AP: Trump’s voter fraud expert registered in 3 states

lol!

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A man who President Donald Trump has promoted as an authority on voter fraud was registered to vote in multiple states during the 2016 presidential election, the Associated Press has learned.

Gregg Phillips, whose unsubstantiated claim that the election was marred by 3 million illegal votes was tweeted by the president, was listed on the rolls in Alabama, Texas and Mississippi, according to voting records and election officials in those states. He voted only in Alabama in November, records show.

In a post earlier this month, Phillips described “an amazing effort” by volunteers tied to True the Vote, an organization whose board he sits on, who he said found “thousands of duplicate records and registrations of dead people.”

Trump has made an issue of people who are registered to vote in more than one state, using it as one of the bedrocks of his overall contention that voter fraud is rampant in the U.S. and that voting by 3 to 5 million immigrants illegally in the country cost him the popular vote in November.

The AP found that Phillips was registered in Alabama and Texas under the name Gregg Allen Phillips, with the identical Social Security number. Mississippi records list him under the name Gregg A. Phillips, and that record includes the final four digits of Phillips’ Social Security number, his correct date of birth and a prior address matching one once attached to Gregg Allen Phillips. He has lived in all three states.

Read on.

Another Replacement: Trump Replaces ICE Chief Daniel Ragsdale, Appoints Thomas Homan

Department of Homeland Security website:

Release Date:

January 30, 2017

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
Contact: 202-282-8010

WASHINGTON – Today, the president appointed Mr. Thomas D. Homan acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Since 2013, Mr. Homan has served as the executive associate director of ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO). In this capacity, he led ICE’s efforts to identify, arrest, detain, and remove illegal aliens, including those who present a danger to national security or are a risk to public safety, as well as those who enter the United States illegally or otherwise undermine the integrity of our immigration laws and our border control efforts.

Mr. Homan is a 33-year veteran of law enforcement and has nearly 30 years of immigration enforcement experience. He has served as a police officer in New York; a U.S. Border Patrol agent; a special agent with the former U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service; as well as supervisory special agent and deputy assistant director for investigations at ICE. In 1999, Mr. Homan became the assistant district director for investigations (ADDI) in San Antonio, Texas, and three years later transferred to the ADDI position in Dallas, Texas.

Citigroup to exit U.S. mortgage servicing operations by 2018

Citigroup Inc (C.N) said on Monday it would speed up the transformation of its U.S. mortgage business by exiting servicing operations by the end of 2018.

Citi said it would sell its mortgage servicing rights on about 780,000 Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans of non-Citibank retail customers to New Residential Mortgage LLC (NRZ).

The remaining Citi-owned loans and other mortgage servicing rights not sold to NRZ are expected to be transferred to loan servicing provider Cenlar FSB [CENLR.UL] in 2018.

The lender said it expected these deals to hurt first-quarter pretax results by about $400 million, including a loss on sale and certain related transaction costs.

The move is intended to simplify CitiMortgage’s operations, reduce expenses and improve returns on capital as the company focuses on mortgage originations.

Read on.

Wells Fargo Sued For Barring DACA Recipients From Student Loans

After Mitzie Perez filled out a preliminary form online to inquire about a student loan from Wells Fargo last summer, a message flashed across the screen saying the bank had no options for her. “This could be due to the school you selected, your field of study, and/or your citizenship status,” the bank’s website said.

The third-year bachelor’s student in gender and sexuality studies at the University of California, Riverside, didn’t think her citizenship status would be a problem. Though she’s undocumented, in 2012 she received work authorization under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. That program shields undocumented immigrants who arrived as youths from deportation and allows them to work legally.

Curious, Perez hit the back button on her browser and changed her answer on one of the preliminary questions to say she was a permanent resident. After she resubmit her application, Wells Fargo allegedly offered her a loan option she could apply for.

“I didn’t expect it,” Perez told The Huffington Post. “I’ve been approved for credit cards. It was weird to me that a loan wouldn’t be approved, but creditors would provide me that support.”

A class action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Northern California says rejecting her application based on immigration status violates both federal and state law.

Read on.

Mnuchin Again Denies Robo-Signing, Despite Yet More Evidence He Is Lying

The Intercept:

This is the very definition of robo-signing. OneWest signed and agreed to the consent order, though it never admitted or denied the activity

However, in a Florida foreclosure case, a OneWest employee plainly admitted to robo-signing. On July 9, 2009 – four months after OneWest took over operations from IndyMac, with Mnuchin as CEO – Erica Johnson-Seck, a vice president with OneWest, gave a deposition in which she admitted to being one of eight employees who signed approximately 750 foreclosure-related documents per week.

“How long do you spend executing each document?” Johnson-Seck was asked. “I have changed my signature considerably,” Johnson-Seck replied. “It’s just an E now. So not more than 30 seconds.”

