Trump’s Consumer Protection Chief Admits He Only Meets With People Who Give Him Money

Mick Mulvaney, the man that Donald Trump personally picked to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, admitted to a room of about 1,300 bankers that while he was a Congressman he would only meet with lobbyists from businesses or groups that had given money to his campaign. This is pay-to-play, and Mulvaney freely admits to it. This is why we MUST get money out of our politics, as Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins explains.

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Recently Mick Mulvaney, the guy that Donald Trump picked to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he gave a speech at the American Bankers Association where you had about 1300 bankers gathered to listen to the guy who's supposed to be regulating them, speak. And during his speech, Mulvaney admitted something that might actually be a crime.

According to what Mulvaney told that crowd, when he was a US Congressman he would only meet with lobbyists from businesses or organizations or groups that gave him money. It was a pay-to-play scenario taking place in Mulvaney's office that he freely admitted to during this speech.

And the reason he admitted to it, is because he was telling the bankers in that room that if you want access to law makers, you've got to give them money. If you want to go and have a meeting with somebody, if you want to lobby for a piece of legislation, or lobby for a regulation to be undone, you've got to go out there and spend some money and engage in basically some good old pay-to-play bribery, as Mulvaney explained.

Here's the thing, I know Citizens United claims that money is speech, and I know that both Republicans and Democrats love taking that corporate money, but when you get into things like this and you say that I won't talk to you if you haven't given me money, if you haven't given money to my campaign, that is still 100% illegal in this country, at least for now. Maybe these bankers are going to start lobbying to make that not illegal, to make it the status quo at this point. It almost is, thanks to Citizens United.

But what Mulvaney has admitted to here is a crime. And let's remember, this was the guy that Donald Trump handpicked to run the CFPB that's supposed to be protecting consumers against the greedy bankers, not going out and giving a speech to 1300 of them telling them how to engage in semi-legal bribery with members of Congress.

Mick Mulvaney should be in jail. He should be brought up on charges for this admission and tried, prosecuted, and put in jail. That is what this story means. But instead he is working from inside the CFPB, trying to dismantle it, trying to cut the funding for this organization. He already requested zero dollars from Congress for this current quarter that we're in. And he's even trying to change the name so that it's the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. I don't know why that matters to anyone, but he just doesn't want the word Consumer to come first in the title, because he believes that gives it a bad image.

You know, we're out there fighting for people. Ahhh, let's change that so that we don't scare off these bankers. Because as you know, some of those bankers gave me money, which means I got to know them personally when they came to my office.

Mick Mulvaney admitted to a crime, and Donald Trump is still going to stand by him. He's still going to support him, much like he has with Scott Pruitt, because he is still doing the work of the big banks. And in the Trump administration, it doesn't matter how corrupt you are, it doesn't matter how many laws you break, as long as you're doing what a good little Republican does, which is repeal consumer protections in order to give the banks and other industries more profits, then all that corruption gets overlooked because you're still a good little Republican, just like Mick Mulvaney.