Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury Nominee Targeted by Soros-Funded Groups

Steven Mnuchin, national finance chairman of President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign talks with reporters at Trump Tower, Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2016 in New York. (Photo: AP)

Far-left groups funded by George Soros and his son are waging a campaign to defeat Steven Mnuchin, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for Treasury Secretary. As part of the effort, at least one television ad campaign painting Mr. Mnuchin as a predatory lender aims to pressure 5 Republicans, including Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada to vote “No” on Mr. Mnuchin.

“Steven Mnuchin, the foreclosure king, made millions by taking people’s homes with no regard to anything but his own bottom line,” said Stephanie Taylor, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), one of the main groups running the ad.

The former partner of Goldman Sachs Group Inc (NYSE:GS) was involved with the team that bought the failing California mortgage lender IndyMac from the government in 2009 following the financial crisis. It was renamed OneWest after he became chairman of the company, which was ultimately sold to the nation’s largest small-business lender (CIT) in 2015 for more than twice what the group paid for it.

Now, the same deal that won him accolades from the business community and The Wall Street Journal is the main subject matter used by PCCC and others who are opposed to his nomination. The deal was backed by a collection of 14 nonprofit groups that received a combined $5.95 million from OneWest. The $3.4 billion deal may not have even gone through without their supportive letters.

PCCC was founded in 2009 by Adam Green, a former MoveOn.org online organizer and and Stephanie Taylor, former MoveOn.org and SEIU organizer. PCCC, like MoveOn.org, collectively known as on MoveOn, is also a front for wealthy radical leftists like Soros. The billionaire financier who is often known as “The Man who Broke the Bank of England,” donated $1.46 million to help initiate MoveOn.org. Linda Pritzker, a member of the Hyatt hotel family, donated $4 million to the group, as well.

Soros the elder met with Democratic Party leadership in Washington D.C. during a conference a week after the Nov. 8 presidential election to discuss the Left’s strategy to sabotage President-elect Trump during his first 100 days.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., PCCC’s favorite senator, was in attendance and is now playing a pivotal role in the strategy devised and agreed upon at the three-day conference in November.

On Wednesday, Sen. Warren led a group of 10 Democratic senators at a forum to hear testimony from some of the people who lost their homes after Mr. Mnuchin’s bank foreclosed.

At the hearing, Mr. Mnuchin vehemently denied Big Media reports claiming he ran a “foreclosure machine,” which of course are planted and pushed at the behest of Sen. Warren and groups like MoveOn and PCCC.

“On the contrary, I was committed to loan modifications intended to stop foreclosures,” he told the Senate Finance Committee. “I ran a ‘Loan Modification Machine.’ Whenever we could do loan modifications, we did them.”

One of PCCC’s top donors is Jonathan Soros, the founder and chief executive officer of JS Capital Management LLC, as well as the son of the Nazi-sympathizer, himself.

Soros the younger supports the elimination of the electoral college, which he says is undemocratic and unconstitutional, despite it being in the U.S. Constitution. He also benefits from all the loopholes Mr. Mnuchin pledged to work with members of Congress to close during the hearing Thursday. According to second quarter 2015 filings, the U.S. assets in his hedge fund portfolio were valued at $500 million, up from $394.76 million the previous quarter. That year, Bloomberg Politics called him one of the hedge fund titans.

But a detail that has been left out of the story told by Big Media is that Mr. Mnuchin ran the investment fund set up by Soros before he and two former colleagues from Goldman Sachs moved on to a new hedge fund venture in 2004–Dune Capital Management. While Soros was left to make other arrangements, Mr. Mnuchin led Dune into financing Hollywood movies including a number of blockbuster hits including “Avatar.”

During his hearing, he told the Senate Finance Committee that his bank extended over 100,000 loan modifications to borrowers who were behind on their mortgage payments. Before he took over IndyMac, which had already become the second biggest bank failure of the financial crisis, it had one of the worst portfolios stuffed with bad mortgage loans “in the history of time.”

“Unfortunately, not all of the homes could be saved through these programs and despite my best efforts, some were sadly subject to foreclosure.” The guidelines Mr. Mnuchin used at OneWest to offer loan modifications were put in place by numerous government programs, with limitations.

Mnuchin served as the national finance chairman for the Trump campaign, a decision he made after the president-elect won the New York Republican primary and one his Wall Street buddies questioned vociferously. Big banks and finance sector titans almost unanimously backed Hillary Clinton for president, including Soros, his son and both PCCC and MoveOn.