Johnson-Seck also admitted to not reading the affidavits before signing them, not knowing who inputted the information on the documents, and not being aware of how the records were generated. And she acknowledged not signing in the presence of a notary. This resulted in false affidavits being submitted in court cases that attempted to take borrowers’ homes away.

Deutsche Bank : to Pay $425 Million to Settle N.Y. Financial-Services Probe

Deutsche Bank AG will pay $425 million to settle an investigation by New York’s financial-services watchdog into violations of the state’s anti-money-laundering laws through a so-called “mirror trading” scheme that transferred $10 billion out of Russia, the Department of Financial Services said Monday.

The bank “missed key opportunities to detect, intercept and investigate” the scheme, according to DFS, in which companies that were clients of its Moscow equities desk issued orders to purchase Russian blue-chip stocks in rubles, while a related party would sell the same stock for the same price in the same amount through the bank’s London branch.

A Justice Department investigation into the Russian trades has been ongoing, and it is unclear if or when a settlement might be reached.

Read on.

33 labor complaints just dropped in front of Trump’s labor secretary pick

On Thursday, workers from CKE Restaurants, which owns Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., filed 33 complaints against franchises of the company, which is run by Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Labor.

Already, Puzder had been facing strong headwinds on his road to confirmation—and he hasn’t even had a hearing yet amid delays. The controversy has included sexist ads for Carl’s Jr., CKE’s low wages saddling taxpayers with a $250 million bill, and calling his employees “the worst of the worst”—which provoked Joe Scarborough to call Puzder a “loser.”

This week, current and former workers have filed 33 complaints in 10 states: Alabama, California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Texas, Nevada, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. Of the complaints, 22 are regarding wage and hour issues, like wage theft and manipulated overtime, 7 are unfair labor practice complaints, and 4 are sexual harassment charges.

The sexual harassment charges, whose allegations include threats of sexual violence and multiple instances of retaliation, like moving the reporting employee to a less-desirable shift after they complained to HR, have been filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.The labor practices complaints have been filed with the National Labor Relations Board. The wage and hour complaints, however, have been mostly filed with the Department of Labor, the agency CKE’s CEO Puzder would be heading, which has aWage and Hour division.

Read on.

Trump Sacks U.S. Acting Attorney General

WASHINGTON ― President Donald Trump fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates on Monday night, hours after she said the Justice Department would not defendTrump’s executive order on immigration.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer said that Yates had been relieved of her duties. Dana Boente, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, was named as acting attorney general.

Spicer’s statement said Yates had “betrayed the Department of Justice” by refusing to defend Trump’s order. The statement added that Yates, a career prosecutor who Trump named as acting attorney general, is “weak on borders and very weak on illegal immigration.”

Read on.

Federal Reserve issued a cease-and-desist order to BB&T Corp. over alleged deficiencies in its anti-money-laundering controls

From the WSJ article:

Such orders don’t state that the bank has laundered money, but rather that their internal systems for detecting criminal activity and reporting it to the government are deemed unsound by regulators. The policing of such violations has become more severe since the financial crisis.

Brian Davis, a BB&T spokesman, said the firm has a “long history of quickly addressing regulatory concerns,” and has already made “significant enhancements” to its anti-money laundering compliance program. He said the firm is “committed to working alongside our regulatory partners to implement the needed improvements as quickly as possible.”

Two lawmakers join battle between the CFPB and PHH

Housingwire:

While the landmark case between PHH and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau awaits a decision on whether the full Court of Appeals will rehear the case, more politicians are publicly voicing their support for the bureau.

A new update from the CFPB Monitor stated that Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., who are, respectively, the Ranking Members of the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee, filed a motion with the D.C. Circuit seeking to intervene in the PHH appeal.

The motion comes shortly after a similar motion from a dozen Democratic state attorneys general.

The 17 attorney generals said that the election of Donald Trump compelled them to intervene in the CFPB lawsuit. “When PHH filed the original petition for review in June, 2015, there was little reason for the State Attorneys General to intervene. At that time, the CFPB still had an independent Director and was fully committed to seeking rehearing to challenge the panel’s ruling and defend the constitutionality of the bureau’s independent structure,” the AGs state in their motion to intervene.

“But as a result of the presidential election,” the AGs continued, “the situation has changed.”

Now, both Brown and Waters are following suit.

From the CFPB Monitor:

The new movants rely primarily on the argument that they cannot rely on the CFPB under the Trump Administration to adequately represent their interest in defending the CFPB’s status as an independent agency.

As grounds for why they have a legally protected interest which would be impaired by the litigation, Senator Brown and Representative Waters point to their votes for the Dodd-Frank Act and claim that if the CFPB, acting at the new Administration’s direction, does not defend its constitutionality, “movants’ votes to establish the Bureau as an independent agency will be nullified without full judicial review of the constitutional question presented in this case.”