SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
Syllabus
ARTIS v. DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
CERTIORARI TO THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA COURT OF
APPEALS
No. 16–460. Argued November 1, 2017—Decided January 22, 2018
Federal district courts may exercise supplemental jurisdiction over
state claims not otherwise within their adjudicatory authority if
those claims are “part of the same case or controversy” as the federal
claims the plaintiff asserts. 28 U. S. C. §1367(a). When a district
court dismisses all claims independently qualifying for the exercise of
federal jurisdiction, it ordinarily also dismisses all related state
claims. See §1367(c)(3). Section 1367(d) provides that the “period of
limitations for” refiling in state court a state claim so dismissed
“shall be tolled while the claim is pending [in federal court] and for a
period of 30 days after it is dismissed unless State law provides for a
longer tolling period.”
When petitioner Artis filed a federal-court suit against respondent
District of Columbia (District), alleging a federal employmentdiscrimination
claim and three allied claims under D. C. law, nearly
two years remained on the applicable statute of limitations for the
D. C.-law violations. Two and a half years later, the Federal District
Court ruled against Artis on her sole federal claim and dismissed the
D. C.-law claims under §1367(c). Fifty-nine days after the dismissal,
Artis refiled her state-law claims in the D. C. Superior Court, but
that court dismissed them as time barred. The D. C. Court of Appeals
affirmed, holding that §1367(d) accorded Artis only a 30-day
grace period to refile in state court and rejecting her argument that
the word “tolled” in §1367(d) means that the limitations period is
suspended during the pendency of the federal suit.
Late last October, several hundred handsomely suited financiers gathered in the ballroom of a luxury Marriott, just two blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Trump International Hotel. Lisa Kidd Hunt, the new chair of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, practically glowed as she addressed the crowd of bankers, brokers, and other money managers.
“There has never been a better time to be in this industry!” she declared. The economy was strong, she said, there was “real movement on regulatory and tax reform,” and the United States boasts “the best capital markets system in the world.” The audience had every reason to feel elated. The stock market was setting records, and Donald Trump’s pick to regulate the industry — one of his most significant decisions as president from the perspective of those in the room — couldn’t have been better. Jay Clayton was a familiar face, having spent his career as a lawyer representing large Wall Street firms, and he was about to take the stage.
As Jacob Lerma surveyed the skeletal beams of his suburban Houston home that was flooded during Hurricane Harvey, he kept muttering three words as he wondered if his family would ever be able to move back in: “I don’t know.”
Like many Texans whose homes were flooded during Harvey, Lerma faces mounting expenses and hasn’t paid his mortgage in months. His insurance payment wasn’t enough to rebuild his home and he was only offered a small loan after applying with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. His last hope is a possible buyout from the city of Friendswood. In the meantime, he, his wife and two daughters will continue living with his parents.
“If the buyout doesn’t work and more money doesn’t come from insurance, walking away from it might be our only option,” said Lerma, 27, who set up a GoFundMe page to help his family. “It’s just crazy to see this all taken away.”
The lawsuit alleged the bank was using rubber-stamped promissory note endorsements in violation of a consent judgment.
DBR-
Bank of America agreed to pay $3.4 million to the federal government to settle whistleblower claims filed by Miami attorney Bruce Jacobs.
The Jan. 5 agreement stems from allegations that the bank didn’t meet documentation standards for foreclosures and bankruptcies even after agreeing to do so as part of a $25 billion consent judgment involving Bank of America and four other mortgage servicers.
“Instead of intending to comply with the servicing standards for foreclosures as provided in the … consent judgment, the defendants intended to commit new misconduct by presenting misleading and deceptive documentation in foreclosure actions promptly after April 4, 2012, and they have done so regularly since then,” the Jacobs Keeley attorney’s complaint alleged.
Deutsche Bank will pay $30 million, UBS $15 million and HSBC $1.6 million to settle civil charges that some of their traders engaged in spoofing in the precious metals market.
The CFTC charged six individuals, and the Department of Justice charged eight with crimes related to deceptive trading in a wide-ranging investigation
CNBC-
Until now, an illegal trading technique called “spoofing” has been associated with two-bit commodities outfits and lone wolf traders operating in the shadows of the markets.
But prosecutors revealed on Monday that their investigations have hit the big time.
Deutsche Bank, UBS and HSBC will collectively pay nearly $47 million to settle civil regulatory charges that some of their traders engaged in spoofing in precious metals. Deutsche Bank will pay $30 million and UBS $15 million of that total in a wide-reaching investigation by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that also names six individuals. HSBC will pay $1.6 million. All three banks cooperated with the probe.
A review conducted by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in the wake of the Wells Fargo & Co. fake account scandal has so far not found similar problems at other large banks, the new chief of the national bank regulator said last week in a letter to Senate Democrats.
