To even be considered for a top-level job in the Trump administration, candidates must satisfy a number of requirements. One of them, of course, is unquestioning, slavish devotion to Donald Trump. Another is dynastic wealth, or at least a willingness to use their positions in government to enrich themselves. But the absolute most important quality is being diametrically opposed to the mission of the department they’re tasked with running, and committed to taking it down from the inside. For instance, the two guys who have run the Environmental Protection Agency since Team Trump took over have done everything in their power to turn the Earth into one giant Superfund site. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has worked hard to destroy public schools. Mick Mulvaney has more or less stated publicly that he believes his mandate as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau encompasses rolling back consumer financial protections and liberating loan sharks. Rick Perry is running a department he once said he’d like to abolish. You get the idea! So it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that a senior Trump appointee charged with stopping discrimination by financial lenders is . . . seemingly pro-racist.

Per The Washington Post:

Eric Blankenstein [who is] responsible for enforcing laws against financial discrimination [at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau] once questioned in blog posts written under a pen name if using the n-word was inherently racist and claimed that the great majority of hate crimes were hoaxes.

In a 2004 post, Blankenstein wrote that a proposal at the University of Virginia to impose harsher academic penalties for acts of intolerance was “racial idiocy.” He questioned how authorities could know the motivation of someone using a racial slur.

“Fine . . . let’s say they called him n-----,” he wrote, spelling out the slur. “. . . would that make them racists, or just a-------?” Blankenstein also wrote that “hate-crime hoaxes are about three times as prevalent as actual hate crimes.”

In a statement to the Post, Blankenstein admitted to writing the entries, but claimed that they have absolutely no relevance to his current work, which, as a reminder, is to supervise lenders and make sure consumer-protection laws like the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, and civil-rights legislation meant to protect African-American people and other minorities from discriminatory practices, are enforced. “The insight to be gained about how I perform my job today—by reading snippets of 14-year-old blog posts that have nothing to do with consumer-protection law—is exactly zero,” Blankenstein, who wrote under the pen name “egb3r,” said in a statement. “Any attempt to do so is a naked exercise in bad faith, and represents another nail in the coffin of civil discourse and the ability to reasonably disagree over questions of law and policy,” he said. “The need to dig up statements I wrote as a 25-year-old shows that in the eyes of my critics I am not guilty of a legal infraction or neglect of my duties, but rather just governing while conservative.”