The Republican staff of the House Financial Services Committee has recommended that the panel cite CFPB Director Richard Cordray for contempt, saying that he has failed to give the panel documents related to the agency’s probe of Wells Fargo Bank.
House Financial Services Committee GOP members have been battling Cordray for a long time, with Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) going so far as to tell Cordray during a panel hearing that he believes that President Trump should fire him.
“Over the course of six months, the CFPB only produced 1,010 pages of records, comprised almost entirely of records easily obtainable from Wells Fargo or the [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency],” a GOP staff report, released this week states.
The House committee has been investigating how Wells Fargo employees were able to open millions of unauthorized or unneeded accounts and whether federal agencies should have discovered the fraud earlier.
The panel’s GOP staff said that Wells Fargo and the OCC has cooperated with the panel’s probe, but the CFPB has refused to do so.
The staff report was released as the House prepares to consider the Financial CHOICE Act, the Dodd-Frank overhaul legislation authored by Hensarling.
That legislation would drastically decrease the CFPB’s power.
GOP staff said in its report that the committee subpoenaed CFPB records on April 4, but that the agency only produced records that it knew the committee already had obtained elsewhere.
In a letter to the committee, Cordray said that the CFPB had turned over the key documentation related to the Wells Fargo probe.
“Due to CFPB Director Richard Cordray’s failure to honor his legal obligation to produce all records responsive to the Committee’s Subpoena, the Committee’s Wells Fargo investigation is at an impasse,” the staff report states, in recommending that the panel consider a contempt citation.
A CFPB spokesperson said the agency is reviewing the report. “As we have previously stated, the CFPB learned from whistleblowers about potential problems at Wells Fargo in mid-2013, just two years after opening our doors,” the spokesperson said. “Director Cordray has provided a public account of the timeline on which our investigation unfolded, and our order publicly details our findings against Wells Fargo. The CFPB’s enforcement action not only put a stop to Wells Fargo’s illegal practices, but it has generated much follow-on enforcement activity across all levels of government. It also has put the entire industry on notice that this conduct will not be tolerated.”
