According to the California state prosecutors investigating OneWest Bank in 2015 — and its then-CEO, Steve Mnuchin — the evidence was overwhelming that OneWest and Mnuchin had committed thousands of felonies.
Thousands!
Those felonies chiefly consisted of falsifying thousands of documents and lying to notaries, making it possible for OneWest to illegally foreclose on several thousand homeowners (disproportionately African-American homeowners targeted with sub-prime loans even when they’d qualified for prime).
Kamala Harris, California’s attorney general at the time, flatly rejected the “strong recommendation” of her prosecutors. Her team had documented a pattern of “widespread misconduct” on the part of OneWest and Mnuchin — again, involving several thousand felonies committed in order to throw several thousand families out of their homes — and Harris responded by closing the case.
Later, Steve Mnuchin would donate to Harris’s 2016 campaign for the U.S. Senate (as Trump had done in Harris’s previous campaigns).
And then Harris was elected!
And then Trump was elected!
And Steve (F’g) Mnuchin became Trump’s USPS-sabotaging, generally terrible Treasury Secretary (following in a long line of massively corrupt Goldman Sachs alumni to hold that position).
But as The Intercept has also reported, it turns out that Kamala Harris wasn’t just generous (to the point of dereliction) with institutionally racist (redlining and “reverse-redlining”) Wall Street crooks.
Apparently, she also had a soft spot for serial pedophiles (just what the Democrats need on their 2020 presidential ticket!).
That kind of leniency was hardly characteristic of Kamala “The Cop” Harris, the zealous prosecutor who’d spent her professional career doing things like: fighting to keep prisoners on death row; withholding potentially exculpatory DNA evidence for several years (and sitting on other potentially exculpatory evidence, for which her office was sharply reprimanded by Superior Court Judge Anne-Christine Massullo); fighting to keep inmates incarcerated in “cruel and unusual” circumstances (longer than their sentences required), with her office citing the prisoners’ usefulness in fighting wildfires; fighting to prosecute poor, disproportionately black parents when their kids skipped school…
In short, Harris had no problem pulling the prosecutorial trigger when her targets were poor, disproportionately black and Hispanic people. When it came to policing California’s most vulnerable citizens, Harris proved to be one of the more regressive prosecutors The New Jim Crow ever had.
In dealing with the poor, her motto was “prosecute, incarcerate, and hang ’em high — even when they’re innocent!”
Yet, when it came to multitudinous felonies committed by powerful elites (Mnuchin and the Catholic Archdiocese) whose “widespread misconduct” had victimized thousands of innocents (people of color, children) Kamala Harris somehow found it in her heart to forgive.
It’s almost enough to bring a tear to the eye. (Well, to Steven Mnuchin’s eye, anyway.)