Al Franken has a video out informing borrowers that they may be contacted if they’re eligible for a cash payment from a wrongful foreclosure or the opportunity to refinance or get a principal reduction on their loans. It’s more of a public service announcement than anything. Meanwhile, Tammy Baldwin joined others in criticizing Wisc. Gov. Scott Walker for proposing to divert settlement funds to the state treasury.

The fact is that as the elected chief legal officers in their states, no one had the power to make Harris or Schneiderman accept the deal. Yes, a lot of indirect political pressure was applied to them, but that is all it was. No one literally put a gun to their heads. Nothing actually prevented them from fighting longer or harder. The deal happened because they choose to agree to it. It would not have happened without them.

No one should get a pass. Everyone should be held responsible for the choices they make.

Eric Schneiderman, co-chair of the newly titled “RMBS working group” investigating financial fraud, appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show last night (the interview starts around the 5:00 mark), and there were a few interesting moments. First you have his assessment of the the fraud involved here, which he definitively cast as a pre-crisis issue. Schneiderman, from his public statements, is less concerned with the faulty documentation used to foreclose on borrowers; I would imagine he sees this as the cover-up for the initial crime of securitization fraud, and going back even further origination fraud. He sees that as where the banks’ real exposure lies. And so the working group will look at “all of the conduct that blew up the economy,” not the conduct being engaged in to paper over (literally) all that.

It seems Covington & Burling, the powerhouse law firm that used to employ, and could be expected to re-employ, Attorney general Eric Holder and Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division Lanny Breuer is also the same firm that issued the opinion letter that said that MERS was a valid way to transfer mortgages.

The 1% protects the 1%. That’s all we’re talking about here. The problem for the Administration is that millions of homeowners have paid the price for this protection racket, and there’s an election coming up. So the effort will be made to create a fig leaf of a “solution” to “fix” the housing market and benefit homeowners.

Because the Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s voter ID law in 2008, it would not surprise me to see them uphold South Carolina’s version. And that could be a means to invalidate Section 5, giving Southern states with a history of racial discrimination in voting the chance to do so again.

US Attorney General Holder gave an address at the LBJ Library in Austin yesterday billed as the opening salvo in a Justice Department counter-attack against disenfranchising voter laws, particularly in states which just turned over to conservative legislatures and governors.

Eric Schneiderman’s has gone where federal regulators fear to tread, to actually do the jobs of the federal government should do. In foreclosure fraud, he undertook the investigation that the feds would not. Now he is applying that to foreclosures on active-duty military service members.

It’s almost not even worth getting to Walsh’s core charge, that the government forced banks to lend to people who couldn’t pay them back. I suppose the government forced banks to slice up those loans into securities and then either lose the paperwork or fail to honor the procedures demanded by the pooling and servicing agreements. Or the government forced banks to sell the securities to investors without telling them they were taking the other side of the bet against the securities. Or that they knew about the irregularities with the loans, and received them at a discount from the originators, without passing on the information to investors who thought the loans were highly rated and perfectly legitimate. And on and on.

As Marcy Wheeler says, this plot has it all – Mexican drug cartels, Iran, assassinations, attacks on the Saudi AND Israeli embassies. You name it, it’s in there.