For an instant, a brief moment in time, Floridians and consumers across this country had public officials and fighters who were standing up to the banks and institutions and fighting for the good of the American people. But all of that has changed now. The fighters are getting snuffed out, one by one.
The most dramatic example is firing of two attorneys who worked for Florida’s Attorney General, Theresa Edwards and June Clarkson. No one knows just how far their investigations took them, but what we do know is they had issued countless subpoenas to the foreclosure mills, the process servers and other companies and parties that are responsible for Fraudclosure. Who knows just how much information they had collected, how many crimes were documented? What we do know is that these investigations did not sit well with the people that are now in power in this state. In the wake of the disclosures of wrongdoing, one Senator (Joe Negron-R) had the gall and audacity to suggest that “foreclosure mill” was not a bad term at all, it merely meant that the law firm was fast and efficient.
Well all of that is done now, I’m sure the investigations are dead. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer dollars are wasted now because these promising investigations were just snuffed out? These attorneys and fighters, shown to the door? But the facts and the information they uncovered cannot hide forever. If you’re in the Broward County area, and you’re in foreclosure, you should hire these two attorneys to fight for you….they know where the skeletons are buried. As for Florida’s Attorney General, I just hope voters have a decent memory and that this whole stinking episode becomes a big nail in the coffin of her young political career….from the Washington Post:
Theresa Edwards and June Clarkson had headed up investigations on behalf of the Florida attorney general’s office for more than a year into the fraudulent foreclosure practices that had become rampant in the Sunshine State. They issued subpoenas and conducted scores of interviews, building a litany of cases that documented the most egregious abuses.
That is, until the Friday afternoon in May when they were called into a supervisor’s office and forced to resign abruptly and without explanation.
” It just came out of nowhere,” said Edwards, who had worked in the attorney general’s economic crimes section for more than three years. ” We were completely stunned.”
Less than a month before they were forced out, a supervisor cited their work as ” instrumental in triggering a nationwide review of such practices.” Now, Edwards is convinced their sudden dismissals will have ” a chilling effect” on those probes into the shoddy foreclosure practices that caused national outrage when they made headlines last fall.
