When Lying Poisons An Administration
National Public Radio’s Morning Edition ran an excellent investigative pieceMonday morning about what’s happening to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) under the direction of Trump appointee Mick Mulvaney. While still a congressman, Mulvaney called the Bureau “a joke” and drafted legislation to do away with it.
The piece broke news, including an internal CFPB memo that NPR was the first to get hold of and which prescribes that the Bureau carry out its work with “humility and moderation.” It also looked into Mulvaney’s decision, just weeks after taking the helm, to drop the CPFB’s lawsuit against Golden Valley, a so-called payday lender, for “unfair, deceptive, and abusive business practices”—including interest rates in excess of 900%.
It’s an important piece of investigative journalism that exposes one of the many ways that the current administration is subverting the rule of law. Listen to it. Read the transcript.
But there’s one additional piece of digging NPR did. It’s almost an aside in the piece, but it deserves closer focus. When Morning Edition approached Mulvaney for an interview, he declined. But his press person said, in an email, that the decision to drop the lawsuit had been made by “professional career staff”—not Mulvaney. Following up with CPFB staffers, NPR learned that was not true: Mulvaney made the decision to drop the suit despite “the entire career enforcement staff” at the Bureau wanting to go ahead with it. As the piece relates, “after repeated questions from NPR, Mulvaney’s press person acknowledged that Mulvaney was, in fact, involved in the decision to drop the lawsuit.”
Wow.
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