Trump regime bigot assailed by his own staff at CFPB

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A senior Trump appointee at an agency responsible for enforcing laws against financial discrimination faced open rebellion from subordinates Friday over blog posts he wrote years ago expressing controversial views on the n-word and hate crimes, according to internal emails obtained by The Washington Post.

The uproar came as two Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee and a national housing rights organization called for the departure of the appointee, Eric Blankenstein, a policy director at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The upheaval was triggered by a mass email from a senior civil servant who harshly criticized the writings, which The Post revealed and linked to Blankenstein in a report Wednesday. Writing under a pen name in 2004, Blankenstein questioned whether the n-word was inherently racist and claimed that the great majority of hate crimes were hoaxes.

“The tone and framing are deeply disturbing to me as a woman, African American, advocate for LGBTQ rights, and human being,” Patrice A. Ficklin, a career staffer and director of the Office of Fair Lending and Equal Opportunity, wrote to hundreds of agency employees...

The CFPB has been a target of the Trump administration. In February, Mick Mulvaney, its acting director, moved to strip enforcement powers from the fair-lending office — potentially reversing years of aggressive enforcement...

Dozens of other colleagues then sent bureau-wide notes agreeing with Ficklin’s sentiments. “We, the undersigned members of the Office of Fair Lending and Equal Opportunity, support Patrice Ficklin in her statement,” said an email signed by 17 agency employees...

In response to The Post’s report Wednesday, Sen. Sherrod Brown (Ohio), the senior Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the bureau’s former head and a longtime critic of Mulvaney’s leadership, called for Blankenstein’s exit.

“Eric Blankenstein has done everything he can to keep the CFPB from doing its job, gutting the Office of Fair Lending and failing to file a single anti-discrimination lawsuit since he arrived at the agency in December,” Warren said in a statement. “Now we know why — Blankenstein must be fired.”

Brown said the bureau is supposed to be on the “front lines of fighting and preventing predatory lending practices including very real financial discrimination that happens all too often in America today.”

“These blog posts are hateful, reprehensible and disgusting. Placing Blankenstein in charge of fair lending was a serious moral and managerial failure, and he must go,” Brown said.

The National Fair Housing Alliance, which represents some 220 local and state nonprofit housing and civil rights groups, also called for his resignation.

“The National Fair Housing Alliance is appalled that the CFPB has someone that is clearly unequipped to lead the Bureau’s anti-discrimination work or make decisions based on the principles of equality as part of its leadership,” the group said in a statement.

The bureau was created by President Barack Obama after the 2008 financial meltdown.