One Group Takes Aim At This Potential VP Pick, Even Before The Nominee Is Decided

Julián Castro, current Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, has been floated as a potential pick for Hillary Clinton’s running mate, but a coalition of housing advocates wants to call him out.

By Rhonda FanningApril 12, 2016 1:54 pm

The presidential primaries aren’t even over, but why wait for the battle to commence over the veeps?

A coalition of groups, many of them backers of Bernie Sanders, took aim at a person long-thought of as a potential Hillary Clinton pick for her ticket – Julián Castro, former San Antonio mayor and current U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) who has been a longtime Clinton supporter.

Politico White House reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere says the groups, which work in housing advocacy, are frustrated by HUD’s handling of mortgages acquired during the foreclosure crisis, mortgages that HUD has been selling to banks.

“The groups involved here say that these mortgages should not be sold back to banks – they were, they say, the banks that caused the crisis in the first place – and that they’re not really concerned with helping homeowners and neighborhoods,” he says.

Dovere says those groups have taken this public stance because if Castro doesn’t change course, they’re not going to be “satisfied” with as the vice presidential candidate. The groups’ goal is, in part, to call attention to the demands of progressives within the Democratic party.

“They are firing a warning shot, essentially,” he says.

What you’ll hear in this segment:

– What the groups’ support for Bernie Sanders has to do with their denouncement of Castro

– Why this coalition says Castro could be, to use a mortgage turn-of-phrase, a “toxic asset” to the Clinton campaign

– The shifting relationships between Democratic leaders and Wall Street