February 20, 2011
An overall view of the Bank of America material now held by WikiLeaks reveals that starting in 2008, the Bank of America acquired Countrywide Mortgage, a very aggressive mortgage company that specialized in creating fraudulent loans to individuals that were unable to make continuing payments on their mortgages. Countrywide then sold these fraudulent mortgages to larger banking houses like Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and others. The results of this takeover of Countrywide? The Bank of America now has over 1.3 mortgage holders in foreclosure.
Bank of America was subsequently sued by California, Illinois and eight other states over its predatory lending policies. The bank was forced to produce a settlement of over $8.4 billion in loan relief plans for those victims holding Countrywide mortgages.
In June of 2010, Bank of America had to pay out $108 million because of a suit by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for “having extracted excessive fees” from their borrowers facing foreclosure. In August of 2010, Bank of America was forced to pay out $600 million to settle shareholder lawsuits which claimed that Bank of America’s Countrywide Mortgage had “concealed the riskiness” of its lending standards. In June of 2010, the State of Illinois once more had to sue the Bank of America for “racial discrimination” in its lending practices. The WikiLeaks documentation shows thousands of in-house emails circulating among top Bank of American personnel showing with shocking clarity that the bank was not only fully cognizant of the illegality of their actions but were, in fact, continuing these actions because of the assurance of protection by “senior American legislators and officials.”
Additional material in the WikiLeaks fundus concerns the brokerage house of Merrill Lynch, which Bank of America acquired for $50 billion in January of 2009. The aforesaid 'senior American legislators and officials' quickly loaned the Bank of America $20 billion in loans to facilitate this purchase. Subsequently, it was revealed that Merrill Lynch had lost over $16 billion at the end of 2008 but had paid out over $4 billion in bonuses to all the top Merrill Lynch personnel. In sum, the Merrill Lynch people, secure in the knowledge of a connived Federal bailout, took the funds for personal gain. The WikiLeaks documents clearly show all of this in detail, complete with boasting emails on the part of the recipients of the monies.
As another aspect of this enormous financial scandal furthered purely for gain, corporate and personal, the Bank of America has been the instigator of the so-called “robo-signing” scandal. As a single example of this illegal conduct, in February of 2010, a Bank of America employee testified on deposition that they had personally signed over 8,000 official foreclosure documents without ever reading any of them. This is a clearcut violation of the law but there are so many such examples of this, not limited to the Bank of America alone, that there is not sufficient space to list them all. The WikiLeaks documents clearly show that these illegal actions were fully known to senior Bank of America officials and that extensive cover-ups were ordered from the very top levels of that bank.
WikiLeaks documentation shows clearly that the “senior American legislators and officials” who connived with the Bank of America include the leadership of the Federal Reserve, top Congressional leaders (mostly Republican) and even senior members of the White House staff, both in the Bush and Obama administrations.
With this pending dam collapse release to the public, it is no wonder that the government itself, the officials of the Bank of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the most powerful, arch-conservative business cabal would all join forces in an attempt to discredit or permanently silence Assange and his organization.
The front organization, HB Gary Federal, a specialist in computer manipulations, was hired by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Bank of America to attempt to plant false information with WikiLeaks, double-heading frantic government attempts to get Assange physically into their hands. When WiliLeaks struck back and, in turn, infiltrated the government and private sector’s attempts to infiltrate them, it was discovered that HB Gary Federal was involved with Stuxtnet, a very sophisticated computer virus developed by Israeli and American experts and designed to infiltrate and destroy computer systems deemed “unacceptable” to Washington.
Bank of America officials have been warning Washington that if they crash, the damage to the American economy would be catastrophic because of their size and pervasiveness and this message has resonated very clearly in official circles, prompting frantic but clumsy attacks on Assange and his organization.”