The former watchdog for the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program bailout of Wall Street is back in the spotlight amid a Justice Department investigation into United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain.Fain, who gained national prominence during the 2023 UAW strike, hit out at former TARP special inspector general Neil Barofsky in a statement on Sunday as he defended himself in the face of a DOJ corruption investigation. Barofsky was appointed by a federal court to be the independent monitor for UAW in 2021 following a corruption scandal.
Fain accused Barofsky of having a “political grudge” against him for the UAW announcing support for a ceasefire in Gaza.The DOJ is probing claims that Fain pressured a union official to provide financial benefits to his fiancee and a workers’ compensation claim for her sister, according to Bloomberg. Fain then allegedly punished UAW Vice President Rich Boyer for not approving the benefits by taking away Boyer’s position as lead negotiator with automaker Stellantis.Last month, Barofsky, the court-appointed monitor for the union, released a report about the accusations against Fain.“The Monitor’s investigation substantiated the claim that President Fain acted improperly to obtain financial benefits for his fiancée, and that Vice President Boyer’s failure to approve the bonus may have contributed to Fain’s retaliatory action against him,” Barofsky wrote.Fain has denied the accusations and claims that Boyer was removed from his negotiating role because “he wasn’t doing a good job for our members.”In the Sunday statement, Fain also accused Boyer of weaponizing Barofsky against him.“Let’s be clear about what’s going on here: Rich Boyer has fed the monitor false allegations about me and is now trying to weaponize these bogus allegations to steal the upcoming UAW election,” Fain wrote. “He knows he can’t win a fair fight because he has no real platform to run on.”The Washington Examiner previously asked the DOJ for confirmation about the investigation.Gina Balaya, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Michigan, said DOJ policy prohibits her from confirming or denying the existence of an investigation.The Washington Examiner also reached out to Barofsky, who is employed at Jenner & Block, for comment.Barofsky, who was appointed as TARP’s watchdog by former President George W. Bush, has been a notable critic of the program and wrote a book about his insider view that the $700 billion TARP bailout was mishandled.Still, in an interview with PBS in 2021, the former inspector general said that while one can never know for sure, everyone was pretty convinced at the time that without it, there could have been an “epic” Great Depression.“I think that’s an accomplishment,” he said. “I think the execution of it, though, was absolutely horrible and shortsighted and so focused on the banks with such little focus on everyone else that we’re feeling the results of that, and ultimately it may end up setting the groundwork for an even bigger financial crisis in the future.”SHAWN FAIN COURTS MAGA SENATORS IN SEARCH OF UAW RESETBarofsky argued the program did little to address the underlying problems that resulted in the 2008 financial crisis.“What we’ve done is essentially preserve a fundamentally broken status quo that led to the financial crisis in 2008, and we took a lot of problems in the system and in some ways made them worse,” he said.
