A new book by journalist Aaron Glantz is challenging Sen. Kamala Harris’s (D-Calif.) record on taking on big banks when she was California’s attorney general from 2011 to 2017.
Glantz joined “Rising” to discuss his latest book, “Homewreckers: How a Gang of Wall St. Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions of Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream.”
In the book he claims that when Harris was California’s attorney general, she allowed Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s OneWest Bank at the time to illegally foreclose on tens of thousands of families and then tried to bury a report with the evidence.
“She stood up this mortgage fraud strike force that was supposed to be looking at ways that people were cheating the system,” Glantz told Hill.TV on Monday, referring to the now 2020 Democratic presidential candidate.
“Her staff on this mortgage fraud strike force, they drew up a 25-page memo detailing how Mnuchin’s bank was allegedly breaking the rules and they brought it to her and they asked her to prosecute his bank and she buried the report,” he continued.
Glantz added that Harris didn’t have to answer for the move in the immediate years that followed because she hid the report.
A spokesperson for Harris’s campaign didn’t immediately respond to Hill.TV’s request for comment.
Harris, who has a history of taking on the banking industry, has faced renewed scrutiny in recent years over her decision not to prosecute Mnuchin for violating state foreclosure laws.
According to a 2013 memo first published by The Intercept, the California attorney general’s office alleged that Mnunchin violated notice and waiting period laws, manipulated legal documents and rigged foreclosure auctions.
But Harris decided not to heed the California attorney general’s recommendation to file charges against him and has since stood by her decision.
“We went and we followed the facts and the evidence, and it’s a decision my office made,” Harris told The Hill in an interview last year. “We pursued it just like any other case. We go and we take a case wherever the facts lead us.”
—Tess Bonn
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