Treasury Secretary nominee Steve Mnuchin’s biggest challenger may be a 61-year-old widow who runs a kite shop on the Oregon coast.
Mnuchin’s past stint leading OneWest, a bank accused of fraudulently foreclosing upon thousands of homeowners in the wake of the financial crisis, is the focus of a new TV ad featuring a woman who claims the bank foreclosed on her after her husband died of cancer last year.
“Mnuchin being nominated is a real slap in the face to me and other widows he kicked out of our homes to make a buck,” Lisa Fraser, who is the subject of an ad by a left-leaning group looking to derail his nomination, told The Post.
Mnuchin, who’s worth at least $650 million and whose resume also includes Goldman Sachs, has become the main focal point of opposition for Democrats looking to block one of Donald Trump’s cabinet appointees from getting a job in the upcoming administration.
OneWest, which Mnuchin controlled from 2009 to 2015, has been the target of housing advocates for foreclosing on as many as 36,000 homes in California in the wake of the financial crisis. The bank was also reportedly under investigation by the California attorney general for “widespread misconduct,” but a suit was never brought.
Mnuchin has said he hasn’t done anything wrong, and dismissed the California AG’s accusations as “meritless.”
In the 30-second ad, which is slated to run on Fox, CNN and MSNBC, Fraser blames Trump’s Treasury pick for kicking her out of her home after her husband, John, died on Feb. 15, 2016.
“We did everything the bank asked,” Fraser says in the ad. “They lied to us, and took our home anyway. John spent his last days terrified that I’d be homeless — and then they kicked me out right after the funeral.”
Fraser declined to go into specifics about the foreclosure process with OneWest, except to say that the bank “lied and misled us for so many years.”
“I was furious,” she said, when she learned that Mnuchin was tapped to lead the Treasury. “I wanted to know how I could get back at him because of the way he had treated us.”
Mnuchin, 54, was chairman and CEO of the Pasadena-based bank through August 2015, when it was sold to CIT Group for $3.4 billion. He remained on the company’s board as a director until December, when Trump nominated him for Treasury secretary. Earlier this month, he said he would divest from his stake in CIT and other companies to avoid conflicts of interest.
Less than a month after her husband died, Fraser set up a GoFundMe page asking for $30,000 to help with legal and moving expenses. By Jan. 17, she’d raised $4,900.
“Despite best efforts, the home she and John shared for many happy years is in foreclosure,” according to the GoFundMe site.
Fraser has been living alone in a nearby cabin since June, she said. She still runs Once Upon A Breeze, a kite shop that she and her husband had been running since 1983, which bills itself as the “oldest kite shop on the Oregon coast.”
She said she’s still struggling to make ends meet, since her business is largely seasonal.
“What shocked me the most is how [Trump] campaigned — and now these billionaires in his cabinet are going to make my life better? The one that’s still not in order yet?”