Holder and FBI admit lying about data released before election last year

More Obama administration lies.

In their efforts to promote the re-election of Barack Obama, our nation’s premier law enforcement agencies presented false data to the American public about a “crackdown” on mortgage fraud. Fox News reports:

The Justice Department and FBI have quietly acknowledged they grossly overstated the scope of a mortgage fraud crackdown, which the administration heralded with much fanfare a few weeks before last year’s presidential election.

According to a memo circulated by the FBI and a correction posted online by the Justice Department, the number of defendants, the number of victims and the size of the losses are, in reality, a fraction of what officials claimed last October.

Attorney General Eric Holder and other law enforcement officials claimed in early October that the initiative charged 530 criminal defendants on behalf of 73,000 victims who suffered over $1 billion in losses. The so-called Distressed Homeowner Initiative, which targeted fraud schemes against distressed homeowners, was highlighted in a press release and press conference at the time.

Holder, talking to the cameras on Oct. 9, called it “a groundbreaking, year-long mortgage fraud enforcement effort.”

The real numbers, it turns out, were far smaller. The feds now admit that the number of criminal defendants charged was more like 107, not 530. The number of victims was 17,185 — still a large number, but roughtly one fourth the size of the original headcount. And the losses totaled $95 million — not $1 billion, as originally claimed.

The mortgage meltdown of 2008, which served (and continues to serve) as a bludgeon for Democrats to blame George W. Bush, Republicans, and free markets for all the economic misery stands as one of the great, deceptive propaganda triumphs of American history. The low and medium information voting public does not know that banks were bludgeoned by regulators into giving mortgages to people who could not afford them. And now we have the admission that they were served up false information to make it appear as though Obama and the DoJ were doing something to improve things.

President Asterisk.