Comptroller Joseph Otting said in the letter that the “horizontal review” that the OCC had undertaken to determine whether other large banks had in place sales practices and incentives that led employees to create…
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Sunday – January 28, 2018
——————— Foreclosure Workshop #53: Validity Versus Finality — The New Frontier in Foreclosure Defense
State and Federal Courts in recent years have begun the inevitable rethinking and setting aside of prior judicial preedents that have otherwise resulted in the protection of mortgage fraud in the United States since the Mortgage Crisis of 2008.
As a result of such new judicial thinking, tension and friction and conflict have arisen regarding the attempted use of such new case precedent to collaterally attack past adverse foreclosure decisions that have resulted in tens of millions of foreclosures, the vast majority of which have arguably had questionable validity, especially when judged by more recent jurisdictional and evidentiary standards.
That welcome awakening has placed foreclosure defense squarely therefore within one of the most complex of all legal doctrinal controversies: VALIDITY versus FINALITY — the new frontier in foreclosure defense.
In English common law, a past decision’s VALIDITY was much more important than maintaining FINALITY.
That view was adopted in the United States in the landmark 1877 decision of the United States Supreme Court in Pennoyer v. Neff, declaring that a judgment “if void when rendered, will always remain void.”
Yet the Court backed away from that principle in later decisions, until Justice Black in Hazel-Atlas Glass Co. v. Hartford-Empire Co. in 1944 held that there was no time limit in setting aside a final judgment due to it having been procured by fraud on the court, yet that precedent has also been substantially limited by lower federal courts today.
The conceptual protectors of FINALITY overriding VALIDITY, the refusal to allow the reopening of prior judicial decisions even if, for instance, you have conclusive evidence that a prior foreclosing plaintiff did not own your mortgage debt or that the prior court lacked jurisdiction, are such doctrinal giants of status quo theology as: Res Judicata, Rooker-Feldman, Statute of Limitations, Waiver, Laches, Stare Decisis, Prospective Application, Detrimental Reliance, and Full Faith and Credit, depending upon the jurisdiction that you happen to be in and the timing and procedural status of your individual case.
The conceptual protectors of VALIDITY overriding FINALITY, on the other hand, the willingness to allow the reopening of prior judicial decisions where, for instance, you have conclusive evidence that a prior foreclosing plaintiff did not own your mortgage debt or the prior court lacked jurisdiction, are such doctrinal giants of change theology as: Fraud, Illegality, Nullification, Retroactivity, Estoppel, Supervening Authority, Equity, and Public Policy.
Yet all of the above competing doctrines, or what we have called on our show “Rule Statements,” are not “triggers of thought,” but the “conclusions of thought,” as those listeners that have heard our past shows on “The Rule Ritual” well understand.
It is the purposeful goals underlying such doctrines or “Rule Statements” that when applied to the actual facts of each case will or should determine the outcome.
In fact, understanding the underlying triggers of thought behind championing VALIDITY or FINALITY over one another, once correctly understood, harmonize these otherwise seemingly contradictory “Rule Statements.”
The best way to understand this new frontier in foreclosure defense is to analyze specific foreclosure defense situations, which will we do on today’s show, in some of the most significant existing case contexts.
A full understanding of how the tension, friction, and conflict between VALIDITY and FINALITY can be intelligently resolved in individual foreclosure cases will aid our listeners in arguing future individual foreclosure cases on the side of VALIDITY, and Judges to intelligently do Justice.
Gary Dubin
Please go to our website, www.foreclosurehour.com, and join your fellow homeowners in the Homeowners SuperPac today.
A Membership Application is posted there waiting for your support.
Jeffrey Wertkin had a plot to bring in business and impress his new partners after joining one of Washington’s most influential law firms.
As a former high-stakes corporate-fraud prosecutor with the Department of Justice, he had secretly stockpiled sealed lawsuits brought by whistleblowers. Now, he would sell copies of the suits to the very targets of the pending government investigations — and his services to defend them.
Wertkin carried out his plan for months, right up until the day an FBI agent arrested him in a California hotel lobby.
The 41-year-old partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld …
Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Pedro P. Echarte Jr. sanctioned Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s former bank, California-based OneWest Bank, and its law firm for filing a frivolous foreclosure against a widow.
The judge granted sanctions against the bank and its attorneys at Tampa-based Albertelli Law, which serves the financial services and mortgage banking industries from offices in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, South Carolina and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He found the law firm and its client bank prosecuted a frivolous foreclosure and will set a subsequent hearing to determine the penalty.
“I believe the court should impose sanctions sufficient to deter a company like OneWest Bank with $65 billion in assets and vindicate the integrity of the judiciary,” said homeowner attorney Bruce Jacobs of Jacobs Keeley in Miami. “They came after my client a month after her husband died and relentlessly pursued this foreclosure.”
