Elizabeth Warren Just Eviscerated the Wells Fargo CEO

“You should resign…You should be criminally investigated.”


The Senate Banking Committee conducted a hearing Tuesday about the massive scandal currently engulfing Wells Fargo. The word “fraud” was used repeatedly by senators on both sides of the aisle when describing the bank’s creation of millions of unauthorized bank and credit card accounts for existing customers.

Fallout from the account scandal continues to pile up. The bank is also facing an investigation by the House Financial Services Committee, subpoenas from the Department of Justice, and at least one potential class-action lawsuit.

First up at Tuesday’s Senate hearing was Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf, who was grilled by the committee for almost three hours.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren—a longtime advocate for more stringent regulation of Wall Street—tore into Stumpf, describing the unauthorized accounts as a “massive, yearslong scam.” She asked Stumpf what he has done to take responsibility for his bank’s actions. “You have said repeatedly, ‘I am accountable,'” she said. “But what have you done to actually hold yourself accountable? Have you resigned?”

Stumpf avoided answering the question directly, prompting Warren to repeat her question, her voice rising, at least three times.

Warren proceeded to pummel Stumpf with more questions. “Have you returned one nickel of the money you earned while this scam was going on?” she asked. Stumpf evaded the question several times. (Stumpf said earlier in the hearing that he earned $19.3 million last year.) Finally, an exasperated Warren said, “I’ll take that as a ‘no.'”

She then asked if he’d fired any members of his senior management. Stumpf initially began by describing the firing of regional branch managers, but Warren stopped him, emphasizing that her question was not about low-level leadership but about the people at the top. Again, Stumpf’s answer was no.

When Warren asked Stumpf if he knew how much the value of his bank’s stock had gone up over the time that the unauthorized accounts were created and maintained, Stumpf replied the information was in the public record. “You’re right, it is all in the public records,” Warren said, “because I looked it up.” She continued: “While this scam was going on, you personally held an average of 6.75 million shares of Wells stock.” The share price went up by about $30 in that time frame, Warren pointed out, “which comes out to more than $200 million in gains, all for you personally.”

Warren ended her speech by calling on Stumpf to resign and for both the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate the CEO. Here’s an excerpt of her speech:

You know, here’s what really gets me about this, Mr. Stumpf. If one of your tellers took a handful of $20 bills out of the cash drawer, they’d probably be looking at criminal charges for theft. They could end up in prison. But you squeezed your employees to the breaking point so they would cheat customers and you could drive up the value of your stock and put hundreds of millions of dollars in your own pocket. And when it all blew up, you kept your job, you kept your multimillion-dollar bonuses, and you went on television to blame thousands of $12-an-hour employees who were just trying to meet cross-sell quotas that made you rich. This is about accountability. You should resign. You should give back the money that you took while this scam was going on, and you should be criminally investigated.

You can watch Warren’s full questioning above.

This post has been revised.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate