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Foreclosure Defense Florida

Florida’s Attorney General Speaks On Foreclsoure Fraud Attorney Firings

NINE FIRMS UNDER INVESTIGATION, 8 ATTORNEYS INVESTIGATING THEM!

After a week of coverage, Florida’s Attorney General is finally setting the record straight.   The attorneys working in her office who were investigating foreclosure fraud were not doing their jobs properly.   And not to worry Floridians, because Bondi now has 8 (Count em, Eight!) attorneys investigating all the wrongdoing.   Now I’m sure that these 8 new investigators didn’t need to get any information from Clarkson and Edwards and I’m sure that just sending both of them packing unceremoniously was the correct thing to do….after all, they were performing poorly.

And importantly, Florida’s Attorney General is ABSOLUTELY COMMITTED TO FIGHTING FORECLOSURE FRAUD. In fact, Florida’s AG has not just added resources to aid in these investigations, no our AG Pam Bondi has, “dramatically increased the investigator resources devoted to this issue.”

And because there are so many precious state resources devoted to this issue, I expect that there will be press conferences and high profile announcements any day.   For the first six months Florida’s Governor and Attorney General have been pounding on the Pill Mills every day.   Press Conferences, Photo Ops, Cheerleaders, Marching Bands.   Now that they are apparently putting this same passion and focus and passion on the foreclosure problems, I’m sure we can all expect   similar results and attention.

Statement by Carlos Muniz, Deputy Attorney General/Chief of Staff

At the end of May, with my approval, June Clarkson’s and Theresa Edwards’ supervisor met with them and gave them the option either to resign or be fired.   The reason was entirely related to the attorneys’ job performance.

As reflected in an April review of our agency’s South Florida Economic Crimes Bureau, the attorneys’ shortcomings included problems with: ” proper identification and analysis of legal issues;” ” judgment in discussing matters related to pending investigations with third parties;” and ” professionalism to opposing counsel.”   Clarkson and Edwards were fully aware of these deficiencies, since their division director had met with them three times over a several-month period to discuss their performance and to demand improvement.   It was only out of basic professional courtesy that I authorized giving Clarkson and Edwards the option to resign rather than be fired outright; their performance was unacceptable, but they had not engaged in deliberate misconduct.

It had been the agency’s preference not to publicly criticize Clarkson’s and Edwards’s performance or to discuss the circumstances surrounding their departure, because doing so would have been inconsistent with the decision to give the attorneys the option to resign.   However, for reasons known only to them, the attorneys have baselessly suggested that they were the victims of ” politics” and that our agency is uninterested in pursuing foreclosure-related wrongdoing.   Their reaction is unfortunate, because nothing could be farther from the truth.   Clarkson and Edwards are no longer with the agency because of their poor performance and their failure to improve after multiple warnings.   If anything, it would have been “political” and irresponsible for the agency to retain low-performing attorneys solely out of a fear that their involvement in high-profile investigations would cause an otherwise mundane personnel decision to be sensationalized.

Attorney General Bondi has made protecting consumers and fighting fraud a top priority of her administration.   One of her first acts as attorney general was to personally recruit seasoned and respected prosecutor Richard Lawson to head the agency’s Economic Crimes division, ensuring that the unit would be led by someone with the commitment and the skill to hold wrongdoers accountable.   Under Attorney General Bondi’s leadership and direction, our agency has sought aggressively to protect consumers from foreclosure-related misconduct, with the result that we have ongoing investigations of nine foreclosure law firms and businesses.   We have increased from two to eight the number of attorneys investigating so-called ” foreclosure mills,” and we have dramatically increased the investigator resources devoted to this issue.

All Floridians can have confidence that the Bondi Administration hires and evaluates agency attorneys on the basis of merit, professionalism, and ethics, and that we strive always to find the best possible attorneys to serve the people of our state.

And News Stories on the Issues

Palm Beach Post

2 Comments

  • BB says:

    Yeah right, poor job performance. My gut feeling is these 8 new investigators will not investigate anything. They’ll simply let the investigation die. And the public, of course, will forget about it in a few months.

  • Meg says:

    Well, that was a question I had yesterday when it was revealed that these two attorneys’ were dismissed due to their unacceptable performance… who replaced them?? Now that they have quadrupled their attention to this matter, it should be easy to show the progress that has been made thus far… compared to the two unacceptable attorneys’…

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