Michael Flynn Is The Subject Of A Pentagon Investigation 27APR17

IT is no wonder (NOT MY) pres drumpf/trump chose michael flynn as his NSA / National Security Adviser, flynn and drumpf/trump are cut from the same cloth. Corrupt, dishonest, greedy, they are a perfect match. I bet the drumpf/trump-pence administration is still mad they had to fire flynn, after all, he helped orchestrate the russian hacking of the DNC and the Clinton-Kaine campaign and their interference in the 2016 Presidential election. flynn deserves to loose his pension and retirement payments from the Pentagon, dollar for dollar, for what he received from the russians and other foreign governments. Because he has repeatedly lied about his foreign activities he should also face criminal charges and jail time. Maybe he and drumpf/trump will be cell mates some time in the (hopefully near) future. From +NPR .....

Michael Flynn Is The Subject Of A Pentagon Investigation

April 27, 20171:06 PM ET

BILL CHAPPELL

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The Pentagon is investigating whether Michael Flynn broke the law by receiving money from a foreign source after retiring from the service, according to a letter written by the Department of Defense's acting inspector general to House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz.

News of the letter, which was released by House Oversight ranking member Elijah Cummings Thursday, comes as Chaffetz is asking the Pentagon to consider making Flynn forfeit hundreds of thousands of dollars to make up for payments from entities linked to the governments of Russia and Turkey.

"When a retired member of the military does not obtain advance approval for a foreign payment," House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz wrote to Acting Army Secretary Robert Speer Thursday, "the Department of Defense treats the payments as 'erroneous,' creating a debt in favor of the federal government."

The standard way to settle that debt, he added, is by withholding pension or retirement payments.

Detailing the money Flynn was paid, Chaffetz cited $35,000 from the Russian news agency RT and $530,000 from a Dutch company Chaffetz said is owned by "a Turkish businessman with links to the Turkish government."

The Department of Defense's acting inspector informed the House committee that it had started its own investigation into Flynn's activities earlier this month, Cummings said today.

The developments come one day after Chaffetz, R-Utah, and Cummings, D-Md., said at a joint news conference that from the evidence they've seen, "Flynn neither asked permission nor reported the funds" he was paid by foreign entities, as the Two-Way reported.

Today, Cummings cited an Oct. 8, 2014, letter to Flynn from the general counsel of the Defense Intelligence Agency that the ranking member described as "explicitly warning Flynn, as he entered retirement, that he was prohibited by the Constitution from receiving payments from foreign sources without advance permission."

In the letter, the agency said it was responding to Flynn's "request for a written opinion regarding the ethics restrictions" after his retirement.

Cummings also says that the DIA's account of its discussions with Flynn about his Russia trip contradicts what the former general said through his lawyer earlier this week, Cummings said, when the retired general's attorney alleged that Flynn had "followed appropriate procedures for accepting foreign funds for his trip to Moscow in December 2015 when he dined with Russian President Vladimir Putin."

Flynn was fired by President Trump from his job as national security adviser for giving statements to administration officials that obscured his contacts with Russia's U.S. ambassador.

"Flynn later offered to testify to the congressional committees investigating the potential connections between Trump's campaign and Russia's interference in last year's election if he could secure immunity from prosecution," NPR's Phil Ewing reports. "So far, neither the House nor Senate Intelligence Committee has agreed to make such an arrangement."

Cummings said that after getting documents related to Flynn from the Department of Defense, "Our next step is to get the documents we are seeking from the White House so we can complete our investigation."

In his letter to Acting Secretary Speer, Chaffetz also asked to be informed about "any other emoluments clause violations" that might have been taken up since Jan. 1, 2010.

Three Democrats seek audience with Eric Holder over FBI's making mortgage fraud a low priority 17MAR14

AGAIN it is Sen Elizabeth Warren D MA, joined by Rep Elijah Cummings D MD and Rep Maxine D Waters, challenging the Obama administration and AG Eric Holder on the FBI deliberately NOT prosecuting the bank-financial cabal for the mortgage fraud that brought us the great recession we are still in. One of my senators, Tim Kaine D VA, serves on the Senate Banking Committee, but again, he is silent on this travesty of justice. My other senator, Mark Warner D VA is up for reelection this year. One has to wonder how much he is receiving from the bank-financial cabal in campaign contributions to remain silent on this issue. Democrats are concerned about loosing control of the US Senate and have given up plans for taking back the House this year. They should be supporting prosecution of mortgage fraud to achieve justice for the American people, but if they are able to bring the banks and their executives involved with mortgage fraud up on charges and vigorously prosecuted it may help with the 2014 congressional elections. From Daily Kos......

