The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB,) the brainchild of Massachusetts far-left Senator Elizabeth Warren, has been known for some time to be an unaccountable, badly managed rogue agency. This agency is one of the best arguments for taking a meat-axe to the federal Colossus, and yet they are still out there stirring their finger in the pot of America's financial system. But in a recent attack on an Ohio banking system, they seem to have taken a whole new slant on the "Protection" part of their name — as in "Protection Racket."

Admitting to one’s past errors may be considered passé by Ohio Republicans these days (ahem, JD Vance). But here at Buckeye Briefing, we’re willing to admit when we got it wrong. We’re also willing to credit the mainstream media when they dig up really good dirt.

And it appears that the good folks at the Cincy Enquirer have done exactly that in relation to federal regulators’ moves to attack Ohio’s very own Fifth Third.

Aggressive sales quotas. Lax internal oversight. Little consideration for customers whose whose financial well-being was compromised and whose complaints were disregarded by employees chasing financial incentives.

That’s the unflattering picture painted by court and other documents filed by federal regulators of Fifth Third Bank, the largest Cincinnati-based bank and one of the region’s Fortune 500 companies.

[…]

Yet, the documents also reveal federal regulators were having difficulties in their fake accounts investigation: A U.S. District Court judge had doubts they found evidence to prove unauthorized activity.

Regulators did not identify any alleged victims of Fifth Third’s disputed practices. The Enquirer’s attempts to find affected consumers in the case were unsuccessful.

The CFPB alleges a crime — but there are no victims. They claim that Fifth Third's "disputed" practices harmed consumers — but produced no such consumers. It looks a lot like the regulators made this all up out of whole cloth.

See Related: CFPB Suing Zero-Interest Lender Over Lending Practices 

Rogue Agency: GOP Lawmakers Scrutinize the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

So, who was harmed? Anyone?

So: CFPB pursued a case relating to actions that allegedly occurred before the CFPB even existed, let alone was empowered to conduct these kinds of investigations and actions. It pursued this case without any actual evidence of wrongdoing, and to this day, no one can find anyone who was actually harmed by the alleged actions. Fifth Third basically paid CFPB to get off its back, sort of like a business might pay a mafia protection racket. And now, the bank is being name-checked alongside Wells Fargo (which, we can personally attest did open at least one account that we personally know of without the account owner’s authorization) because it made a financially and legally smart, but reputationally stupid, move to stop the CFPB harassment.

That’s quite an indictment of one of the agencies most loved by Democrats, and Sherrod Brown, especially.

Did you get that first part? This was, in effect, an ex post facto investigation.

This smacks of a protection racket, indeed; "Nice little banking system you have there, Fifth Third — be a shame if anything... happened to it." And this, folks, is always the problem with over-regulation and government overreach — to continue their agency's mission and to protect their phony-baloney jobs, the regulators are incentivized to find problems, even where none exist. In this case, these perverse incentives prompted the CFPB to invent victims that didn't exist, to bring charges alleging harm where there was no evidence, and to cost an Ohio firm a lot of money that they never should have had to shell out.

This leads us to ask about the CFPB — are they the victim or the crime?

This seems appropriate.