You’d think after it had become the poster child for robo-signing foreclosure fraud, at a time when it was facing a class action suit arising out of that fraud, and at a time when all servicers had been anxiously awaiting the result of the US Bank v. Ibanez suit in MA, GMAC would be very very careful about the way its purchase of mortgage notes interacted with its servicing department.

You’d be wrong.

In a major ruling Friday, a coalition of nonprofit defense lawyers and consumer protection advocates in Maryland successfully got over 10,000 foreclosure cases managed by GMAC Mortgage tossed out, because affidavits in the cases were signed by Jeffrey Stephan, the infamous GMAC “robo-signer” who attested to the authenticity of foreclosure documents without any knowledge about them, as well as signing other false statements.

Yves Smith has a post laying out one of the most troublesome aspects of the response to the revelation of foreclosure fraud. As she explains, to conduct an “independent review” of its PR-servicing “review” of its own servicing practices, GMAC picked the lawfirm that has been in charge of its national counsel on servicing issues.

On Tuesday, Iowa’s Attorney General Tom Miller testified to the Senate Banking Committee it would be months before the combined AG “investigation” came up with a settlement. That’s almost exactly the moment when the Washington Post posted a story reporting the AGs were close to a settlement.

Let me make a rare statement: I agree with just about everything Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) said in his call for an investigation of mortgage servicers. But Shelby’s choice of targets sure does bear watching.

I come to Steven Rattner’s Overhaul: An Insider’s Account of the Obama Administration’s Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry from a very particular perspective. As a Michigander whose husband still works in the auto industry and whose town has benefited from battery subsidies, I’m a grateful direct beneficiary of the work the Obama Administration did to save the auto industry. But that also means I read this book, which might have been subtitled, “Wall Street gapes at Detroit” from the perspective, “Detroit gapes back at Wall Street.”

The NYT has a fascinating story about the $75,000 house that led to the GMAC deposition on robosigning that finally alerted the world to the extent of the fraud behind foreclosures. GMAC requested the judge prevent publication on the internet documentation key to the case. But the judge refused.

Ally Financial (the parent company of GMAC Mortgage) expanded their review of their foreclosure processes to all 50 states, the second mortgage servicer to do so after Bank of America; the Obama Administration supports the 40-state investigation by Attorneys General into foreclosure fraud.

Had the stress tests included a real look at the subject banks’ servicing business, these banks might not have been declared healthy.

Attorney General Cordray is going to need some time to prosecute this case. But he has an election coming up in a little over 3 weeks, against former Senator Mike DeWine. The latest poll shows him slightly behind, 44-38. It is imperative that Cordray and his team be given the time to reach discovery in this case and untangle the crooked web everyone suspects is at the heart of the mortgage lending industry.