Up @theintercept, this is a strange story that's going to take a small tweetstorm to untangle. theintercept.com/2018/09/29/jos…
So you know this epidemic of fake public comments, right? In the FCC proposal to repeal net neutrality, for example, people's emails were used to "submit" comments supporting repeal when they never sent anything.
Well, we got documents showing that happened in 2015 too, when OneWest Bank was trying to merge with CIT.
Here's an example. This emailer had never heard of this business, but got acknowledgement from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency saying it received a letter from them supporting the merger. 
The emails were pretty clearly hacked. Evidence shows that hundreds of them came in a batch in the middle of the night on Valentine's Day 2015, and all of them were from Yahoo email addresses.
These documents, from a FOIA request, are the first hard evidence that letters supporting the merger were sent without the knowledge of the senders.
Now here's the fun part. This is the support letter these fake commenters sent:
This language is identical to a form letter OneWest Bank put on their website urging customers to support their merger with CIT.
That's strong circumstantial evidence that OneWest Bank manufactured fake comments to gin up public support for their merger.
OCC knew about this at the time, and did next to nothing. They sent an email to OneWest's lawyer at Sullivan Cromwell (suggesting they knew OneWest was behind this), but there's no indication of any response.
In fact, OCC approved the merger, and cited supportive public comments as part of their rationale!
The punchline is this: At the time, OneWest's CEO was a guy named Joseph Otting. And he was incensed that activists were trashing his bank and demanding that OCC block the merger.
So Otting sent an email to his ENTIRE rolodex of Wall Street colleagues and contacts, asking them to... send OCC the form letter supporting the merger. bloomberg.com/%20news/articl…
Otting is now... the head of the OCC. "You have a bank regulator run by a banker who openly defrauded the bank merger process a few years earlier," as one activist told me.
If OneWest ginned up fake comments to support their merger, and Otting was active in generating comments... what did he know and when did he know it?
OCC wouldn't comment on that. But Otting is leading an effort to roll back the Community Reinvestment Act, which encourages bank lending throughout where they serve, including low and moderate-income areas.
The only real enforcement of the Community Reinvestment Act is that it's examined when a bank tries to do a merger. That's what activists scrutinized during the OneWest/CIT merger.
So the former head of a bank who may have deceived the OCC during his merger... now runs the OCC, and wants to gut the kind of scrutiny of bank mergers that he felt as a bank CEO.
As I said, strange story!
I'll end the tweetstorm with another link to the story. Short version: a bank CEO who may have defrauded a regulatory agency is now running that regulatory agency theintercept.com/2018/09/29/jos…
Oh, I should at that Inner City Press has put all the FOIA'd documents online:
