NY AG Schneiderman on Mortgage Investigation: “We Have to Hold Accountable the People Who Caused This Disaster”

New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was on The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC last night discussing his investigation into mortgage abuses.

Schneiderman made headlines back in June when he broke from the 50-state attorney general settlement/investigation into mortgage origination, securitization, and foreclosure fraud.  He said he would take “the hardest line” against a “quick, cheap settlement”.  The joint investigation/settlement, led by Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, has come under fire for backtracking on promises to bring about criminal charges over the mortgage crisis, and for doing an inadequate job investigating mortgage abuses.

In addition to Schneiderman, the attorneys general for Arizona, Massachusetts, California, Nevada, Arizona, Delaware, Kentucky, and Minnesota have all broken from the joint settlement and are planning on conducting their own investigations.  Despite the fact that these defections almost assure that the joint settlement is dead (as the banks would never settle with some states knowing they are still subject to liability from others), there has been a consistent PR effort to declare that a settlement is near.  It’s very reminiscent of this Seinfeld, but I digress…

In any case, I watched the interview (which I posted below- interview starts around 4:04), and I liked much of what Scheiderman had to say.  He said that the fiscal crisis “was a man-made crisis, it was created by regulatory neglect and greed“.  He said “we got to get this out in the open so they can’t re-write history.”  “We have not found a trace of evidence that a cop, firefighter, teacher, or sanitation worker contributed to blowing up the American economy“.

Schneiderman said that he and Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden “think [they] will be able obtain real meaningful relief” and “we think we have to hold accountable the people who caused this disaster”.

When asked whether is was deregulation or criminal behavior that caused the meltdown, Schneiderman indicated that “deregulatory mania didn’t work so well for the economy” and “there’s no question that they dismantled a lot of the safety mechanisms that protected our markets for a long time”.

He also said that the investigations are delving into “the conduct of individual institutions and individuals to see if there were misrepresentations made, to see if there was any fraud committed, to see if criminal acts were also a part of this”.

Schneiderman said that accountability and the restoring confidence in the rule of law are among the key motivations for his investigation:

“A lot of folks look at Occupy Wall Street and the other occupations and think that they’re fringe characters. I hear the same sense that we don’t have one set of rules for everyone anymore – that people are not held accountable for misconduct anymore – from every average American you run into anywhere else…there is a sense that equal justice under the law is no longer the rule for this country…the law applies to everyone the sense of accountability is one of the key motivators for our investigation…Occupy Wall Street is the tip of a much bigger iceberg…people are mad – they want to know there’s one set of rules for everyone”.

Interview starts around the 4:04 mark.