Ted S. Warren/AP Photo
As the Trump administration tells the story, Barry Sturner is an ordinary small-business owner who had his life’s work and reputation destroyed by Rohit Chopra’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in a “seven-year harassment saga,” after some power-mad lawyers got ahold of some “innocuous” comments he’d made about crime on an AM radio show and decided to “spen[d] years persecuting and extorting” his “small Midwest firm.”
What really happened is this: Sturner and his longtime partner David Hochberg co-owned a mortgage brokerage called Townstone that derived some 90 percent of its business from its eponymous personal-finance call-in infomercials broadcast on the venerable Chicagoland AM radio station WGN. No one at the CFPB knew about the radio show until a periodic examination of mortgage lending data for signs of potential abuse flagged Townstone as a brokerage with a suspiciously low percentage of home loans in “majority minority” neighborhoods—a curious finding given that 60 percent of Chicago residents fall into an ethnic minority. Staffers began listening to the radio shows, with help from transcription software, and found that Sturner and Hochberg had characterized the South Side of Chicago as a “war zone,” downtown Chicago as a “jungle” that turned on Friday and Saturday into “hoodlum weekend,” a Jewel-Osco supermarket in the neighborhood as “a scary place,” and predominantly Black Markham as a “crazy” place through which one must “drive very fast” while “look[ing] at the dashboard” and making sure not to “look at anybody or lock on anybody’s eyes.” For good measure, the men also advised prospective house sellers to “take down the Confederate flag” before they listed.
There’s nothing illegal about holding these opinions, of course. But Townstone’s radio show is an infomercial, which generates 90 percent of the brokerage’s leads, which the brokerage pays WGN to air, presumably punctuated at regular intervals by some phrase along the lines of “an equal housing lender” (LOL), because as everyone who has ever been exposed to a five-minute radio commercial break knows, America has laws—the Fair Housing Act, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, the Community Reinvestment Act—to protect borrowers from lending discrimination. It also has enormous multitrillion-dollar pools of money in Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, etc., which buy virtually every single mortgage Townstone and operations like it originate, which is literally the only reason men like Sturner and Hochberg can actually turn a profit peddling fixed-rate 30-year loans to people who still listen to the radio. Sturner and Hochberg went to mortgage broker academy; they know the rules.
And when the Trump administration’s CFPB contacted him in 2017 about all the “jungle” references he’d made on his infomercial, Sturner knew he’d been caught, and he knew he’d done wrong. He updated Townstone’s website for the first time in years, replacing the bare-bones home page with a montage of stock photos featuring Black and interracial families. And he transferred $2.4 million of the brokerage’s money to his personal bank accounts, instantly and dubiously rendering Townstone an insolvent shell company.
The CFPB had an open-and-shut case of a high-profile mortgage lender actively dissuading Black borrowers from approaching the firm, and it was so obvious that Trump’s handpicked CFPB director, Kathy Kraninger, had no problem signing off on the case. (That’s something in itself, since Kraninger didn’t do much in the way of enforcement.) In the BLM summer of 2020, the agency made it official, with nary a peep from the right-wing outrage industrial complex.
Trump’s CFPB actively sought out a corporation that was allegedly wrongly accused, and ripped up the meager consequences it faced.
Then came 2022, and a new legal team, bankrolled by the right-wing Pacific Legal Foundation, and in 2023 a surprising dismissal from Judge Franklin Valderrama, a Trump appointee but one broadly viewed as a moderate, whom Dick Durbin signed off on at the time. Pacific Legal’s argument was that the Equal Credit Opportunity Act only prohibits lenders from denying minority borrowers who apply for credit, not from discouraging them from applying at all. This is an absurd and ahistorical rendering of the law, akin to saying a retail business could legally place a “Whites Only” sign in its front window. In the present day, it would allow creditors to exclude any protected group from online marketing efforts.
The CFPB appealed and won a unanimous ruling by the very conservative Seventh Circuit, including Diane Sykes, who was once on Trump’s Supreme Court short list and loves him so much she just resigned so he could appoint someone even more conservative to the slot. The Pacific Legal Foundation made hay of the fact that the agency had not received any complaints from Black customers about Townstone, but that was irrelevant given that the brokerage had built a whole business model around discouraging them.
In November, Townstone finally settled the case, agreeing to a perfunctory $105,000 fine that PLF celebrated as a victory. But the goalposts, in the interim, have clearly moved significantly. On Wednesday, the Trump administration and its wrecking crew decided to make the federal government $105,000 poorer by returning the funds to Townstone, and posting a long press release about how “abusive” and “unjust” the whole case had been.
While the brokerage’s owners have repeatedly complained in court filings that the CFPB’s woke persecution has forced them to self-censor (even among friends and family), it may not shock you to learn that Hochberg is now using his social media platform to endlessly promote the candidacy of a local politician, Josh Kaplan, who is currently crusading to punish the public library of Northbrook, Illinois, for hosting a single screening of documentary Israelism—which Kaplan accuses of being “funded by supporters of pro-Hamas rhetoric” (who happen to be Jewish, but whatever!).
The situation is a good example of a corporate pardon. Rather than just declining to enforce, Trump’s CFPB actively sought out a corporation that was allegedly wrongly accused, and ripped up the meager consequences it faced. Townstone is the January 6th rioter of Trump 2.0.
But Townstone’s shamelessness is literally a drop in the ocean next to that of Boeing, whose deferred prosecution agreement for the preventable mass homicide of 346 passengers aboard two 737 MAX planes, which required the company to plead guilty to “lack of candor” with regard to some employees’ “conspiracy to defraud” the FAA, was such an appalling miscarriage of justice that the Trump Justice Department waited until the very end of “embarrassing pardon season”—January 6, 2021, to their great fortune—to close the deal. The government signed off on a “statement of facts” promising there was nothing “systemic” about the obviously systemic shareholder-driven murderousness that led the board to keep the errant plane in the sky even after the first plane’s malfunctioning stall-avoidance software drove it nose-first into the Java Sea.
The Prospect has covered at length the whole sordid story of Boeing’s DPA, which involved many of the same high-powered attorneys and extraordinary tactics that had conspired to award a similar deal to Jeffrey Epstein 13 years earlier. And perhaps in similar fashion, the terms of the plea deal were so facile and undemanding that the company, under the absentee leadership of private equity ghoul Dave Calhoun, could almost not help but violate them by brazenly impeding the various investigations into the flyaway door plug that had famously been installed without bolts to an Alaska Airlines jet.
Boeing almost escaped the great door plug escape last fall when the Biden DOJ overruled its own line prosecutors and offered the company another deferred prosecution agreement. But conservative Texas judge Reed O’Connor—for whom Boeing had successfully pressured the DOJ to move its original investigation from New York to Texas—rejected the deal, on the grounds that the victims’ families did not approve of the agreement and that the government’s proposal to appoint federal monitors reflecting a “commitment to diversity and inclusion” might compromise the legitimacy of the monitoring process. No one was entirely sure whether O’Connor found the DEI stuff or the deal itself more objectionable. He also referred to the MAX disaster as “the deadliest corporate crime in history,” a harsher analysis than the Biden administration had ever mustered.
But all that was in the Before Times. Boeing is pushing to get the Justice Department to support the withdrawal of its relatively meager guilty plea, perhaps only to get out of the quarter-billion-dollar fine it promised to pay over the door plug debacle. O’Connor seems lukewarm to any sweetheart deal; he scrapped an earlier deadline and set a trial for June. But it’s seen as likely that the punishment will be reduced, which is some feat considering Biden’s DOJ didn’t do much of anything. Certainly, after the $12 billion Boeing lost in 2024, it could use the cash. And Boeing has ingratiated itself so much with Trump that it recently won a contract to build the F-47 fighter, which is literally named for the 47th president.
Throughout last year, Elon Musk was one of Boeing’s harshest critics, amplifying the endless stream of stories about the company’s struggles and swooping in to brand himself a savior when its Starliner space capsule was deemed unable to return from the International Space Station. Now that he is running the government and pursuing radical deregulation of the military-industrial complex while brazenly looting the FAA and Pentagon, he may feel he needs Boeing’s buy-in to pursue his own agenda. Or Pam Bondi may simply feel like her department can’t spare any staffers while Elon’s actions are getting her sued four times a day. Whatever the case, Boeing clearly senses a window for a DOGE dividend. If the corporate pardons continue with one of its most malicious offenders, where does it end?
