POWIP Piece of Work In Progress – Former Abode of Dan Collins

How the Office of Thrift Supervision Cost Taxpayers Billions

This is a story that I've mentioned I've had and been sitting on for awhile. It was my hope that Andrew Breitbart or Scott Baker might pick it up, and indeed, I was told by both of them that they had an interest, though nothing panned out. The only person who responded in a helpful way was Michelle Malkin, who contacted Fox to see whether Cavuto wanted it. The Fox show declined, and their business channel folks haven't gotten back to me about it, but Michelle was able to pass it on to Issa's office. It was taken by the fellow who was forced out for sharing media emails with someone writing a book, but I hope that he got it to the investigative team before he was cashiered.

The story, in brief, is that the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) was still advising lenders to skirt normal vetting practices when providing mortgages to subprime customers. My source has 43 pages of correspondence from the OTS and various lending institutions to back up his claim that even in September of 2007, as the mortgage lending industry was collapsing, the OTS was justifying its existence by urging lenders to skirt the law. The mechanism by which this was effected was to have banks and other lending institutions partner with national lenders, such as IndyMac, in order to evade state-imposed minimums. The document from September of 2007 says in effect that partnering firms should no longer black out the numbers that they are given when submitting mortgage applications, since it might expose them to legal liability, but that they should continue to treat such information as the wages of the applicant as a matter of no consequence.

That was the "Oversight" performed by the Office as the house of cards collapsed.

My source, as a condition of his bank's being purchased, is barred from banking, but the OTS officers who urged him to lend with abandon by partnering with IndyMac and other subprime monstrosities have escaped punishment altogether. You may recall that IndyMac's government capital infusion was backdated in order to make it appear that the lender was on less shaky financial ground.

This appears to be something of a pattern as Issa and company investigate Countrywide and the Friends of Angelo Mozilo, who have so far escaped any punishment beyond the levying of fines. Like the amounts taken by lawmakers to look the other way, those amounts are minuscule compared with the liabilities with which taxpayers have been saddled.

If anyone out there in the MSM is interested in this story, my contact is willing to talk, to appear personally on the news, and to share his documents, which I've vetted, and which testify to the truth of his allegations.

I know that there's a lot of news out there with Wisconsin and Charlie Sheen and Libya (and breasts!), but this is a story that deserves coverage, because you and I are going to be paying for these failures for a long, long time.

I've got a couple of other scoops available, including the best friend of James Arthur Ray Sedona sweat lodge victim James Shore (who left a diary of his experience at the "Spiritual Warrior" retreat), and the story of union folks getting withholdings sent to them at the end of the fiscal year, then settling up after years of tax evasion at pennies on the dollar with the IRS (averaging 7 cents/$), as well as a spokesperson for the loosely-affiliated hacker group Anonymous, who'd like to explain their operation to a conservative news outlet with some profile.

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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