Nobody will ever accuse George "W"orthless Bush of having an ounce of integrity, honesty or intellectualism. This new Bush pardon is just outrageous. Bush released his "pardon" list for 2008 today, which of course does not reflect the hundreds of possibilities that he will will "buy off" or pardon in exchange for their silence, on his last day in office, January 19, 2009.
The President's ability to pardon absolutely anyone without consent from congress is one of the most abused and egregious parts of our government and our constitution.
President George W. Bush has characterized the recent US housing crisis as a product of greed and Wall Street excess.
But that doesn't seem to have been Bush's opinion when he pardoned Isaac Toussie, 30, of Brooklyn, the son of a New York real estate developer, who defrauded the Housing and Urban Development Department government for millions of dollars and pled guilty to inflating the incomes of at least 100 families to make them eligible for federal loans in the lead-up to the worst housing crisis the United States has ever had.
Toussie was among 19 pardoned by President George W. Bush in his semi-annual pre-Christmas clemencies.
http://rawstory.com/...
Seems like a bit of an odd time to pardon a guy who pleaded guilty to the relatively minor charges of making false statements to HUD and mail fraud amid an investigation of a massive housing scam that involved allegedly sticking the victims, homebuyers, with ballooning mortgages.
But President Bush today pardoned Isaac Toussie of Brooklyn, who was convicted and sentenced to five months in prison in 2003 and paid a $10,000 fine for just that. He and his father were poster children in a 2002 BusinessWeek piece on the dark side of the housing boom.
His father, Robert, did give $28,500 to the RNC this year.
http://www.politico.com/...
This is big time fraud perpetuated by father and son.
In what is termed the largest real-estate discrimination lawsuit ever in New York State, lawyers yesterday filed class-action litigation on behalf of 400 families, primarily in Suffolk County and on Staten Island, who said they were duped into buying overpriced, shoddily built homes from one of Suffolk's largest residential builders.
The suit charges that Brooklyn-based developers Robert Toussie and his son, Isaac, acted in concert with more than a dozen lenders to defraud minority home buyers. The families were mostly from New York City and some had blemishes on their credit records.
The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Central Islip, also names some of the estimated 20 companies the Toussies have owned and sold new houses through over the years. The 13 financial institutions named in the lawsuit include three big banks or their divisions: HSBC Bank, Fleet Mortgage Corp. and Chase Manhattan Mortgage Corp. As is common in real-estate transactions, these companies bought the families' loans from smaller mortgage banks that originated the transactions. Most of the other financial defendants are the smaller lenders.
http://xml.newsday.com/...
Indeed, January 20 will not arrive soon enough! Finally and hopefully, we will rid ourselves of this republican effort to destroy our country through avarice and greed. From now on, the definition of greed, government criminality and ineptness will forever be associated with George "W"orthless Bush.