Bill Brennan calls subprime mortgage lending “the biggest type of fraud” he saw in roughly a quarter of a century as director of the Home Defense Program of the Atlanta Legal Aid Society.
To this day, eight years after the foreclosure crisis that plunged the American economy into a deep recession, he said he couldn’t believe that banks would so willingly risk their reputations to loan money to people who would have difficulty paying it back. The predatory lending that contributed to the undoing of the financial system disproportionately targeted black and Latino families and set them up with risky loans. Institutions even convinced minorities firmly in the middle class to take loans with adjustable rates when they qualified for the standard, 30-year fixed mortgage.
Atlanta was one of several cities in the country that took the brunt of the hit caused by the housing crash. According to Brennan, the…
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claims that it had routinely overstated the quality of mortgages it was selling to investors. But how did the bank avoid prosecution for committing fraud that helped cause the 2008 financial crisis? Today we speak to JPMorgan Chase whistleblower Alayne Fleischmann in her first televised interview discussing how she witnessed “massive criminal securities fraud” in the bank’s mortgage operations. She is profiled in Matt Taibbi’s new Rolling Stone investigation, “The $9 Billion Witness: Meet the woman JPMorgan Chase paid one of the largest fines in American history to keep from talking.” Click 
Deadly Clear 