not be a veteran himself, but I am encouraged by the 
fact that he comes from a military family and has decades of medical 
experience, including serving for 2 years under former VA Secretary 
Robert McDonald as head of the Veterans Health Administration after 
being nominated by President Obama. May I add that he left a lucrative 
private sector job and took a huge pay cut to join the VA.
  It is no surprise that a number of veterans service organizations 
actively support his nomination. Although progress has been made in 
recent years, there are still challenges at the VA that we need to 
continue to address. I worry about the veterans' health care, 
education, homelessness, accountability, and a host of other issues. I 
look forward to working with Dr. Shulkin on these matters.
  But we must not forget that, overall, in terms of health care, the VA 
is consistently found to provide care in key areas that is better than 
or on par with care in the private sector. It is significantly more 
cost effective, as well. And most veterans across the country prefer 
their veteran-centric health care that they receive in the VA. Despite 
what some may claim, most of them do not support privatization. I want 
to be clear that this includes a myriad of efforts under the guise of 
expanding access or choice.
  So I hope my colleagues will join me in supporting Dr. Shulkin to be 
the next VA Secretary. I shared then-President Obama's sentiment that 
he was the right person to head up the Veterans Health Administration 
back in 2015, and I believe he is the right person to head the VA 
today.
  Just 3 days ago, I was in Marion, IL, and visited our veterans 
hospital there. I met with the administrator. Ms. Ginsberg told me she 
knew of Dr. Shulkin and had high regard for him. That came as high 
praise from someone who is on the front line of serving thousands of 
deserving veterans in southern Illinois every single day. So her 
endorsement helped me to come forward today and to commit that I will 
be voting to make sure that Dr. Shulkin gets this opportunity to head 
the Veterans Affairs agency.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. MERKLEY. Madam President, even now, more than 2 months after then 
President-Elect Trump nominated Steven Mnuchin to be Treasury 
Secretary, I still find it hard to believe. Month after month out on 
the campaign trail, President Trump attacked Wall Street. He said, time 
after time, that he was going to take on Wall Street. He attacked his 
opponents in the primaries and in the general election by saying that 
they were too close to Wall Street and, specifically, too close to 
Goldman Sachs.
  He said, regarding Secretary Clinton: She will never reform Wall 
Street. I know the guys at Goldman Sachs; they have total control. But 
he countered this by saying that he would do it differently. He 
promised to take on Wall Street. He promised to fight for middle-class 
Americans. He promised to drain the swamp and reduce and eliminate the 
powerful entrenched special interests here in Washington, DC.
  But what a change can happen within a few weeks. Less than a month 
after winning the Presidency--I should point out, winning the electoral 
college but losing by a massive margin the popular vote, the citizen 
vote--who does Mr. Trump pick to be Treasury Secretary? A 17-year 
Goldman Sachs veteran, a foreclosure king--Steve Mnuchin.
  So here tonight, not even a decade after the second worst financial 
crisis

[[Page S1113]]

in U.S. history, we will be holding a vote on whether Steve Mnuchin is 
a fit character to be Secretary of the Treasury.
  What is particularly puzzling is not only the Goldman Sachs 
background, in contrast with the President's campaign promises, but 
also that this individual was a contributor to many of the predatory 
practices that nearly destroyed our economy in 2008, and he is someone 
who made a fortune throwing struggling American families out of their 
homes and onto the streets.
  I am somewhat shocked we are here tonight and that some of my 
colleagues are considering voting to put a man in charge of our 
Nation's financial system who played such a role in bringing it to its 
knees just a couple of years ago.
  Let's remember the massive impact on American families. They lost 
jobs by the millions. The unemployment rate soared. They lost their 
retirement savings and often they lost their homes--not just because 
they lost their jobs and couldn't pay their mortgage but because of the 
predatory design of the mortgages.
  So I am shocked that I am here tonight and we are holding this vote 
and that we are particularly considering an individual who worked to 
tear down the protections and throw American families to the Wall 
Street wolves.
  Maybe we should have a Treasury Secretary who succeeded in the past 
to build up the economy, not one who participated in tearing it down. 
Maybe we should have a Treasury Secretary who worked hard to put tens 
of thousands of people into homes, rather than someone who personally 
profited by throwing tens of thousands of American families out of 
their homes. I would be feeling much better about the vote we are 
holding tonight if that was the case because the American people have 
endured too much pain and suffering at the machinations of Wall Street.
  I thought we had perhaps learned our lesson. We worked hard to pass 
the Dodd-Frank reforms that would end those predatory mortgages, that 
would end those liar loans, that would end those teaser rate-exploding 
interest rate loans that brought families to their knees, that would 
end the securities designed in such a fashion that you couldn't 
evaluate whether they were AAA or AA, that would end this process and 
this formulation that turned the dream of American homeownership into 
the nightmare of American homeownership--this nightmare in which, 
instead of building wealth for American families, homeownership became 
a predatory instrument for draining wealth from American families.
  What was Steve Mnuchin doing when the Banking Committee was working 
to save the economy he had helped to tear down? Well, he was 
foreclosing on more than 36,000 struggling homeowners, conducting more 
than one-third of all the reverse mortgage foreclosures, running a bank 
with a record of discriminating against minority home buyers, running a 
bank with a record of discriminating against minority neighborhoods.
  So for all these reasons, this is the wrong man; the wrong man 
because he does not fit the promise the President made to take on Wall 
Street; the wrong man because he participated in destroying our 
economy, which harmed millions of American families; and the wrong man 
because he wants to dismantle Dodd-Frank, which had been put together 
specifically to end the predatory practices, including the illegal 
robo-signing he participated in.
  This individual has no business overseeing the financial future of 
the American people so I will be voting no on his confirmation, and I 
passionately urge my colleagues to do the same.
  Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. CASEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Moran). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. CASEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak as in 
morning business.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. CASEY. Mr. President, I rise this afternoon to speak about the 
nomination of Steve Mnuchin to be Secretary of the Treasury and the 
concerns I have about his nomination.
  I want to start with a Pennsylvania story. It is a story we wish we 
didn't have to highlight, but it is relevant to the discussion and 
debate on this nomination.
  I am looking at a document that is a written summary of a television 
investigative news report from January of this year. It is from the 
Pittsburgh television station WTAE, and it is dated January 16, 2017. 
The headline on the document is ``Trump Pick for Treasury Secretary 
Foreclosed on Hundreds of Homeowners in Western Pennsylvania.'' The 
article says in pertinent part about this one Pennsylvanian:

       Nellie Mlinek lost her husband to cancer. She lost her son 
     to an overdose. And then she lost her home to OneWest Bank.

