While the Big Banks continue to fabricate notes, robosign documents and create fake assignments in order to illegally foreclose, the Federal government continues to focus on the small fish.

A Georgia real estate investor pleaded guilty today for his role in a bid-rigging conspiracy and fraud scheme related to public real estate foreclosure auctions in Gwinnett County, Georgia, the Department of Justice announced today.

Clifford Wayne Hill pleaded guilty to bid rigging and fraud in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.  On Feb. 3, 2016, a federal grand jury in the Northern District of Georgia returned an indictment against the defendant.

According to the indictment, from December 2007 to March 2012, Hill and his co-conspirators agreed not to compete for the purchase of selected foreclosed homes so that they could win the auctions for those homes with artificially low bids. Hill made and received payoffs for…

Jay Clayton is tied to big banks and corporations—and that could hold up fraud enforcement.

The dominant theme of Thursday’s Senate Banking Committee hearing with Jay Clayton, nominee for chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, was conflict of interest. Not the well-documented conflicts of some of the more notorious members of the Trump administration but the conflicts of Clayton himself.

A partner at the high-powered corporate law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, Clayton represented Wall Street banks throughout his career. He served as Goldman Sachs’s lawyer during the Wall Street bailout, allowing it to emerge from the financial crisis relatively unscathed. He helped deliver failed investment bank Bear Stearns to JPMorgan Chase and other failed investment bank Lehman Brothers to Barclays. Hedefended Ally Financial in its foreclosure fraud settlement with the government and represented Deutsche Bank in its “mirror trade” Russian oligarch money laundering scandal. He was the lawyer…