Anti-discrimination official once questioned validity of hate crimes
A policy director at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau says past claims that most hate crimes are hoaxes have no relevance to his current work enforcing laws against financial discrimination.
Eric Blankenstein, a Trump administration appointee in charge of preventing lenders from discriminating against racial minorities, asked in posts written under a pen name whether using the n-word was inherently racist. He also wrote that "hate-crime hoaxes are about three times as prevalent as actual hate crimes."
Blankenstein and a friend started the blog, called Two Guys Chatting, in 2004 to focus on controversial issues.
"Does it matter that someone got beat up because they were black, or does it matter that someone got beat up," wrote Blankenstein, writing under the pen name "egb3r," the Washington Post first reported.
Blankenstein acknowledged writing the blog, but questioned its relevance to his current duties as a financial regulator.
"The insight to be gained about how I perform my job today -- by reading snippets of 14-year-old blog posts that have nothing to do with consumer protection law -- is exactly zero," Blankenstein said in a statement emailed to CBS MoneyWatch. "The need to dig up statements I wrote as a 24-year-old show[s] that in the eyes of my critics I am not guilty of a legal infraction or neglect of my duties, but rather just governing while conservative."
The CFPB did not specifically address calls for Blankenstein's ouster from consumer advocates.
"Eric Blankenstein shouldn't be let anywhere near the CFPB's fair-lending office, let alone running it," Karl Frisch, executive director of Allied Progress, left-leaning nonprofit focused on consumer protection.
Patrice Ficklin, assistant director of the agency's fair-lending office, said in a statement emailed by the federal agency that while she disagrees with Blankenstein on policy and legal issues related to lending, she found him to be "collegial, thoughtful and meticulous."
"Eric has told me repeatedly that he is committed to enforcing the fair-lending laws," she added. "He has allowed us to continue to advance our fair-lending supervisory and enforcement work and approved proposed new matters as well."
Weaker enforcement?
Since taking the helm, the Trump administration has worked to reshape the CFPB into a business-friendlier agency, sharply restricting its enforcement powers and inserting into its mission statement a goal to cut regulations.
The agency has drawn fire from Democrats for its lack of enforcement action. Seth Frotman, a former CFPB official in charge of protecting student loan borrowers, resigned in August to protest what he viewed as the agency's retreat under the Trump administration.
"At every turn, your political appointees have silenced warnings by those of us tasked with standing up for serve members and students," he stated in a letter to Mick Mulvaney, the CFPB's acting director.
President Donald Trump's nomination in June of Kathy Kraninger, formerly a mid-level staffer at the Office of Management and Budget, to succeed Mulvaney as head of the agency has also drawn fire. While Republican lawmakers have defended her credentials, critics have said she lacks the experience to lead a regulator charged with protecting consumers from financial abuse.