  It goes on to describe the interaction between this individual and 
the bank, and of course this is the bank of which Steve Mnuchin was a 
part owner.
  I also want to read what she said about the circumstance she was in. 
She was hoping that because of the circumstances with regard to her 
home, that she would be able to work with the bank instead of having 
foreclosure. That was not to be.
  The article goes on to talk about others in the region who had 
foreclosures as well. A house in White Oak, PA, was foreclosed in 2014; 
a house in North Versailles was foreclosed in 2013; a house in Penn 
Hills in 2012; a Pittsburgh house was foreclosed in 2011. These are all 
communities in Allegheny County, Southwestern Pennsylvania, and Nellie 
was from Westmoreland County, which is just to the east of Allegheny 
County. So that is what the article summarizes--foreclosures throughout 
a corner of Southwestern Pennsylvania, as the headline says, hundreds 
of foreclosures.
  The article starts with this line: ``Critics say President-elect 
Donald Trump's pick for treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, ran a 
foreclosure machine at a major bank,'' and it goes on from there. That 
is one in Pennsylvania, and then references to foreclosures that I read 
from are summaries of what happened to some others.
  Then we go to the other end of the State. This is in Southeastern 
Pennsylvania, the region within which Philadelphia sits. In this case, 
the individual is Ruth Guerriero. Ruth is from South Philadelphia, and 
she remembers the day she got the letter that ``scared me to death.'' 
The letter threatened a foreclosure because of a reverse mortgage that 
she didn't know existed. The headline of this article is ``Reverse-
mortgage nightmare can start after borrower dies.''
  In this case, Ruth lost her husband. The article says that this 
particular piece of mail in October 2013 was from OneWest Bank, 
informing Ruth that it was foreclosing on the house in the 2800 block 
of South Hutchinson Street that she and her late husband had bought in 
2006 for $200,000. Without her knowledge, Ruth Guerriero said, her 
husband, 23 years her senior, had taken out a reverse mortgage in 
September 2007. It goes on from there.
  So anyone who has had that experience of losing a home or becoming 
the victim of a reverse mortgage when you didn't have prior knowledge 
can relate to what has happened to these individuals. This is part of 
the debate. These are not the only considerations we weigh, but when 
you have, in this case, a nominee for Treasury Secretary who comes into 
the nomination process not having held public office or not having held 
appointed government office, this is part of the record you are to 
review. It is really the only record--the record in this case as a 
banker or a businessperson, and in his case, his work on Wall Street.
  I had the opportunity, of course, as a member of the Finance 
Committee, to meet Mr. Mnuchin in my office and to question him more 
than once in the question period for the Finance Committee. In our 
meeting, I asked him, for example--and these are other relevant 
questions in terms of presenting accurate information, presenting 
information that will fully answer questions--I asked him how many 
times his financial institution chose to modify mortgages as opposed to 
foreclosing, and he told me that there were about 100,000 mortgage 
modifications. Yet we

[[Page S1114]]

know the documented evidence tells a different story; it is about one-
third that number, closer to 35,000 modifications.
  I realize that someone could not remember the exact number, but I was 
surprised at how far off he was in something so substantial in 
someone's life, whether it was a person like Nellie or other 
individuals. A mortgage foreclosure, as opposed to a modification, 
which is a better result for an individual or family--that is a 
substantial difference in their lives. And I would hope that when you 
are in any way involved in a foreclosure, as a banker or as a part of 
an entity that is foreclosing, that you would carefully weigh the 
consequences before you choose to pursue foreclosure or pursue a 
different path, the path of modification, which, of course, everyone 
would prefer in that circumstance.
  I asked Steve Mnuchin how many Americans his bank had foreclosed on 
during the financial crisis, and he has yet to provide an answer to 
that question. I know others may have asked a similar question, and I 
wonder if they got an answer. We will see what the public record shows.
  Mr. Mnuchin was also asked to provide a copy of a letter he said he 
sent to the Department of Housing and Urban Development raising 
concerns about the impact of the company's reverse mortgage guidance. 
It was almost a month ago that we asked for that information to be 
produced, that letter, and we still haven't seen it. So I wonder about 
the statement he made with regard to information from HUD.
  I also asked Mr. Mnuchin whether his financial institution engaged in 
the predatory practice of so-called robo-signing, and this is a 
question which was asked by a couple of Senators. I asked him for that 
information, and he said that wasn't the case. But now we know from the 
documented evidence in an answer that he later changed that there was 
robo-signing taking place at the time we alleged that it did.
  So when you ask a question in a hearing and you get an answer that 
was wrong or incomplete or misleading or otherwise, that is one thing. 
You could sometimes have a circumstance where someone didn't 
intentionally want to mislead or tell a lie, or they may have answered 
a question imprecisely or without a lot of information. But I think it 
is a little different when you ask a question in writing, where the 
individual had the time to analyze a question and provide an answer in 
writing with some time to reflect, some time to consult some other 
sources of information before they draft their answer and then submit 
it to you as part of the nomination process. In this case, Mr. Mnuchin 
had a different answer than the facts showed, and I will go through 
that a little bit later.
  At some level, there is a question of accuracy, maybe even rising to 
the level of trust, and that is something we have to consider when we 
are making a determination about a nominee, because almost any Cabinet 
agency has to transmit information, very specific, detailed 
information. People have to be able to rely upon the information, the 
accuracy of it and the completeness of it. And if he has had problems 
in his nomination process, that causes us to raise some real questions.
  I wanted to start with OneWest Bank--another entity called Financial 
Freedom. I don't know how far we will get into this in the limited time 
we have. In 2009, Mr. Mnuchin and his business partners bought OneWest 
Bank at the height of the financial crisis for $1.6 billion, paying 
about 5 cents on the dollar for the bank's assets. Mr. Mnuchin was able 
to buy the bank at such a significant discount in part because he was 
entrusted to modify as many home mortgages as possible so homeowners 
could stay in their homes. He foreclosed on more than--I should say 
OneWest Bank foreclosed on more than 40,000 Americans, so we are told.
  We don't know how many foreclosures they engaged in in Pennsylvania, 
but, as I read a couple moments ago from an investigative report from 
WTAE, it is at least hundreds in one region of the State. We have 67 
counties. Depending on where you draw the line, Southwestern 
Pennsylvania is 10 counties, 12 counties, somewhere in that range, 
maybe as high as 15 if you went as far north as Erie. Let's say it is 
15 counties. Hundreds of foreclosures in that region is substantial.
  Later, after all of those thousands of foreclosures across the 
country, Mr. Mnuchin sold OneWest Bank for $3.4 billion in 2015. The 
sale itself yielded the group of individuals, including Mr. Mnuchin, 
billions of dollars--that would be Mr. Mnuchin and also investors.
  I mentioned the foreclosures before and the individuals involved. I 
wanted to go a little deeper into the particular circumstances.
  I mentioned and highlighted Nellie's story. Here is what took place 
in that circumstance--or what she had hoped would take place. Nellie 
was hoping that she would be able to work something out with the bank, 
so she asked OneWest to help her keep the house by adjusting her 
payment. That often happens when a bank initiates a foreclosure. It 
begins a process but works something out with a homeowner, and that 
would be called a modification. In this case, Nellie asked OneWest to 
help her keep her house by adjusting her payment, but she said the bank 
refused and then foreclosed on her. She said: ``They should have worked 
with me to meet a payment that I could make.'' She filed for 
bankruptcy, but even that did not save her house. She said it cost her 
``a lot of depression.'' That is what Nellie said about her own 
circumstances, and I mentioned the other communities in Western 
Pennsylvania.
  That is the reality foreclosure brings to bear on the life of one 
individual who is struggling, who, in Nellie's case, has had a series 
of setbacks, deeply personal, tragic circumstances compounded by the 
foreclosure. The same is true of Ruth in South Philadelphia, in terms 
of the impact of that decision. We have a lot of ways to summarize 
information like this, and I will just highlight maybe one or two.

  For example, according to the National Consumer Law Center, in March 
of 2012, a Philadelphia senior citizen with a reverse mortgage from a 
wing of Mr. Mnuchin's bank--in this case, the name of the entity was 
Financial Freedom--sought assistance because he had been served with a 
preforeclosure notice. The reverse mortgage company owned by Mr. 
Mnuchin gave this individual 30 days to pay almost $5,000.
  What was the bill for? Well, without his knowing it, Financial 
Freedom charged him over $2,000 for forced-placed insurance coverage 
from 2010 to 2012. Financial Freedom threatened to go forward with the 
foreclosure unless this senior citizen made immediate monthly payments 
equal to almost 35 percent of his monthly income. With legal 
assistance, those payments were reduced.
  I would hope you would not need to hire a lawyer to get those 
payments reduced, but sometimes when you are up against a powerful 
financial institution, that is the only way to proceed.
  Instead of immediately informing this senior citizen of his lapsed 
coverage, Financial Freedom charged excessive amounts for forced-placed 
coverage. Financial Freedom then waited 2 years to begin collection, 
but it expected this senior, who was living on a fixed income, to pay 
within 30 days. Financial Freedom also did not tell this senior citizen 
he could apply for a longer repayment plan due to his low income.
  According to the National Consumer Law Center, in 2015, Financial 
Freedom notified a Pennsylvania reverse mortgage holder's heirs that 
the only way to avoid foreclosure on the family home was by repaying 
the loan balance or selling the property for at least 95 percent of its 
appraised value. They said the appraised value for the Pennsylvania 
home was $170,000, even though their own appraisal of the property just 
one month earlier was $67,000. There is a big difference between 
$170,000 and $67,000. It seems that $170,000 was the appraised value at 
loan origination, way back in 2007. Now, of course, it is years later, 
and that was, of course, before the market collapsed. So for the 
purposes of preforeclosure notice, Financial Freedom used an appraisal 
over $100,000 more than the actual value of the home. They were trying 
to force the heirs to pay more than $100,000 above the home's value to 
prevent foreclosure of the family home.
  So these are a couple of Pennsylvania stories--Ruth and Nellie and 
then some others, whose names aren't in the text of my remarks, but 
give similar stories about some of the foreclosure practices

