CFPB Seeks to Vacate Abusive, Unjust Case Against Townstone

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, the Acting Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Russ Vought is seeking to vacate the settlement the CFPB extracted from Townstone after a seven-year harassment saga. Using a “redlining screen” based on an arbitrary number of mortgages, CFPB set out to destroy a small Midwest firm with about ten employees and a radio program called Townstone Financial. After a thorough review, the CFPB is seeking to make Townstone whole by returning the six-figure penalty they were forced to pay.

“CFPB abused its power, used radical ‘equity’ arguments to tag Townstone as racist with zero evidence, and spent years persecuting and extorting them – all to further the goal of mandating DEI in lending via their regulation by enforcement tactics. The more we uncover at CFPB, the more we see how this agency was weaponized against targeted Americans,” said Acting Director Russ Vought.

“This was a flagrant misuse of government resources to destroy a small business that did nothing wrong. For the crime of protected political speech, this firm was targeted and harassed for years by this rogue agency. We are righting this wrong and protecting the First Amendment,” said Senior Advisor Dan Bishop.

The investigation was not prompted by any actual or perceived harm, but by pure quota-style statistics. CFPB ran a “redlining screen” that caught 22,000 companies and then winnowed it down to a handful with unexplained “qualitative research.” Townstone was targeted because it was a small firm (<10 employees) and had a radio show that touched on political topics, making it easy for the CFPB to bully. To reiterate, no one came forward to complain about Townstone, they were “drawn out of hat” by a computer model run by DEI-driven CFPB bureaucrats.