He’s been a state lawmaker, state treasurer and Ohio attorney general. And his most recent job, director of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, allows him to boast that he returned $12 billion to 30 million consumers who were done wrong by financial institutions.
But through the course of such a long career, Cordray also has done things that raised objections from his critics and he’s taken positions that his opponents say are out of step with the 2018 Democratic electorate.
For example, when he was treasurer in 2008, Cordray hired Amer Ahmad, who later turned out to be a crook. Ahmad is in a low-security federal prison in California after he pleaded guilty in 2013 to fraud and other financial crimes while working as deputy treasurer to Kevin Boyce, Cordray’s successor. Ahmad fled to Pakistan, but was extradited back to the United States.
Cordray offered no apologizes for hiring Ahmad, a native of Canton.
“We vetted him highly and there were no problems while I was treasurer,” Cordray said in an interview last week. “Later it turned out that he went down the wrong path and became a criminal. He was prosecuted and he’s in prison where he deserves to be and that’s the end of that story, I think.”
Cordray added that he has subsequently hired hundreds — if not thousands — of employees.
“You hope that everybody turns out as you expect them to be,” he said. “Not everybody does. If somebody does something wrong, they deserve to be prosecuted and they deserve to be in prison if it turns out that they did do something wrong."
Perhaps Cordray’s biggest vulnerability has to do with guns.
