Late update: This post has been updated to reflect the Bloomberg reporting that Blankenstein resigned from the agency. Bloomberg originally reported that he had been fired.
A Consumer Financial Protection Bureau official, Eric Blankenstein, resigned 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.
A senior CFPB official confirmed to TPM that Blankenstein will be leaving the agency in the coming weeks.
According to an email obtained by Bloomberg Law, his departure date is 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.