[[Page S1115]]

that Mr. Mnuchin was part of when he had these individual banks.
  Here is the question on robo-signing that I mentioned earlier. I 
submitted a question for the record in writing and gave it to him, and 
here is what his response was to the question. The question was this:

       One of the most significant scandals during the financial 
     crisis was the practice of ``robo-signing'' whereby bank 
     employees rapidly approved foreclosure documents without 
     thorough review. Many were wrongfully foreclosed upon on 
     account of these practices. Did OneWest Bank ``robo sign'' 
     documents relating to foreclosures and evictions?

  His response was pretty shocking:

       OneWest Bank did not robo-sign documents, and as the only 
     bank to successfully complete the independent foreclosure 
     review required by Federal banking regulators to investigate 
     allegations of robo-signing, I am proud of our institution's 
     extremely low error rate.

  The reason I say that it was a shocking answer is because he had 
signed his name to a 2011 document that found that OneWest Bank did, in 
fact, robo-sign. The findings from the Office of Thrift Supervision 
does not explicitly state robo-signing--that is not a legal term of 
art--but it does set forth a fact pattern for robo-signing, which 
involves an employee signing foreclosure documents without reviewing 
them. Instead of reviewing the details of each, robo-signers assume the 
paperwork is correct and sign it automatically. Almost anyone who lived 
through the financial crisis of 2008 knows what robo-signing is, and 
many were victims of this practice.
  So that is a problem, obviously, when you answer a question in a 
manner that is totally inconsistent with the facts.
  I know I am low on time, and I want to wrap up. What I will do for 
the record--or if we have time to come back later--is to get into some 
other issues. But one of the real concerns I have about his nomination 
is not just his record as a banker, as a person working on Wall Street 
and working in that world. It is one thing to say you did something in 
your prior life, but once you put on the mantle of public service and 
the heavy responsibilities of Treasury Secretary, you set aside that 
other work you did or that other position you had, maybe, on some 
issues. But, apparently, some of his work--or at least some of his 
points of view--will continue in the Treasury Department, because I 
think it is pretty clear, based upon some reporting back at the end of 
November, that Mr. Mnuchin believes that one of his prime 
responsibilities is to begin to dismantle, or substantially alter, what 
we know as the Dodd-Frank legislation.
  We know what happened prior to that. We know what happened to the 
economy. We know that the United States lost about $19 trillion in 
household wealth. That is $19 trillion, with a ``t.'' More than 8 
million jobs--by one estimate, 8.7 million jobs--were lost. So I would 
hope that as Treasury Secretary, were he to be confirmed, he would make 
sure that we never go down that path again--that before you dismantle 
Dodd-Frank, you better think about the consequences to real people's 
lives.
  So I will wrap up because I know we have to go, but I will put more 
information in the Record.
  Let me conclude with one thought before we move on. One of the 
concerns I have about his nomination, also, is not something you can 
point to in a document. It is just a gut instinct or a judgment that I 
have made, and it is a judgment that can be summarized this way: I have 
a real concern about his commitment to public service. Why do I say 
that? It seemed that, in this whole process of disclosing financial 
information--turning over documents, answering questions, answering 
follow-up questions--Mr. Mnuchin was kind of resistant to scrutiny or 
seemed to be burdened by this, and that somehow he was disclosing too 
much. His demeanor, when you would ask him some questions, appeared to 
me to be a demeanor that was not consistent with what public service 
must be about. When you are in public service, whether you are elected 
or appointed, you are, in fact, a servant. You don't work for a bank, 
you don't work for a financial institution, and you don't work for a 
company. You don't even work for a President. You work for the people.
  I was taught a long time ago that the closer you can get to this 
ideal--which is inscribed on a building in our State capitol in 
Harrisburg: ``All public service is a trust, given in faith and 
accepted in honor''--the way you accept your public duties is not only 
to disclose what you should disclose, to answer questions which you 
must answer, but to do it in a manner where you are doing it with a 
belief that you are a public servant and with the spirit of public 
service. If you are labored and if you are chafing under that or 
resisting, you should probably do something else with your life.
  I hope I am wrong about that. I hope once he is in office--and it 
appears that he may be confirmed--and if he is confirmed, we see a 
different approach to the duties of public service and the burdens of 
public service. I hope I am wrong about him, but my instincts tell me 
otherwise.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Jersey.
  Mr. MENENDEZ. Mr. President, I rise today to speak in opposition to 
President Trump's nominee to serve as Secretary of the Treasury, Steve 
Mnuchin.
  From his days at Goldman Sachs, on the frontlines of developing the 
very products that brought our economy to its knees, to his reign as 
chairman of OneWest Bank, quantified by tens of thousands of 
foreclosures and qualified by years of despair, to his plan to get rich 
off cash-strapped seniors, to his investments in Sears that stripped 
pension benefits from low-wage-earners, Mr. Mnuchin made a career out 
of exploiting the financial turmoil of hard-working American families, 
never once stopping to consider the impacts of his profiteering on the 
people of this country.
  At every step of the way, Mr. Mnuchin's mantra has been to privatize 
profits and socialize losses.
  While our President spent much of his campaign railing against 
Goldman Sachs and Wall Street's stranglehold on Washington, it should 
be lost on no one that Wall Street has the majority vote in this 
administration. With friends like Mr. Mnuchin and Gary Cohn in high 
places, the country's largest and most complex financial institutions 
can rest easy, knowing this administration is firmly committed to their 
bottom lines. As Treasury Secretary, Mr. Mnuchin will be a chief 
architect of the GOP's ``Wall Street First'' policy.
  Despite his self-described humble beginnings at Goldman Sachs in the 
1980s, Mr. Mnuchin was on the frontlines of developing the now-infamous 
collateralized debt obligations known as CDOs and credit default swaps.
  I urge my colleagues not to be fooled by Mr. Mnuchin. He was part of 
the cadre of corporate raiders that brought our economy to its knees.
  In its 2011 report on the great recession that wiped out nearly $13 
trillion in household wealth and cost nearly 9 million Americans their 
jobs, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations described 
Goldman Sachs' role in the crisis as follows:

       Goldman engaged in securitization practices that magnified 
     risk in the market by selling high risk, poor quality 
     mortgage products.

  It said:

       Conflicts of interest related to proprietary investments 
     led Goldman to conceal its adverse financial interests from 
     potential investors, sell investors poor quality investments, 
     and place its final interests before those of its clients. . 
     . .''

