This Appeals Court Noinee Steven Manashi, is one of those people T has singled out for the Judicial system, a hand-picked conservative, with bizarre points of view. He’s been controversial from the start, and has had a hard time getting approved (thankfully.) I hope he gets shut out.
Appeals Court Nominee Shaped DeVos’s Illegal Loan Forgiveness Effort
A judicial nominee slated for a key Senate committee vote on Thursday helped devise an illegal Education Department effort to use private Social Security data to deny debt relief to thousands of students cheated by their for-profit colleges, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times.
The plan, outlined by Steven J. Menashi when he was acting general counsel under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, was ruled by a federal judge to violate federal privacy laws. She ordered the department to stop the practice.
In the memo, President Trump’s appeals court nominee, who left the Education Department to join the White House legal team, outlined the department’s plan to use earnings data from the Social Security Administration to forgive only a small percentage of debts shouldered by 30,000 borrowers who attended Corinthian Colleges, a for-profit chain that the Obama administration found misled thousands of students. Corinthian’s collapse left its students and graduates with worthless degrees and mountains of debt.
In the previously unreported memo, Mr. Menashi wrote that Ms. DeVos had the discretion to determine how to respond to requests for relief, then boasted that the department had used Social Security income data: “The department utilized actual earnings data for borrowers maintained by the Social Security Administration.”
He also said her method was not subject to judicial review.
That proved untrue: Six months after a new partial-forgiveness policy was implemented, Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim of Federal District Court in San Francisco ruled that using the Social Security data violated the federal Privacy Act. Since then, the department has been entangled in a messy court battle, which recently resulted in Ms. DeVos being held in contempt of court and facing a $100,000 fine.