We have long suspected this, but now we have proof: according to the Justice Department’s own audit, the FBI has placed mortgage fraud as its LOWEST priority in criminal investigations.

The report also found that much of the data collected on mortgage fraud prosecutions was not accurate.

More than five years after Wall Street crashed our economy, the banksters continue to get a slap on the wrist—while families lose their homes.


Meteor Blades

Working for us. Again

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland and Rep. Maxine Waters of California, all Democrats, sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder Monday expressing their "deep concern" about an investigative report released last week that concluded the FBI placed mortgage fraud as its lowest priority for criminal investigations. The report by Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Justice also found that much of the data collected regarding mortgage fraud prosecutions was not accurate. Diane Olick reported Thursday:

One glaring example of inaccurate reporting was cited by the OIG. Specifically, it says, the Justice Department inflated the number of criminal defendants by five-fold during an October 2012 highly publicized press conference. The event was held to tout the success of the Distressed Homeowners Initiative, a mortgage fraud program involving the Justice Department and the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force. It took a year for the Justice Department to correct the mistake.

It's not exactly the first time anyone has called into question the lack of criminal prosecutions of mortgage fraud, but this is the highest-placed source of such an accusation so far. A DOJ spokeswoman implied the OIG report was misleading and said prosecutions for mortgage fraud had doubled under the Obama administration and convictions had risen by 100 percent. The DOJ itself has called mortgage fraud investigations a high priority, and the FBI was allocated $196 million to investigate such activities from 2009 through 2011. But the OIG report found that in the FBI offices it checked in the giant real estate markets of Los Angeles, Miami and New York City, mortgage fraud was a low priority or none at all. Read more about the OIG report below the fold.

The OIG report stated:

DOJ and its components have repeatedly stated publicly that mortgage fraud
is a high priority and during this audit we found some examples of DOJ-led efforts
that supported those claims. Two such examples are the Criminal Division’s
leadership of its mortgage fraud working group and the FBI and USAOs’
participation on more than 90 local task forces and working groups. However, we
also determined during this audit that DOJ did not uniformly ensure that mortgage
fraud was prioritized at a level commensurate with its public statements.

Warren is a member of the Senate Banking Committee, Cummings is the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight panel, and Waters is the ranking member on the House Financial Services Committee. This isn't the first time they have collaborated in such matters. In their letter to Holder, the three concluded:

For most Americans, a home purchase is the single largest investment they will ever make and the single largest source of intergenerational wealth transfer. According to CoreLogic, 4.9 million Americans have now lost their homes to foreclosure since the beginning of the financial crisis. The number of Americans who have been the victims of mortgage fraud is unknown and the Inspector General's report indicates that the Department's own data are unreliable indicators of the extent of the Department's efforts to identify and prosecute those responsible for illegal lending schemes. The report calls into question the Department's commitment to investigate and prosecute crimes such as predatory lending, loan modification scams, and abusive mortgage servicing practices. For that reason, we would appreciate the opportunity to meet with you to review the Inspector General's findings and discuss the steps the Department is taking to protect consumers from fraudulent mortgage lending practices.

Even a lowball calculation of mortgage fraud among those 4.9 million foreclosures, not to mention fraud that didn't result in foreclosure, has to put the number of illegal doings around mortgages in the tens of thousands. Good to see Warren and her two partners in the matter trying to get to the bottom of this. If only we had a couple of hundred making the same push.

Originally posted to Meteor Blades on Mon Mar 17, 2014 at 04:18 PM EDT.

Also republished by Maryland Kos, Massachusetts Kosmopolitans, and Daily Kos. 

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/03/17/1285493/-Three-Democrats-seek-audience-with-Eric-Holder-over-FBI-s-making-mortgage-fraud-a-low-priority?detail=action 

Rep. Elijah Cummings says new financial protection bureau will have budget equal to just 1 percent of industry's fees 8JUN11

ALL the political whores in congress owned by wall street and the banking / financial industry, and their tea-bagger allies are running a propaganda campaign against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau / CFPB and the woman who should head the agency, Elizabeth Warren, as an expansion of big government and extremely costly, too expensive to exist considering the budget problems we are facing (caused by the greed of wall street and the banking / financial industry in the U.S.). Check this out from PolitiFact...