  Despite the damage they caused, Mr. Mnuchin never learned his lesson, 
and, as recently as 2012, he praised these instruments, calling them 
``an extremely positive development in terms of being able to finance 
different parts of the economy and different businesses efficiently.''
  Now, after he left Goldman Sachs, Mr. Mnuchin started a hedge fund, 
Dune Capital, which started investing in an exotic financial instrument 
called life settlements, which are made up of life insurance policies 
purchased from cash-strapped seniors. The investor, Mr. Mnuchin's hedge 
fund, had a plan to pay the premiums on the policies until the seniors 
died, at which point they would cash in on the insurance claims.
  So let's be clear. Under Mr. Mnuchin's plan, the sooner seniors died, 
the more money his hedge fund would make. While the markets for

[[Page S1116]]

this product collapsed before Mr. Mnuchin could cash in, we have to ask 
ourselves if this is the type of leader whom we want at the helm of our 
economy? Do we really want a Treasury Secretary who had a plan to get 
rich off of dying seniors?
  That brings us to the end of 2008 and early 2009. Wall Street had 
brought our economy to the brink of collapse, and 13.2 million 
Americans were facing unemployment. Home values were plummeting, having 
fallen 12.5 percent in just one quarter. And where was Mr. Mnuchin? He 
was negotiating the deal of a lifetime. In the darkest days of the 
financial crisis, when Rome was burning, Mr. Mnuchin and his friends 
were looking for stores to raid.
  Boy, did they find a gem in IndyMac. He purchased IndyMac's $23.5 
billion of assets for a mere $1.55 billion in March of 2009. With the 
FDIC, Federal Deposit Insurance entity backing, its too many loans went 
south. So he had a governmental guarantee for $23.5 billion of assets 
for about $1.5 billion, and he had the government's guarantee. All that 
Mr. Mnuchin had to do was to agree to help homeowners struggling with 
their mortgages, but Mr. Mnuchin didn't hold up his end of the bargain. 
He wanted more. Apparently, the profit margins of foreclosure were just 
too sweet to ignore.
  After buying IndyMac and renaming it OneWest Bank, Mr. Mnuchin was 
installed as chairman. But instead of working to achieve sustainable 
loan modifications and workouts for struggling borrowers, as Mr. 
Mnuchin had committed to doing, OneWest's business model centered on 
kicking borrowers out of their homes at the first sign of default.
  In April of 2011, the former Office of Thrift Supervision hit OneWest 
Bank with a consent order because the bank was actually putting 
homeowners on a fast track to foreclosure, robo-signing foreclosure 
documents.
  In a sworn deposition in 2009, a OneWest vice president admitted to 
robo-signing 750 foreclosure documents a week without ever reading or 
reviewing them. In 2014, an independent government review of OneWest's 
foreclosure activities in 2009 and 2010 alone identified more than 
10,000 homeowners, including dozens of active-duty servicemembers, who 
were owed $8.5 million in damages due to the bank's foreclosure 
practices.
  OneWest's practices were especially egregious when it came to seniors 
with reverse mortgage loans. During Mr. Mnuchin's tenure at the bank, 
OneWest's reverse mortgage subsidiary, Financial Freedom, had 
approximately 17 percent of the reverse mortgage shares but was 
responsible for nearly 40 percent of reverse mortgage foreclosures. In 
other words, Mr. Mnuchin cornered the market on focusing and 
foreclosing on seniors in America. Whether it was foreclosing on a 90-
year-old woman over a 27-cent--27-cent--missed payment or threatening 
to kick an 84-year-old widow out of her home of 54 years, Mr. Mnuchin 
was ruthless.
  What did Mr. Mnuchin have to say about all of this when we asked him 
during his confirmation hearing in the Senate Finance Committee? He 
dodged responsibility at every step. First he blamed IndyMac for the 
quality of mortgage loans; then he blamed government regulations, which 
he falsely claimed forced his bank to kick people out of their homes. 
If that wasn't enough, Mr. Mnuchin had the audacity to tell us that his 
bank did not robo-sign documents despite clear evidence to the 
contrary.
  To make matters worse, Mr. Mnuchin had the gall to call OneWest a 
loan modification machine. He repeatedly misled the committee that 
OneWest provided more than 100,000 loan modifications when, in fact, 
they modified less than one-quarter of that amount.
  On top of misleading the committee, Mr. Mnuchin has been unwilling to 
provide information on the number of borrowers who lost their homes 
during the time that he ran the bank. We believe that number is at 
least 60,000 families and seniors, but those numbers could even be 
higher.
  At the end of the day, this is about much more than numbers. It is 
about the seniors who are barely hanging on to their homes--their only 
source of wealth. It is about communities that were hit with a one-two 
punch of subprime loans in the years leading up to the crisis, only to 
face banks like OneWest with unrelenting foreclosure practices that 
stopped at nothing until they had kicked people out of their homes.
  It is about people like Sylvia Oliver of Scotch Plains, NJ. After her 
employer cut her hours in 2009, like so many other hardworking 
Americans at the time, she ran into difficulty paying her mortgage. 
Despite the fact that Ms. Oliver found a full-time job and applied 
eight--eight--times for loan modifications, Mr. Mnuchin's bank denied 
each and every one of her applications. Ms. Oliver has been fighting to 
save her home for 7 years. She is hanging on by a thread. Her own words 
speak volumes about Mr. Mnuchin. She said:

       It's been very painful and stressful not knowing if my kids 
     and my family are going to have a home to live in, or if it's 
     going to be foreclosed on. I would ask you to remember my 
     experience when you consider whether Mr. Mnuchin is qualified 
     to lead the Department of the Treasury. As the CEO and Chair 
     of OneWest Bank, Mr. Mnuchin had the opportunity to help 
     families like mine with responsible loan modifications, and 
     he didn't. I don't think this is a track record that anybody 
     should be proud of.

  Ms. Oliver is right. Mr. Mnuchin's record is not only undeserving of 
pride, it is shameful. While Mr. Mnuchin's business formula proved 
toxic for tens of thousands of hard-working American families and 
seniors, it was incredibly lucrative for Mr. Mnuchin and OneWest's 
investors. He sold OneWest for $3.4 billion, a profit of $1.85 billion 
over just 6 years, making around $200 million for himself. That is a 
pretty nice return on investment.
  While I am gravely concerned about Mr. Mnuchin's history of 
exploiting hard-working Americans to line his own pockets, I am equally 
concerned about his plan to unchain Wall Street. Mr. Mnuchin has made 
it his No. 1 priority to roll back Wall Street reform.
  As my friend Senator Brown has often said, our colleagues seem to 
have contracted a case of collective amnesia about the great recession. 
Just 8.5 years after the worst financial collapse in 80 years, which 
put taxpayers on the line for billions in bailouts, the President, 
Republicans in Congress, and Mr. Mnuchin are champing at the bit to 
take down the very protections that were put in place to prevent 
another catastrophe. I ask them, Have we learned nothing?
  We know what this administration wants. It wants what the industry 
wants. On the day the President signed his ``Wall Street First'' 
Executive order, Goldman Sachs' shares soared 4.6 percent, a $4 billion 
gain. At the end of the day, Mr. Mnuchin is nominated to serve in a 
position to ensure the financial stability of the American economy, but 
his only experience is betting on the financial instability of American 
families.
  Not only did he profit off the backs of struggling homeowners, he 
also stands to profit off of pensions he mismanaged while on the board 
of the Sears company. From the time Mr. Mnuchin joined the board of 
Sears, the company lost billions of dollars, including more than $8 
billion since 2011 alone. Rather than invest in growth and its workers, 
he decided to strip the company of its most valuable assets and keep 
them for themselves and their friends.
  While Sears seemed to lose in this transaction, there were some that 
certainly appeared to profit. Not surprisingly, Mr. Mnuchin and his 
hedge fund friends were those profiteers. As a shareholder lawsuit 
contended, they gobbled up the most valuable and profitable assets, and 
they saved golden parachutes for themselves to escape if the company 
crashed. This might sound complicated, but it is a move that would make 
Gordon Gecko from the movie ``Wall Street'' proud. Just replace 
Bluestar Airlines with Sears, and fiction becomes reality. In the world 
of both men, greed is good.
  But this isn't a movie. It is the real world with real-life 
consequences for 200,000 people who work at Sears. Stripping Sears of 
$12 billion worth of its most valuable assets contributed to the 
devaluation of the company, which further jeopardized the pensions of 
more than 200,000 Americans. According to the most recent filing, this 
pension fund is now underfunded by an alarming $2 billion after they 
stripped $12 billion of its most valuable assets. These retirees, who 
rely on pensions to live, who worked hard all of their lives and played 
by the rules, have already

