Thursday, March 13, 2014
Senator Chuck Grassley today made the following comment after the Inspector General for the Department of Justice released a scathing audit report on the Justice Department's efforts to address mortgage fraud.
Grassley began asking questions about the Justice Department's work in this area more than two years ago following a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on lending discrimination cases. Grassley initially asked the department on March 9, 2012, about its claim to have prosecuted thousands of mortgage fraud cases and to have "secured numerous convictions against CEOs, CFOs, board members, presidents and other executives of Wall Street firms and banks for financial crimes."
Here is Grassley's comment.
"The Inspector General's report sheds light on what looks like an attempt by the Justice Department to pull the wool over the public's eyes with respect to its efforts to go after the wrongdoers involved in mortgage fraud. According to the Inspector General, the department wasted time cooking the numbers about the cases it pursued, when it should have been prosecuting cases. In addition, it isn't even using the funding allocated by Congress for the specific purpose of going after mortgage fraud, which might explain why the Inspector General found that it isn't a priority in some of the FBI's biggest offices. It's contrary to everything we've been hearing out of the Obama administration. In order to change Wall Street's shady practices, the Justice Department needs to be honest and transparent about its efforts, and actually prosecute some people instead of succumbing to a too big to jail mentality."