In his eight years as a circuit judge, Thomas Minkoff has handled family and civil cases. He oversaw more than 14,000 foreclosure hearings at the height of the Great Recession.
He was in court once again on Tuesday, but not in his usual perch at the bench. This time, he was on the witness stand.
Minkoff testified in the trial of a Clearwater woman charged with filing fraudulent documents against the Pinellas-Pasco circuit judge after he presided over her foreclosure.
U.S. BANK TRUST NATIONAL ) Appeal from the Circuit Court
ASSOCIATION, Not in Its Individual ) of Du Page County.
Capacity but Solely as Owner Trustee for
)
Queen’s Park Oval Asset Holding Trust, )
)
Plaintiff-Appellee, )
)
v. ) No. 14-CH-473
)
MARIO A. LOPEZ, a/k/a Mario Augusto )
Lopez-Franco; MARTHA D. LOPEZ; )
UNKNOWN OWNERS; and NONRECORD )
CLAIMANTS, ) Honorable
) Robert G. Gibson,
Two days after Hurricane María passed through Puerto Rico, I was able to get in a car and begin what would be the daily task for the next couple of weeks of looking for water and gas. As I stepped outside, I realized that this would not be as with other hurricanes that I had experienced in my childhood. Puerto Rico was destroyed, trees had been stripped out of all their leaves, 100-feet-tall cement poles laying on the ground almost pulverized. It looked like a scene taken out from a movie, and a scary one at that.
Despite this devastating scenario, private equity and other Wall Street companies behind home mortgages continued with their business—filing foreclosures proceedings in Puerto Rican courts to make a profit.
Just last month, Hedge Clippers, a watchdog group I am part of, released an alarming report identifying TPG Capital and its subsidiary Rushmore as the most aggressive company foreclosing families on Puerto Rico. Following the third month anniversary of the devastation left by the tempest, the “Report No. 53: Private Equity and Puerto Rico” was released on December 20, to coincide with protests in several cities calling for an end to all foreclosures on the island.
A classic circular kerfuffle in congress this week shifted eyes away from rare bipartisan cooperation on spying powers and bank reform
RollingStone-
The Internet is exploding today with cries of #ReleaseTheMemo, with the GOP throwing a big fat j’accuse at the Democrats. Republicans are pounding the table over what by now is about the millionth news story to be called “worse than Watergate” since the Russia scandal first broke. “People will go to jail!” chirped Florida Republican Matt Gaetz.
The GOP claims congressional committees have been shown a memo detailing shocking Obama-era surveillance abuses involving the Russia case. Dithering town-crier types like Iowa’s Steve King have spent the last day or so insisting to reporters that if only they could see the explosive material, they’d be lighting torches and marching in search of Obama administration security officials to burn as witches.
This trick – i.e. “If only you could see the amazing secret stuff I can’t tell you about, although actually I can” – has been employed with increasing regularity by both sides in the past few years, particularly with regard to #Russiagate.
The Ninth Circuit recently limited the availability of diversity jurisdiction for certain cases with claims involving mortgage loan modifications. Specifically, in Corral v. Select Portfolio Servicing, Inc., the Ninth Circuit held that, where the plaintiff-borrower “seeks only a temporary stay of foreclosure pending review of a loan modification application … the value of the property or amount of indebtedness are not the amounts in controversy.” — F.3d —-, 2017 WL 6601872, at *1 (9th Cir. Dec. 27, 2017). Rather, to satisfy the amount in controversy requirement in such cases, parties must demonstrate that the value of the temporary delay in foreclosure exceeds $75,000, “such as the transactional costs to the lender of delaying foreclosure or a fair rental value of the property during pendency of the injunction” (in addition to any compensatory damages plaintiffs may be seeking). Id. at *5.
In Corral, the plaintiff-borrower filed an action in California state court seeking to enjoin a foreclosure sale until her loan modification application was reviewed and also seeking unidentified compensatory damages and costs. Id. at *2, 3. Defendant removed the action to federal court arguing that the $75,000 amount in controversy requirement had been met because the original principal balance on the loan was $680,000 and the total outstanding indebtedness was in excess of $800,000. Id. at *2. The district court agreed and denied plaintiff’s motion to remand. Id.
Deutsche Bank notified German regulators, and Robert Mueller will likely be given the reports.
Mother Jones-
A German business magazine is reporting that Deutsche Bank, the German financial giant which is a major lender to both President Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, identified “suspicious transactions” related to Kushner family accounts, and has reported them to German banking regulators. The bank is reportedly willing to provide the information to special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s team of investigators.
Manager Magazin, a respected German business magazine, reported in its latest print edition, which hit German newsstands on Friday, that Paul Achleitner, chairman of Deutsche Bank’s board, had the bank conduct an internal investigation and the results were troubling. Those results have been turned over to the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority—Germany’s bank regulatory agency, which is commonly known as BaFin.