[[Page S1117]]

had their benefits cut by Mr. Mnuchin and the Sears finance board. In 
fact, the pension situation has become so dire that the government, 
through the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, or the PBGC, felt 
compelled to step in to protect the pension benefits for these 200 
people.
  As if his past mismanagement of pensions isn't bad enough, as 
Treasury Secretary, Mr. Mnuchin would oversee the decision whether to 
bail out the pension. Mr. Mnuchin would have to decide whether to 
protect his personal hedge fund investments in Sears, which he refuses 
to divest, or to protect the Federal Government and those 200,000 
retirees.
  To be fair, when I asked Mr. Mnuchin about his inherent conflict of 
interest during his confirmation hearing, he pledged to recuse himself 
from any decision by the PBGC regarding Sears. But we have heard that 
song before. Mr. Mnuchin can't avoid a conflict of interest by recusing 
himself any more than President Trump can avoid a conflict by 
supposedly letting his children run his businesses. The only true 
firewall against a potential conflict of interest is through a full 
divestiture, which Mr. Mnuchin refuses to do. As a private citizen and 
executive at Sears, Mr. Mnuchin showed a total disregard for the earned 
pension benefits of hundreds of thousands of hard-working Americans. I 
have no reason to think he will have a change of heart as Treasury 
Secretary.
  Not only does Mr. Mnuchin want to let banks write their own rules and 
let executives profit when they cut pensions, but he also wants to cut 
taxes on the rich so he and his friends can keep more of their ill-
gotten gains. After helping raise millions of dollars from Wall Street 
and big corporations for President Trump's campaign, they are now 
expecting a big return on their investment--and, boy, do they win big 
league under the Mnuchin-Trump tax plan. This ill-conceived proposal 
would give large corporations, which are already earning record 
profits, an additional $2.5 trillion. That is $2.5 trillion taken away 
from transportation, from schools, from the middle class, and given 
directly to multinational corporations. It would eliminate the estate 
tax and gift taxes, giving a nearly $200 billion windfall to the 
wealthiest 5,000 family dynasties in the country--$200 billion to the 
wealthiest 5,000 family dynasties in the country--and 99.99 percent of 
all Americans will not see a penny from this giveaway. But we know who 
would benefit: Mr. Mnuchin and President Trump.
  It doesn't stop there. On top of all of this, the Mnuchin-Trump 
proposal would also give the top one-tenth of 1 percent--the wealthiest 
of the wealthy, the corporate CEOs and hedge fund managers who make 
around $4 million per year or more--$1 million back each and every 
year. This group of elite earners already take home a whopping 184 
times the average pay and has the same combined net worth as nearly 90 
percent of all American workers. These 160,000 of the richest families 
in the country have as much wealth as 144 million families in America.
  I have nothing against wealthy people. I have nothing against 
millionaires and billionaires. Many worked hard for their money, and 
they played by the rules. I applaud their success. But I don't think 
the wealthy, who are doing just fine right now, need an extra million 
dollars or more than the middle class. I don't think we should be 
borrowing trillions more from China just to give the top one-tenth of 1 
percent another million dollars. This is fundamentally backward.
  They say we can't afford to invest in infrastructure, we can't afford 
to help our graduates with mounting college debt, we can't afford to 
give a whole host of resources to things we think are critical to 
compel our Nation to be the continuing global economic leader, but we 
can afford to give $1 million away to all the millionaires and 
billionaires in the country. This warped order of priorities is a 
perfect metaphor for Mr. Mnuchin's school of economics: Give the rich 
more and more because they know best.
  Unfortunately, this theory of trickle-down economics hasn't worked in 
the past and will not work now. The American people are sick and tired 
of getting fleeced. They are tired of working hard every day and 
playing by the rules only to fall further behind. They are tired of 
losing in a rigged system.
  But a Treasury Department led by Mr. Mnuchin will only deliver more 
of the same: more tax breaks for the wealthiest in the country, more 
borrowing from China, more income inequality. These are not the 
principles Americans want or need.
  In conclusion, you can tell a lot about a person based on how they 
handle a crisis. When Wall Street crashed and the country plunged into 
recession, where was Mr. Mnuchin? Was he warning regulators that they 
were asleep at the wheel and hard-working Americans were being 
exploited? Was he working to reform the broken system? No. He was 
looking for stores to raid with one goal in mind: profits.
  Some would like to either ignore or whitewash this past, but if we 
don't learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. The American 
people cannot afford a repeat of that past. We cannot afford a return 
to the Wild West of Wall Street--when the middle class was held hostage 
to the earnings reports of the biggest banks, when the cure for income 
inequality was simply more tax cuts for the wealthy.
  We need a Treasury Secretary who will stand up to Wall Street, not 
take orders from them. We need a Treasury Secretary who understands 
that the strength of our country has come and will always come from the 
middle class, not from the CEOs and the hedge funds. Unfortunately, 
Mnuchin is not that person.
  I urge may colleagues to oppose his nomination.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Lankford). The Senator from Nevada.
  Ms. CORTEZ MASTO. Mr. President, I rise today, along with many of my 
colleagues, to speak out against the White House nominating Steven 
Mnuchin to be the next Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. President Trump 
has nominated the former CEO of OneWest Bank--who before that for 17 
years was a Goldman Sachs executive--to run the Federal agency tasked 
with crafting and implementing U.S. economic policy. So much for 
draining the swamp.
  I want to start, however, by sharing the story of a good friend, Lola 
Orvik, whom I met when I was attorney general of Nevada.
  In 2013, Lola's mortgage on her townhouse in Henderson was 
underwater. Like thousands of other Nevadans, she needed to refinance, 
but five different loan modification applications had all been rejected 
by her bank. Lola was desperate for a solution and on the verge of 
losing her home. She received a telephone call offering help that was 
too good to be true, and it was. After calling my office, she 
thankfully discovered that it was a scam. I am so glad she called my 
office. Our staff referred her to a new program we had created, the 
Home Again Homeowner Relief Program. It is a one-stop shop to help 
struggling homeowners. It helped Lola finally get a loan modification, 
reduce her principal by $37,000, slash her interest rate from 5.7 
percent to 2 percent, and keep the house she had lived in for nearly 20 
years.
  The Home Again Program helped thousands of Nevada homeowners 
understand all the State and Federal housing resources available to 
them. It has helped folks like Lola restructure their loans to ensure 
more affordable monthly payments. That simple hotline number has gone a 
long way.
  Because we were there to help her, Lola got her life back. However, 
not everyone was as fortunate as Lola. In fact, some families are still 
trying to overcome the continuing destructive impact of the foreclosure 
crisis in Nevada and across this country.
  In the depths of the great recession, Lola's predicament was not 
unique. Nevada was ground zero for the housing crisis. Property values 
plummeted. ``For sale'' signs lined the streets. Foreclosure notices 
hung on doors throughout the State. Thousands of families lived in 
constant fear of losing their homes.
  In 2008, Nevada had the highest foreclosure rate in the Nation, with 
more than 77,000 homes getting a notice at the door saying they were at 
risk for eviction. We led the Nation in the terms of foreclosure rate 
for 62 straight months during the recession.
  Things got so bad that by 2010, nearly 70 percent of Nevada 
homeowners were underwater on their homes, meaning

