Foreclosure Mill Clients Of LPS Gave Large Donations To Michigan AG
Steve Dibert, MFI-Miami
Back in May, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi complained about her fellow Attorneys General being too hard on mortgage servicers and demanded that principal reductions be taken off the table as part of any settlement. Some how she thought principal reductions were going create a mass epidemic of people refusing to make their mortgage payments:
As I wrote about in May, it was apparent Bondi was and is doing the bidding of her of her political donors because after all, who could be this paranoid unless they were naive enough to believe everything the banking industry claims. With having a background in politics, I wasn’t shocked that she would be pro-banker because she had campaigned on an anti-Obama Care platform/pro-healthcare industry platform. However, what does surprise me is her cavalier attitude about her relationship with the banking lobby. This came to light with her firings of Theresa Edwards and June Clarkson, the two mortgage fraud specialists in the Economic Crimes Division. These firings amplified suspicions that she may be a little too cozy with lenders and processing companies who donated to her campaign.
I come from the political arenas of metro-Detroit. For those who don’t know about Detroit politics, let me put it this way, when Fox News uses the term, “Chicago Politics” to bash President Obama, Roger Ailes has apprently never been involved in the politics of metro-Detroit. It’s the kind of place where the Mayor’s favorite exotic dancers will show up dead as warning to others to keep their mouth shut. So as you have probably guessed, I’ve seen my shares of corrupt politicians, dealt with my share of political egos and politicians doing incredibly stupid things.
So when Lisa Epstein at Foreclosure Hamlet found these emails between Victoria Butler, the Tampa Bureau Chief of the Economic Crimes Division Office of the Florida Attorney General’s office and LPS’s legal counsel requesting that the Florida AG’s office to contact Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette encouraging him to drop his criminal investigation into robo-signing by LPS on behalf of their foreclosure mill clients and replace it with a civil investigation instead, I was surprised. What surprised even more was that a career politician like Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette would allow his staff to entertain such conversations considering the amount of people watching and following the robo-signing crisis.
Michigan politicians tend to be a little bit more subtle when it comes to paying back political favors especially when it comes to people elected to state government. Although due to term limits and the Michigan GOP getting young true believers elected in to state government the landscape is changing rapidly. Last April, former lobbyist turned State Representative and daughter of former Lt. Governor Dick Posthumus, Lisa Posthumus-Lyons introduced a bill she claimed was a “Community friendly” bill that eliminated redemption rights and basically screwed homeowners. The bill was written by the banking lobby and was clearly pay back for the nearly $11,000 in campaign contribution she received from the real estate and banking lobby.
The criminal investigation into robo-signing and documentation fraud in Michigan was only initiated because Ingham County Register of Deeds, Curtis Hertel, Jr. sent our joint findings of robo-signing to the Ingham County Sheriff’s Department. Hertel also repeatedly asked Schuette’s office to do something. Schuette, a fixture among career politicians in Lansing, was afraid he would look like a Sgt. Schultz from the TV show Hogan’s Heroes if he did nothing. The documents turned over to both the Ingham County Sheriff’s Department and the Michigan Attorney General’s office were documents filed on the public record by LPS clients Orlans Associates and Trott and Trott and were robo-signed by various attorneys from these two firms as well as LPS employee, Linda Green.
Like Bondi, Schuette has a major problem. He received nearly $20,000 from people associated with and employees of Trott & Trott and Orlans Associates. Both of whom are clients of LPS and have both filed thousands of robo-signed documents across the state. LPS is so connected with these firms that their employees have desks in their law firms.
Linda Orlans is also the chair of the Michigan chapter of Americans for Prosperity, the Koch Brothers astro-turf non-profit that promotes anarcho-capitalist agendas and has worked with the Mackinac Center, a conservative think-tank created by former Michigan Governor John Engler and Bill Schuette back in the early 1990s.
Is Schuette’s investigation in to robo-signing sincere or is it some Machiavellian ploy to placate a bunch of potential malcontents? Is Schuette the “banking lobby’s BFF” like Bondi? Time will tell
