'New York Congressional Dems Support Schneiderman on Foreclosure Fraud Investigation'

from firedoglake....

"Eric Schneiderman keeps picking up support in his quest to hold a real investigation on the criminal failures in mortgage securitization and servicing. He has the support of a number of newspaper editorial boards, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which devoted its Sunday editorial to an out-of-state Attorney General:

"Eric Schneiderman won’t play ball with efforts to make the mortgage foreclosure mess go away. In the spring, federal regulators thought they had a deal with Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, the five biggest mortgage servicers, to settle claims that they had taken shortcuts by foreclosing on homes before the paperwork was properly processed. The banks would have paid about $20 billion, most of it for loan modifications and counseling.

But the banks wanted the 50 state attorneys general to sign off on the deal, too. The AGs have been meeting for months and were said to be close to an agreement. But Mr. Schneiderman is an outlier.

Good for him. The banks want this so-called “global agreement” to indemnify them against any mortgage-related claims, not just processing complaints. Mr. Schneiderman has been investigating the way that the banks securitized mortgages in the years leading up to the 2007-2008 housing collapse, cutting them into pieces and bundling them as mortgage-backed bonds".............READ MORE