[[Page S1118]]

that they owed more on their mortgages than the current value of their 
property.
  As Nevada's attorney general, I fought the big banks, Wall Street 
institutions, and default servicing companies to secure more than $1.9 
billion to help hard-working families get back on their feet. That 
money helped to fund the Home Again Program.
  More than just getting that money back, this was about changing the 
conduct and predatory practices of the big banks when working with 
homeowners. For instance, we made dual tracking an illegal practice so 
that banks could no longer foreclosure on a home while simultaneously 
considering their request for a loan modification and then charging 
them fees every step of the way. We demanded that a homeowner have a 
single point of contact within the financial institution so the 
homeowner would no longer get shuffled around from person to person and 
told to resubmit their loan modification application over and over 
again. We demanded that the banks demonstrate that they had personal 
knowledge of the foreclosure documents they filed to prevent robo-
signing and unlawful foreclosures of a home.
  Unfortunately, not every bank was willing to do everything possible 
to help the millions of Nevadans and Americans who were suffering. Mr. 
Mnuchin's OneWest Bank--formally known as IndyMac--was one such bank. 
Instead of trying to help homeowners, OneWest enforced predatory and 
unforgiving practices that only served to line the pockets of Mr. 
Mnuchin and his co-owners.
  Steven Mnuchin purchased IndyMac from the Federal Government after it 
collapsed and took control of the thousands of mortgages the bank 
managed. Mnuchin rebranded the bank as OneWest and went to work using 
questionable foreclosure practices, like dual tracking, so he could 
make more money. That is not right.
  Instead of working to help these homeowners stay in their homes, 
OneWest Bank, under Mnuchin's leadership, became a foreclosure machine. 
The bank had one of the highest denial rates for applications to the 
Home Affordable Modification Program. A judge in Wisconsin cited 
OneWest's ``harsh, repugnant, shocking, and repulsive'' practices when 
deciding a suit against them. Recent documents show that the company 
used robo-signing to deny modification claims, proving that it did not 
fairly consider loan modification applications for tens of thousands of 
homeowners.
  When confronted with these facts at his Senate confirmation hearing, 
Mr. Mnuchin lied. He denied that OneWest used robo-signing, offered 
empty excuses, and shifted blame for his company's heinous practices. 
And during his confirmation hearing, Mr. Mnuchin repeatedly refused to 
say how many homes OneWest foreclosed on in Nevada.
  However, according to new data, during the foreclosure crisis and its 
immediate aftermath, OneWest made $3 billion in profit while evicting 
3,654 Nevada families from their homes. This includes 181 foreclosures 
on seniors who had taken out reverse mortgages. When he eventually left 
the bank, Mr. Mnuchin received a $10.9 million payout. This is on top 
of the annual compensation of $4.5 million he has received since 2015, 
when OneWest was bought by other investors. Let me repeat that. Some 
3,654 Nevada families lost their homes because Mr. Mnuchin's OneWest 
put profits over people. That is a snapshot and a statistic which does 
not do justice to how much pain that caused for those families.
  I want to spend some time on these accusations of robo-signing, both 
because Mr. Mnuchin clearly lied and also because this was an issue I 
took on when I was attorney general during and after the crash.
  First, let's be clear what this is. Robo-signing is a procedure used 
by mortgage companies to sign foreclosure documents without reviewing 
them. This is a reckless practice used by banks to cut corners and 
forge documents, to rush things along, and it caused thousands of 
families to be wrongfully evicted from their homes.
  Like OneWest, the banks were involved in a massive robo-signing 
scheme in my home State of Nevada, and I went after them aggressively 
as the State's attorney general. Nevada led the Nation in foreclosures 
every month for more than 4 years.
  Mr. Mnuchin's company did not care that middle-class families were 
losing their homes during the crisis. In fact, during his confirmation 
hearing before the Senate, he admitted:

       I never wanted to be in the mortgage servicing business. I 
     didn't want to be in the reverse mortgage business, I wanted 
     to build a regional bank.

  In other words, Mr. Mnuchin had to convince his investors that they 
would make money--a point that Mr. Mnuchin admitted at the hearing, 
saying: ``Yes, my investors made a lot of money on OneWest.''
  Not only did his investors make a lot of money, Mr. Mnuchin did so as 
well. Since leaving the bank, he has pocketed nearly $20 million. Mr. 
Mnuchin was making millions, while thousands of Nevadans were losing 
their homes and their dignity, Nevadans like Heather McCreary of 
Sparks, who came to Capitol Hill last month to share her heart-
wrenching story of how she applied to OneWest for a loan modification 
in 2010 after she and her husband lost their jobs as a result of the 
financial crisis. Despite three applications and following all 
instructions, the bank kept Heather's family dangling and then suddenly 
foreclosed on their home. I want to read some of Heather's testimony. 
It is moving and heartbreaking and deserves to be heard by every Member 
of this body.
  Here is what she told us at the hearing:

       In 2008, when the economy started to get worse, I was laid 
     off. The following year, in 2009, my husband Jack was laid 
     off too. Though Jack was able to find another job pretty 
     fast, he had to take a big pay cut--from about $25 an hour to 
     $8.50 an hour. Between the cut in Jack's pay and the loss in 
     income I experienced when going on unemployment insurance 
     benefits after I got laid off, we were pinched and we were 
     drowning financially.
       However, we were determined to keep our dream home, so Jack 
     and I were tenacious about doing whatever we could to get 
     help. We sought help from the Hope Now Alliance, which is an 
     alliance of HUD-approved counselors who provide free 
     foreclosure help, and from the Washoe County Senior Law 
     Project.
       We worked side-by-side with both organizations to do 
     everything required of us by our mortgage servicer IndyMac, 
     which later became OneWest. When we first asked for help, 
     OneWest gave us a short forbearance and allowed us to make a 
     smaller payment for several months with the goal of a 
     reduction in our monthly mortgage payments through the Home 
     Affordable Modification Program (or HAMP).
       By applying for the HAMP program, we thought we were back 
     on the road to keeping our home. We complied 100 percent with 
     OneWest requirements for HAMP--we were incredibly nervous 
     about being able to keep our house, so we were extremely 
     careful to make sure we did everything we could to keep the 
     process going forward. Our application for HAMP was processed 
     and we were approved for our modification. I sent in the 
     signed paperwork and the first payment under the modified 
     payment amount along with it.
       But then the process started to fall apart. After a whole 
     30 days, OneWest returned our personal check and told us that 
     only certified checks would be accepted, so they were now 
     voiding the modification offer. We had followed the 
     instructions to the letter on OneWest paperwork, crossing our 
     ``T''s and dotting our ``I''s. But in the end, this didn't 
     matter--and OneWest's rejection of our HAMP application put 
     us on the road to foreclosure.
       We applied two more times for loan modifications over the 
     next six months because we were given assurances by people at 
     OneWest that they would approve our application. We again 
     complied with every request OneWest made of us, taking care 
     to send in extra documents whenever OneWest requested them.
       But as far as I can tell, OneWest never attempted to 
     process the loan modification. The foreclosure went through 
     and we lost our home on September 10, 2010. The foreclosure 
     left us without a home; and finding a new rental was 
     extremely difficult because of our credit. Juggling the 
     demands of raising our twins was so hard--the foreclosure 
     even meant that our kids had to miss school. Eventually we 
     did find a new place, but we had to pay an outrageous rent, 
     even though it was not a good home for us at all.
       It's hard to explain the shame, embarrassment, and grief 
     that Jack and I felt. I've cried a river of tears over this. 
     I really didn't think we were asking too much: We wanted to 
     hang on to our home for the sake of our kids, and we did 
     everything we could to stay in our home. And while I will 
     probably never know exactly what OneWest did, the outcome of 
     my story proves that Steve Mnuchin's company had no interest 
     in helping us. They wanted to foreclose because they were 
     focused on their profits.

  Heather's story is just one of thousands that highlight just how 
wrong

[[Page S1119]]

Mr. Mnuchin is to be our next Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. The 
Treasury Department has the vital mission of promoting the conditions 
that enable economic growth, stability, job opportunities, and the 
ability to buy a car or own a home. Their actions directly affect the 
lives of every American.
  Our next Treasury Secretary should have a proven record of fighting 
to expand economic opportunities for everyone. That is what Americans 
deserve. Yet, from where I stand, Mr. Mnuchin falls far short of that 
test.
  President Trump's choice of Mr. Mnuchin to lead the U.S. Treasury is 
a slap in the face for Nevada families like Heather's. Her story makes 
it crystal clear: This is not someone who will be looking out for 
working people when he implements our Nation's economic policy.
  In many ways, President Trump's unfortunate choice of someone like 
Mr. Mnuchin should not surprise us because in 2006 the President said 
he ``sort of hoped'' the real estate market would tank, and in 2007 he 
said he was ``excited'' for the housing market crash. The motive was 
the same: profits.
  We cannot afford to return to the misguided policies that brought us 
to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Families 
cannot afford to lose their homes again. But that is exactly what we 
can expect if Stephen Mnuchin is confirmed as President Trump's 
Treasury Secretary.
  When I ran for the Senate, I promised Nevadans that I would fight for 
them, that I would stand up for them and be their voice here in 
Washington. Today, I am that voice, and that is why I rise with my 
colleagues in opposition to the ``Foreclosure King,'' Mr. Mnuchin.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, I rise today to join a chorus of my 
colleagues in speaking out against the nomination of Steven Mnuchin to 
serve as Secretary of the Department of the Treasury.
  What I believe is, if you look at Mr. Mnuchin's record, he has spent 
a lot of time benefiting from--in fact, even exploiting--families who 
are struggling homeowners in my State.
  I would like to read into the Record a report by NPR from November of 
last year which makes his pattern stunningly clear.

