10/09/2026
How much more evidence is needed to show how the Trump regime is now using existing federal laws created to correct the negative impact of past discrimination agaisnt racial minorities, and other marginalized groups, as the basis to justify the elimination of those protections and remedies intended to compensate for the harms and level the playing field? That's punishing the victim of discrimination and the providers of corrective relief for following the law. How sick is that!!!
The Trump administration on Wednesday accused Wells Fargo, one of the nation’s largest mortgage lenders, of discriminating against home buyers by creating programs that favored minority applicants for loans.
Scott Turner (Secretary of H.U.D.), who is BLACK is the Christian nationalist former NFL player turned executive tapped by Trump to run the department, has opened an investigation of Wells Fargo over the company’s efforts to boost Black homeownership. And his remarks about the probe, the existence of which was revealed by The Wall Street Journal, underscore that this is fundamentally about conservatives’ racist assault on virtually any program they think falls under the umbrella of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, or DEI.
https://www.ms.now/opinion/hud-wells-fargo-investigation-scott-turner-black-homeownership
The allegations came in a letter from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to Wells Fargo’s chief executive, Charles Scharf.
The letter, signed by Craig W. Trainor, an assistant secretary, said the San Francisco bank was being investigated for violations of the Fair Housing Act, a civil rights-era law that barred banks and other lenders from considering race, religion, s*x and national origin, among other factors, in their underwriting.
In his letter Mr. Trainor cited “repeated public promotion of explicit race-based policies,” including offering Black homeowners lower-cost refinancing and the creation of a $150 million so-called credit program “to advance racial equity in homeownership.” He raised the specter of expanding the investigation to include the Department of Justice.
Mr. Trump said in an interview this year that he believed laws and policies dating to the 1960s, such as affirmative action, had resulted in white people being “very badly treated.”
Fair housing advocates say the Wells Fargo program was created under federal rules that expressly allowed it.
"Congress wrote Special Purpose Credit Programs (SPCPs) into federal law 50 years ago to enable lenders to adopt programs to remedy the effects of historic barriers and exclusions from the lending market based on gender, race and national origin," Nikitra Bailey, executive vice president of the National Fair Housing Alliance, said in a statement.
"Investigating a bank for following the government's own rules to create paths to address longstanding discrimination in lending is an abuse of the agency’s investigative authority and a transparent attempt to scare every lender in the nation away from their legal obligation to serve underserved communities," she said.
SOURCE:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/07/business/trump-hud-wells-fargo.html?smid=nytcore-android-share
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2026/10/08/inside-wells-fargo-housing-investigation/92153358007/
https://www.ms.now/opinion/hud-wells-fargo-investigation-scott-turner-black-homeownership