The budget for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau "is only about 1 percent of the amount banks generate just from late fees and overdraft fees."

Elijah Cummings on Tuesday, May 24th, 2011 in a congressional subcommittee hearing

Rep. Elijah Cummings says new financial protection bureau will have budget equal to just 1 percent of industry's fees

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Elizabeth Warren is President Barack Obama's pick to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. We checked a comparison of the agency's budget to various fees levied by financial-services firms.

During a contentious hearing on May 24, 2011, members of a congressional oversight subcommittee sparred with Elizabeth Warren, who is President Barack Obama’s pick to head a new federal agency charged with protecting consumers from abusive practices in the financial services sector.

The hearing attracted media attention for a testy exchange between the subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., and Warren, who has become a champion of those who want to see stricter oversight of Wall Street. Her official appointment as director has been blocked by Republicans, who want to see changes in how the new agency operates, though she has been working to get the agency up and running as assistant to the president and special adviser to the Treasury Secretary.

A reader pointed us to one statistic presented at the hearing that purported to show the imbalance between federal regulators and Wall Street.

Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the top Democrat on the full oversight panel, said that the new agency’s "budget is only about 1 percent of the amount banks generate just from late fees and overdraft fees. … I have to ask you: How in the world will you be able to compete against this Goliath when you are so mismatched?"

We wondered whether there was such an imbalance.

We were able to track down sources for both types of fees.

R.K. Hammer, a privately held bankcard consulting firm, tracks credit card penalty fees. The firm found that card penalty fees assessed by the industry during 2010 totaled $22.5 billion.

We should note that the figure we’re using from R.K. Hammer -- what the firm calls "penalty fees" -- is an umbrella category that includes various types of fees. However, the firm says that late fees -- the category specifically cited by Cummings -- account for more than 90 percent of penalty fees. So we’ll reduce the amount slightly, to an estimated $20.3 billion in late fees.

Meanwhile, the economic research firm Moebs Services tracks data on overdraft fees. The firm projected that for 2010, overdraft fees will total $35.4 billion.

If you add these two figures, the total is $55.7 billion. To make sure we weren’t double-counting, we checked with both firms, and they confirmed that the two estimates do not overlap.

What about the agency’s budget? We turned to the agency’s website for the answer.

Budget documents posted there say that the agency’s estimated budget for fiscal year 2011 is $142.8 million, a number that Obama wants to increase to $329 million in fiscal year 2012.

Using the 2011 figure, the agency’s budget is three-tenths of 1 percent of the industry fee totals. Using the larger figure for 2012 -- which is only a proposal -- it works out to six-tenths of 1 percent.

Both figures are well under the 1 percent threshold Cummings cited. And the fees in Cummings’ comparison are just a small slice of the resources available to financial institutions. According to the Department of Commerce, profits in the finance and insurance sector for 2010 -- not revenues, just profits -- amounted to $366.8 billion.

We’ll note here that we're not ruling on whether a budget that’s equal to 1 percent of penalty and overdraft fees is too little (or too much) to carry out the agency’s tasks. But on the specific comparison Cummings made, we found that he was accurate and even understated the disparity slightly. He’s correct that the new agency’s budget is "only about 1 percent of the amount banks generate just from late fees and overdraft fees." So we rate his statement True.

About this statement:

Published: Wednesday, June 8th, 2011 at 4:26 p.m.
Subjects: Federal Budget, Financial Regulation, Regulation
Sources:
Elijah Cummings, comments in transcript of a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on TARP, Financial Services and Bailouts of Public and Private Programs, May 24, 2011 (accessed via Lexis-Nexis)

R.K. Hammer, "Card Penalty Fees Soften Slightly In 2010," June 2, 2011

Moebs Services, "Overdraft Fee Revenue Drops to 2008 Levels for Banks and Credit Unions," Sep. 15, 2010

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, "Program Summary by Budget Activity," accessed June 8, 2011

Bureau of Economic Analysis, "National Income and Product Accounts Table 6.16D: Corporate Profits by Industry," accessed June 8, 2011

Interview with John Lopez, spokesman for Moebs Services, June 8, 2011

Interview with Bob Hammer, CEO of R.K. Hammer, June 8, 2011
Written by: Louis Jacobson
Researched by: Louis Jacobson
Edited by: Martha Hamilton