       During the depths of the financial crisis, Mnuchin was 
     looking to make profits from the ruins of the housing bust. 
     In 2009, he put together a group of billionaire investors and 
     bought a failed California-based bank called IndyMac. It had 
     been taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation 
     after its sketchy mortgage loans went seriously bad.
       Mnuchin and his partners bought IndyMac on the condition 
     that the FDIC agree to pay future losses above a certain 
     threshold. They renamed the bank OneWest Bank, and after 
     running it for 6 years, they sold it last year for a profit, 
     estimated at close to $1.5 billion.
       Kevin Stein of the California Reinvestment Coalition, a 
     housing advocacy group, says that profit was made on the 
     backs of suffering Californian homeowners.

  This is not in the text here, but homeowners who were suffering from 
a massive mortgage collapse that was created in many ways or stimulated 
by the greed and avarice of bad actors. I witnessed this myself in 
Newark, NJ, watching people feed upon a subprime mortgage environment 
where they were pushing bad loans on unsuspecting borrowers.

  Back to the text:

       In essence what they did is they bought a foreclosure 
     machine.
       According to the coalition, OneWest foreclosed on more than 
     36,000 homeowners under Mnuchin. During that time, the FDIC 
     made payments to OneWest totaling more than $1 billion. Those 
     payments went to the billionaire investors of OneWest Bank, 
     says Stein, to cover the cost of foreclosing on working-class 
     everyday American folks, many of whom lived in California.

  So this was what we saw at the height of the financial crisis. Mr. 
Mnuchin, already very wealthy, already very successful, did not see 
Americans struggling, did not join efforts to try to empower, support, 
or deal with this crisis. What he saw was an opportunity to take over a 
financial institution and continue, if not accelerate, the foreclosures 
that were going on.
  It has become painfully clear that in what Mr. Mnuchin oversaw in the 
operations of this bank that, as its business model, he set out to 
explicitly mislead and manipulate homeowners into foreclosure.
  This one article that I read has been repeated by organizations and 
by news outlets all over the spectrum, talking about how Mr. Mnuchin, 
in this environment, worked very hard to accelerate foreclosures and 
take advantage of this and make a profit. From elderly widows, the 
stories continue, to families, to small business owners, to Active-Duty 
servicemembers, there were many, many victims of Mr. Mnuchin's bank's 
predatory tactics, taking advantage of folks in a crisis, as opposed to 
trying to figure out a way to support folks through it.
  I would like to read one more from the Minneapolis StarTribune, an 
article that documented one instance of the disturbingly prevalent 
practices of Mr. Mnuchin's company.
  The headline reads: ``Negotiating on foreclosure, then locked out in 
a blizzard.''

       A Minneapolis woman who was negotiating with a lender to 
     find a way to stay in her foreclosed house--

  Stepping back from the text, this is someone who is working hard to 
do the right thing in negotiations.
  Back to the text:

       They arrived home from work during Tuesday night's blizzard 
     to find that the locks had been changed. After spending the 
     night at her mother's, Leslie Parks went Wednesday to 
     Hennepin County Housing Court, where a referee ordered that 
     she be allowed back into her mother's former duplex at 3749 
     Park Avenue while negotiations continued. Locksmiths on 
     Wednesday reconfigured the locks that had been changed 
     Tuesday by a contractor for OneWest Bank.

  These are the kind of tactics that were being used, the kind of 
hardball tactics that were being used by Mr. Mnuchin's company that 
really undermined a lot of hard-working Americans from a variety of 
backgrounds in many, many different States.
  His record is clear. Mr. Mnuchin not only advocated in support of 
this company and its tactics, but even now he talks about trying to 
roll back the kind of protections that have been put in place to try to 
protect average Americans. Many of them are in the Dodd-Frank 
legislation that helped to protect against the creation of an 
environment in which such predatory practices can take place.
  This position that Mr. Mnuchin has been nominated for, which is the 
Secretary of Treasury, has a critical role within our economy. But one 
of those roles has to be the idea that average Americans will be 
protected from the kind of financial victimization that was going on 
during the recession--actually, which lead into the recession.
  We see that we can prevent Wall Street from burdening Main Street 
with the costs while they reap the rewards. This is the broken system 
that we saw in the past that needs fixing and needs healing. We don't 
need one of the architects of the system that caused so much pain to be 
in one of the most important positions in our land.
  The head of this vital agency must be someone who understands their 
responsibility to look out for the struggling American trying to make 
it by playing by the rules and someone who is qualified and willing to 
direct the Department to fiercely protect the economic security of our 
Nation, the economic well-being of the American people, and the 
integrity of our financial system.
  I don't believe Mr. Mnuchin is that person. He has made it clear in 
his decades-long career that he is willing for a profit to work hard to 
exploit hard-working families and shortchange homeowners for that 
personal gain. This is unacceptable. Mr. Mnuchin has built a career and 
has reaped literally millions of dollars of success by pushing people, 
by exploiting people, and by hurting people.
  The American people cannot afford to suffer through another financial 
crisis. We can't afford to have a master Wall Street manipulator put in 
the position that we should be relying on to protect us from that kind 
of financial manipulation.
  This is a difficult economy where people in our country are still 
struggling under challenging financial

[[Page S1120]]

times. I believe that we can make a nation where people can do good and 
do well at the same time, where we should not elevate or celebrate 
people who really fed off of the misery and the challenges of others, 
but, instead, that we can have a nation where we put people, regardless 
of their political background, in positions like the Department of 
Treasury to celebrate the best of who we are, the best of our values--
people who are public servants, people who have shown a commitment to 
not only serve but even sacrifice for one another.
  What we saw amidst this crisis--amidst a crisis that, in many ways, 
was aggravated and caused by greed and avarice in the mortgage industry 
and the banking industry, among rating agencies--was that many people 
showed who they were in a time of American struggle and American 
crisis. We saw with clarity where people's priorities were. Was it 
exploiting people? Was it manipulating systems for their own avarice 
and their own benefit, or was it for being there for our country, 
trying to make thing things better, trying to give people bridges that 
could carry them from financial struggle and strain to stability, or 
people that were trying to crumble those bridges and have people free 
fall in financial distress.
  This is, unfortunately, what we see here today. We have President 
Trump trying to elevate someone who has not shown a record of someone 
who wanted to help but instead has shown a record of someone who wants 
to hurt. That to me is unacceptable, especially at this time where so 
many American families are still struggling to get back on their feet 
to find financial security and find the pathway to their American 
dream.
  It is for this reason and more that I cannot support this nomination.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, there are communities across this country 
that are still waiting for the recovery from the great recession to 
show up. In many of those towns and cities, the storefronts are boarded 
up, the factories are shuttered, and, in what could be the most lasting 
scar of the crisis, homes--many homes--have been foreclosed. A lot of 
people in those communities cast their votes in November based on a 
Trump message that real change was coming.
  Heads are going to be spinning tonight with the news from the Senate. 
In just a few minutes, this body will vote to confirm as Treasury 
Secretary Steven Mnuchin, known by many as the ``foreclosure king.'' 
That is whom the President chose as his Treasury Secretary. Mr. Mnuchin 
turned the bank he bought into a cash cow, and they set a land speed 
record for foreclosures.
  I have supported nominees for this position from both parties. I 
voted for Paul O'Neill. I voted for John Snow, and Hank Paulson, who 
served under President George W. Bush. I don't expect to see eye to eye 
on each issue with every Treasury Secretary. I do expect to have 
confidence that the Treasury Secretary is going to work on behalf of 
all Americans--all Americans--and not just the well healed, not just 
the fortunate, not just the powerful.
  After considering Mr. Mnuchin's qualifications and background, I just 
don't believe he would be that kind of Treasury Secretary. In Mr. 
Mnuchin's response to questions from members of the Finance Committee, 
he denied that his bank, OneWest, engaged in a practice known as robo-
signing. The public record says that is just dead wrong. In fact, a 
OneWest vice president who worked under Mr. Mnuchin, Erica Johnson-
Seck, admitted under oath that she ran an office that churned out 
roughly 6,000 sets of foreclosure documents a week.
  She said she personally signed more than 750 disclosure documents a 
week without even reading them, and there was no notary present during 
the process. That is a violation of the law. When asked how much time 
she spent executing each foreclosure document, Ms. Johnson-Seck 
replied:

       I changed my signature considerably. It's just an E now. So 
     not more than 30 seconds.

