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the more persuasive argument? Should the big mortgage corporations pony up billions in penalties and borrower recompense, sacrificing a few employees with the wrong job title at the wrong time to prosecutors along the way, all to atone for cutting corners so that the foreclosure convoy kept pace with the staggering numbers of borrowers who stopped paying their mortgage? Or has the seemingly remarkable degree of vitriol gone too far in this "blame game," specifically in terms of state attorneys general and government officials taking any and every means possible—even if it's unethical or unlawful—to publicly place blame for the housing and financial crises squarely on the shoulders of the mortgage industry, targeting individual professionals as "examples"? When the charges were levied against Trafford and Sheppard, "The grand jury found probable cause that there was a robo-signing scheme which resulted in the filing of tens of thousands of fraudulent documents with the Clark County Recorder's Office between 2005 and 2008," according to Nevada's chief deputy attorney general at the time, John Kelleher. Prentiss Cox, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and a former assistant attorney general for the state of Minnesota, told the Huffington Post it was admirable for Attorney General Masto and her staff to pursue the robo-signing case, but, he was quick to add, "When criminal prosecutions are done for robo-signing, I would hope the target of those prosecutions would be the people who designed the system and profited from it, not just the low-level people doing what they were told." 56 The unnamed source, still seeming somewhat haunted by the ordeal, asserts LPS officials were kept in the dark about Trafford's and Sheppard's alleged actions. "[Management wasn't] even aware that these employees were doing this. It was just kind of an administerial [procedure]. That's not an excuse, it's just the way it was," the source stated. Trafford and Sheppard were suspended for about a year with pay following their indictments and later rejoined the company. Those keeping an eye on how these events played out, speculated at the time that the state of Nevada went after Trafford and Sheppard hoping they'd roll on their superiors higher up the executive chain at LPS. In a blog post on Firedoglake's News Desk website, David Dayen commented, "LPS hasn't been indicted, but you can see where this is going . . . . Indictments of Trafford and Sheppard will almost certainly not end there. Everyone who worked for LPS in Nevada will be culpable." "We just assumed [Masto] wanted to make a statement, to embarrass LPS in a major way," the source said. "Politicians are using these crises for their own political gain, [and] the industry is portrayed as villains." Attorney General Masto is making a play for the Nevada governorship, according to the source. Masto's office didn't respond to a request for comment, but in a report published January 16, 2013, the Las Vegas Sun said while "[i]t's unclear what Democrat will challenge [the incumbent governor] Sandoval in 2013 . . . Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto's campaign adviser said she's considering it." While our unnamed source describes the case in Nevada as "farfetched [and] bizarre," the same scenario strikes a much different cord with Rheingold, who said LPS was driven by "profit and greed and [the belief] that it was above the law; that rules we've had for a century in this country about how homes are transferred, about how documents are reviewed, how our court system requires accuracy and fairness, [didn't apply to them]." He added that companies like LPS feel that "if you're big enough, you don't have to follow the rules of the law until [you] get caught. It was all about moving paper as quickly as possible, regardless of whether their work was compliant with the law. It got in the way of their profits, so they figured they could ignore it." Particularly galling to Rheingold is that the foreclosure crisis, at least to a degree, "could have been mitigated but for the fact that the servicing industry failed miserably in trying to help homeowners," he said. "I think a lot of people lost homes, or were charged more money than they should have been because [LPS and others] didn't have systems in place." Consequently, people were severely damaged, he noted. Our unnamed source holds a similar distaste recalling the severity of the damage the state caused the LPS employees. Even though Trafford and Sheppard were reinstated by the company, their careers were marred and their lives were broken. "They were physically ill and emotionally distraught," is the description the source used. And that's not the worst of the outcomes among those involved in the case. During the course of their investigation, prosecutors for the attorney general's office zeroed in on Tracy Lawrence, a notary and Trafford's assistant. Lawrence was characterized in the media as the "whistleblower" whose testimony could potentially topple some of the country's most prominent mortgage powerhouses and negate thousands upon thousands of foreclosures in Nevada. Lawrence was scheduled to appear in court on November 28, 2011, to be sentenced after agreeing to a plea bargain—guilty of one misdemeanor charge of notarizing the signature of a person not in her presence. Lawrence reportedly admitted to falsely notarizing the signatures on tens of thou-

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