Kamala Harris

[honest.abe]

70. Here is a good discussion of the "Harris did not prosecute Mnuchin" issue..

On the OneWest issue, it’s a misnomer (ie, lie) that Harris “didn’t prosecute Mnuchin.” He was never under investigation, and Harris didn’t receive a referral to criminally prosecute anyone. What she got was a recommendation to file a civil enforcement action against OneWest. In such a filing, no one person is accused of anything. Instead, an entire company is looked at, and perhaps fined for wrongdoing.

So why didn’t she file the action? Well, Senator Harris isn’t exactly free to openly discuss that, because we don’t openly discuss investigations. It’s not appropriate to discuss partial evidence, suspicions, or rumors. This harms the party under investigation, who has a right to a presumption of innocence.

But the reasons this didn’t go anywhere are likely far simpler. The civil enforcement action requested by the consumer law division would have potentially fined OneWest in order to encourage them to fix their internal issues. Those fines would have been entirely passed on to shareholders. Sen. Harris likely saw no reason to invest time and energy in pursuing fines to be levied on people already losing their shirts, just so that OneWest would be encouraged to shape up, when the recession was ensuring banks were going to be forced to do that anyway.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/1/21/1827095/-Kamala-Harris-and-the-big-lie-that-she-didn-t-prosecute-Mnuchin