  Now, on the eve of the Finance Committee mark-up for Mr. Mnuchin, the 
Columbus Dispatch in Ohio reported documented examples of robo-signing 
in Ohio. Now, on the eve of Mr. Mnuchin's confirmation vote in the 
Senate, another such story has broken. This time it is in the State of 
Washington, more evidence of robo-signing that directly contradicts 
what Mr. Mnuchin told the Finance Committee and the public.
  Mr. Mnuchin also withheld foreclosure data requested by two 
Democratic members of the Finance Committee, Senators Brown and Casey. 
He did, apparently, give similar information to Senator Heller, one of 
the committee's Republican members. That is on top of $100 million 
worth of property and more than a dozen positions with various business 
entities missing from his disclosures to the Finance Committee.
  My own view is, if not for the committee's minority investigations 
team, I don't believe any of that information, none of it--$100 
million, the other disclosures--would have ever come to light.
  I am going to turn from missing disclosures and misleading testimony 
to a broken promise. The day after news of Mr. Mnuchin's nomination was 
leaked, he appeared on television and, in effect, debuted a new tax 
policy. I have come to call it the Mnuchin rule, and I will quote Mr. 
Mnuchin directly with respect to what he said.
  Mr. Mnuchin said: ``Any reductions we have in upper income taxes 
would be offset by less deductions, so there would be no absolute tax 
cut for the upper class.''
  I will repeat the last part of the Mnuchin rule: ``no absolute tax 
cut for the upper class.''
  When I first called this the Mnuchin rule during the Finance 
Committee's hearing on his nomination, Mr. Mnuchin said he took it as a 
great compliment, comparing it to the Volcker rule and the Buffett 
rule. Well, you would think a fellow who proudly embraced having a rule 
named after himself would actually stick to it.
  The Mnuchin rule didn't last for very long before it was abandoned. 
The very first act of the 115th Congress in a unified Republican 
government, repealing the Affordable Care Act, would shatter the 
Mnuchin rule. Then it is set to take another hit later this year. That 
is with the majority working on plans to fast-track a second, even 
bigger tax break for those who are the most fortunate. The Trump plan, 
in fact, would hit millions of middle-income families with tax 
increases by wiping out key personal exemptions and eliminating head of 
household filing status.
  So I want to be really clear what this means to people in Oklahoma 
and Oregon and all across the country, working families: Working 
families would get hurt by the Trump plan. They would lose key personal 
exemptions. They would eliminate the head of household filing status 
while those who were more fortunate would be in a position to get tax 
breaks, additional tax breaks beyond what they already have in the Tax 
Code.
  The fact is, the Tax Code today is a tale of two systems. For the 
firefighter in Coos Bay, OR, or the retail worker in Roseburg, your 
taxes come straight out of each and every paycheck. That is the way it 
works in Oklahoma, the way it works all across the country. The Tax 
Code for working people is compulsory. Once or twice a month, your 
taxes come directly out of your paycheck--no special dodges, no special 
loopholes. Nobody is able to hide their pay in a Cayman Islands account 
if they are a firefighter or a retail worker.
  But there is a very different Tax Code in America for the well-
connected and the powerful. They have a whole array of lawyers and 
accountants who specialize in helping them shrink their tax bills. And 
with the right advice, the fact is, those people can, to a great 
extent, decide what they are going to pay, when they are going to pay 
it, and sometimes be in a position to not pay much, if anything at all.
  The fact is, the tax system today punishes working Americans because 
it treats them very differently than it treats the most fortunate. And 
the administration and the majority in Congress don't seem to be doing 
much in terms of fixing this disparity.

[[Page S1121]]

  The Mnuchin rule just hasn't held up. It is beyond being on the 
ropes. It is not going anywhere at all. In fact, the early proposals 
only make this extraordinary unfairness, the unfairness at the heart of 
America's Tax Code, even worse.
  So what we have is another Trump nominee who, in my view, doesn't 
meet the test of standing up for working families in those communities 
all across the country who are waiting for economic recovery to show up 
in their neighborhood. They are the ones who have seen the factory 
close and seen the foreclosures and seen their neighbors laid off. And 
they would like to see people in these positions advocate for them, 
advocate for them because they need somebody who is going to stand up 
for them, and they were told in the campaign that is what they were 
going to get.
  The fact is, Mr. Mnuchin is yet another Trump nominee who, instead of 
standing up for those working families, has a different set of 
priorities and, in addition to that, has the ethics alarm bells 
sounding.
  He appears to be withholding information requested by Members of this 
body. My view is, he misled the Finance Committee and the public about 
his bank's foreclosure tactics. The Mnuchin rule--the first promise he 
made, the very first promise he made on policy, which he was proud to 
have described as a rule named after him, already has been broken.
  So I am not going to be supporting Mr. Mnuchin to lead the Treasury 
Department. I urge my colleagues as well to reject this appointment.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, all postcloture time 
has expired.
  The question is, Will the Senate advise and consent to the Mnuchin 
nomination?
  Mr. HATCH. I ask for the yeas and nays.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
  There appears to be a sufficient second.
  The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk called the roll.
  The result was announced--yeas 53, nays 47, as follows:

                       [Rollcall Vote No. 63 Ex.]

                                YEAS--53

     Alexander
     Barrasso
     Blunt
     Boozman
     Burr
     Capito
     Cassidy
     Cochran
     Collins
     Corker
     Cornyn
     Cotton
     Crapo
     Cruz
     Daines
     Enzi
     Ernst
     Fischer
     Flake
     Gardner
     Graham
     Grassley
     Hatch
     Heller
     Hoeven
     Inhofe
     Isakson
     Johnson
     Kennedy
     Lankford
     Lee
     Manchin
     McCain
     McConnell
     Moran
     Murkowski
     Paul
     Perdue
     Portman
     Risch
     Roberts
     Rounds
     Rubio
     Sasse
     Scott
     Shelby
     Strange
     Sullivan
     Thune
     Tillis
     Toomey
     Wicker
     Young

                                NAYS--47

     Baldwin
     Bennet
     Blumenthal
     Booker
     Brown
     Cantwell
     Cardin
     Carper
     Casey
     Coons
     Cortez Masto
     Donnelly
     Duckworth
     Durbin
     Feinstein
     Franken
     Gillibrand
     Harris
     Hassan
     Heinrich
     Heitkamp
     Hirono
     Kaine
     King
     Klobuchar
     Leahy
     Markey
     McCaskill
     Menendez
     Merkley
     Murphy
     Murray
     Nelson
     Peters
     Reed
     Sanders
     Schatz
     Schumer
     Shaheen
     Stabenow
     Tester
     Udall
     Van Hollen
     Warner
     Warren
     Whitehouse
     Wyden
  The nomination was confirmed.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote on the 
nomination, and I move to table the motion to reconsider.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Daines). The question is on agreeing to 
the motion to table.
  The motion was agreed to.

                          ____________________