Charlie Baker says he agrees with Elizabeth Warren: Wells Fargo CEO should resign
Gov. Charlie Baker might not be as fired up about it as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, but the Massachusetts governor said Thursday he’d also like see Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf resign.
“If I had been on the board of Wells Fargo, I would have asked for his resignation,” Baker said during his monthly “Ask the Gov” appearance on WGBH’s Boston Public Radio.
Stumpf was derided by Warren in a Senate hearing earlier this week for his company’s recent fake account scandal, for which 5,300 low-level Wells Fargo employees were fired over the past five years.
Warren, a Democrat, said she thought Stumpf should resign and face a criminal investigation.
An investigation found that employees, pushed by aggressive sales goals, secretly created more than 2 million unauthorized accounts for customers, many of whom were subsequently hit with various fees related to the unwanted accounts.
“The program itself is not defensible,” Baker said Thursday, noting that he was surprised that no senior-level executives lost their jobs as a result.
“I don’t think that’s leadership,” he said.
Asked specifically about Warren’s performance in the hearing, Baker deferred.
Instead, the governor said he wished lawmakers in Washington, D.C., would spend more time focusing on reducing the federal government’s $19 trillion budget debt.
But Baker said he gets that people are “fired up” about “what went on” at Wells Fargo. He pointed out that Republicans on the Senate banking committee, such as Sen. Pat Toomey, were not easy on Stumpf.
As Vox’s Matt Yglesias wrote, the outrage at Wells Fargo in Tuesday’s hearing was hardly partisan, as both Democrats and Republicans aggressively questioned Stumpf over the company’s actions during the scandal and in its aftermath.
Ironically, Iglesias also notes that each of the Republicans “outraged by the bank’s wrongdoing” also support eliminating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a new federal agency (conceived by Warren), which spearheaded the federal action against Wells Fargo.
Following the investigation, Wells Fargo agreed to pay a $185 million in fines, including $100 million to the CFPB.
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