“Achleitner’s internal detectives were embarrassed to deliver their interim report regarding real estate tycoon [Jared] Kushner to the financial regulator BaFin,” the Manager Magazin article, translated from German, reports. “Their finding: There are indications that Donald Trump’s son-in-law or persons or companies close to him could have channeled suspicious monies through Deutsche Bank as part of their business dealings.”
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Sunday – January 21, 2018
——————— Exclusive Tell-All Eye-Witness Interview With a Retiring Mainland Big Law Supervising Foreclosure Attorney
For several years, The Foreclosure Hour has been trying to secure, heretofore unsuccessfully, an interview with an experienced foreclosure attorney willing to reveal the inside story concerning how mortgage fraud is planned and implemented from the highest levels of American Government, through large Mainland law firms, down to the smallest local foreclosure mills.
Finally, we have found one such individual who says he is a regular listener to our show, presently vacationing in Hawaii this week and looking for a home to purchase, planning to retire here, who has expressed his willingness to talk with us and even take questions, if respectful, from our listeners this Sunday.
For obvious reasons our guest, with the highest professional credentials, prefers to keep his identity hidden, who we have agreed only to refer to as “Chuck,” who has promised to reveal the underworld secrets that most of us have heretofore only been guessing about.
Please join us this Sunday provided you can control your emotions and are not susceptible to heart attacks, for otherwise the consequences of listening to what takes place behind the scenes could be dangerous to your health.
Gary Dubin
Please go to our website, www.foreclosurehour.com, and join your fellow homeowners in the Homeowners SuperPac today.
A Membership Application is posted there waiting for your support.
Every quarter, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau formally requests its operating funds from the Federal Reserve. Last quarter, former director Richard Cordray asked for $217.1 million. Cordray, an appointee of President Barack Obama, needed just $86.6 million the quarter before that. And yesterday, President Donald Trump’s acting CFPB director, Mick Mulvaney, sent his first request to the Fed.
He requested zero.
In a letter to Fed chair Janet Yellen obtained by POLITICO, Mulvaney wrote that the bureau already has $177 million in the bank, enough to cover the $145 million the bureau has budgeted for its second quarter. Cordray had maintained a “reserve fund” in case of overruns or emergencies, but Mulvaney said he didn’t see any reason for it, since the Fed has always given the bureau the money it needs. Mulvaney, who is also Trump’s budget director, noted that instead of advancing the funds to the bureau, the Fed could return them to the Treasury and reduce the deficit.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has taken the first step to killing or revising the payday lending rule it finalized only a few months ago.
The watchdog agency said in a statement Tuesday that it intends to “reconsider” a regulation, issued in October, that would have required payday lenders to vet whether borrower can pay back their loans. It also would have restricted some loan practices.
If the rule is thrown out or rewritten, it would mark a major shift for an agency that had zealously pursued new limits on banks and creditors before Mick Mulvaney, President Trump’s budget director, became the CFPB’s acting director.
Nine large banks, including six from Canada, have been accused in a lawsuit of conspiring to rig a Canadian rate benchmark to improve profits from derivatives trading.
The complaint, filed by a Colorado pension fund in U.S. District Court in Manhattan late on Friday, accused Royal Bank of Canada RY.TO, Toronto-Dominion Bank TD.TO, Bank of Nova Scotia BNS.TO and the other banks of suppressing the Canadian Dealer Offered Rate (CDOR) from Aug. 9, 2007, to June 30, 2014.
According to the Fire & Police Pension Association of Colorado, the banks hoped to reduce interest they would owe investors on CDOR-based derivatives transactions in the United States, including swaps and Canadian dollar futures contracts, and generate potentially billions of dollars of improper profit.
The Trump administration’s actions suggest it’s unwilling or unable to fix housing finance.
Bloomberg-
This was supposed to be the year when the U.S. government would finally address one of the biggest pieces of unfinished business from the 2008 financial crisis: reforming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the quasi-state entities that dominate the U.S. mortgage market.
Unfortunately, the Trump administration’s actions so far suggest it’s unwilling or unable to handle the task.
The collapse of the entities during the financial crisis offers a case study on how public-private partnerships can go wrong. Mandated by Congress to promote home ownership, they operated as privately owned corporations that bought and guaranteed mortgage loans. They delivered big profits for private shareholders, thanks in large part to the market’s assumption that the government would bail them out in a crisis. In 2008, that assumption proved correct: Amid heavy losses, the Treasury had to step in with a $187 billion capital injection and put the entities into a government conservatorship.
Documents that could not be found were suddenly found. Endless refusals by Nationstar to answer RESPA letters and other inquiries. It is the best picture of how bad Nationstar treats its customers.
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