The official GOP biography of Steven Mnuchin, which appeared on the Republican National Committee’s website earlier this week, has some interesting gaps.
Mnuchin, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of the Treasury, spent 17 years working at Goldman Sachs ― where, like his father before him, he became a partner. He also worked for hedge fund manager George Soros, founded a hedge fund of his own and was the lead investor in IndyMac, a failed subprime lender that turned into a “foreclosure machine” during the housing crisis.
In other words, Mnuchin doesn’t exactly fit with Trump’s promises to “drain the swamp.”
To gloss over the inconsistency, the Republican Party has simply elided Mnuchin’s almost two decades at Goldman and his role in fraud-driven foreclosures that cost thousands of people their homes.
Here’s the key section of Mnuchin’s GOP-approved bio:
Mr. Mnuchin has decades of experience with financial and monetary matters. His experience includes serving as finance director of President-elect Trump’s campaign, Former CEO of Dune Capital Management, and co-founder of RatPac-Dune Entertainment which produced films such as Avatar, American Sniper, and X-Men.
His vast background, wealth of experience, and deep understanding of financial matters makes Mr. Mnuchin a fantastic selection to implement President-elect Trump’s America First agenda that will boost our nation’s economy.
Business Insider first noticed that this passage is a conspicuously incomplete account of Mnuchin’s career. The Goldman years, BI points out, are only obliquely acknowledged with the phrase “decades of experience with financial and monetary matters.”
Mnuchin’s investment in IndyMac, which was later renamed OneWest Bank, is substantively a larger issue. Not only was the bank a hotbed of the type of document fraud that was rampant during the foreclosure crisis, but it has recently been accused of racist business practices. In a complaint to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, two advocacy groups said in November that OneWest did not have branches in neighborhoods of color, made “very few or no” loans to people of color and did a better job maintaining and marketing foreclosed homes in mostly white neighborhoods.
It’s not hard to see why the GOP doesn’t want to talk about any of this. But what’s not in Mnuchin’s party-approved bio is likely going to be a focus of his confirmation hearings nonetheless.
UPDATE: 5:20 p.m. ― Transition spokesman Barney Keller told The Huffington Post that Mnuchin’s bio on the transition website does mention his time at Goldman Sachs and IndyMac. A press release announcing Mnuchin’s nomination also mentioned Goldman Sachs and IndyMac, Keller noted.