Democrat Rep. Katie Porter Supports Impeachment of Trump, Has Her Own Ethics Concerns

Freshman U.S. Rep. Katie Porter added her name on Monday to an impeachment investigation of President Donald Trump. The Democrat from Irvine joined nearly 60 other House members seeking to impeach Trump, despite special counsel Robert Mueller’s report in which he found no obstruction of justice in the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

“I cannot with a clean conscience ignore my duty to defend the Constitution. I can’t claim to be committed to rooting out corruption and putting people over politics and then not apply those same principles and standards in all of the work I do,” Porter said, AP reported.

Rep. Katie Porter is no stranger to controversy. Since being elected in November 2018, less then one year ago, is was revealed that she took a six-figure salary from the big banks mortgage settlement funds, arranged by then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris, meant to assist California homeowners facing foreclosure. Kamala Harris touts the $20 billion relief settlement she secured as California attorney general for homeowners hit hard by the foreclosure crisis, Reuters reported.

“Using funds originally meant for California’s troubled homeowners, Katie Porter negotiated with Kamala Harris a $300,000 salary and benefits package for herself and a $1.56 million-dollar budget for an 11-member staff. Porter, who was then a professor at UCI Law School making approximately $250,000+ per year, ran her operation out of UCI’s Irvine campus and according to University records, Porter went $1.57 million over budget, totaling $3.13 million in staff salaries and benefits,” SoCalDailyPulse reported. “All of this funded by money meant to assist distressed homeowners.”

SoCalDailyPulse also reported:

“Reuters published the other side of California’s housing recovery story with less than complimentary marks for Harris and Porter:

“Consumer advocates who worked with California homeowners during the mortgage crisis say the most vulnerable – limited English speakers, the disabled, widows and minorities – had the least luck obtaining relief.”

The article goes on to quote the deputy director of the California Reinvestment Coalition, an association of 300 nonprofit consumer finance groups that maintain that the people who were supposed to get loan modifications were not actually getting them.”

“Porter contends that 150,000 homeowners received some form of relief under the mortgage settlement in California but admits that at least half of the aid went towards short sales of people who still ended up losing their homes. This equates to $14 billion worth of settlement funds put towards short sales and second mortgages that reimbursed the big banks for money they would have lost without the settlement funds.”

There is no accounting for the remaining $6 billion from the $20 billion mortgage settlement funds. However, a court found California illegally held $331 million of the funds from the settlement, and ordered the state to use the money  for its intended purpose — to help victims of foreclosures.

Washington Free Beacon found Rep. Katie Porter availed herself of another perk:

“Congresswoman Katie Porter (D, Calif.,) revealed in a subcommittee meeting that a tangled mess of health care bills she was facing was cleared up when a patient advocate told the insurance company Porter had been recently elected to the House of Representatives.

In a Tuesday hearing titled “Protecting Patients from Surprise Medical Bills,” the freshman representative told her personal story of needing an emergency appendectomy last August. She said she was shocked to get a bill for $3,000 because one of the surgeons was out of her provider network.

“As I continued to fight my insurance company, I kept receiving bills from the surgeon,” she said at one point. “Eventually, nearly five months after I was hospitalized, the surgeon was forced to simply request payment.”

“Finally, the patient advocate, invoking the fact that I had just been elected to Congress, was able to get the insurance company to agree to pay my surgeon’s bill,” Porter said. “A patient advocate in this case was a doctor hired by Porter’s employer to help workers navigate complicated health care billing issues.”

Porter, who used her election to Congress to get her $3,000 medical bill paid by the insurance company, is the one who said she is “committed to rooting out corruption and putting people over politics and then not apply those same principles and standards in all of the work I do.”

“According to OpenSecrets, a campaign finance watchdog group, Katie Porter’s political fundraising figures show a cozier relationship with Wall Street than her press releases portray,” SoCalDailyPulse reported. “In her last campaign, Porter received nearly half a million dollars in campaign contributions from the Securities and Investment industry. Senator Kamala Harris’ records match Porter’s in that the fourth largest source of her campaign funds comes from the securities and investment industry totaling $798,677 in contributions, $5,475 of it coming from Wall Street-connected political action committees.”