CFPB Anti-Discrimination Official Forced Out Over Racist Blogs

A Consumer Financial Protection Bureau official, Eric Blankenstein, has been fired following an internal investigation into his racist blog posts.

Blankenstein was the policy associate director of the Office of Supervision, Enforcement and Fair Lending, the CPFB wing that’s meant to combat discrimination by banks and financial institutions.

According to an email obtained by Bloomberg Law, he will leave the agency on May 31.

In September last year, the Washington Post discovered Blankenstein’s blog posts from 2004 that argued that “hate-crime hoaxes” are more common than “actual hate crimes.”

Blankenstein also complained about “racial idiocy” at the University of Virginia when students pushed the school to designate racism as an honor code violation. In that same post, he described hate crime legislation as “making it illegal to have a thought.”

This story has been corrected to cite Bloomberg Law, not Bloomberg.