He’ll probably get confirmed. But first, Steve Mnuchin, Donald Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, will have some explaining to do.

Mnuchin is a Goldman Sachs alumnus and lifelong financier who mostly has a strong track record of earning millions of dollars for clients and himself. But he became a lightning rod after assembling a group of investors to buy the insolvent bank IndyMac in 2009. Mnuchin et al. renamed the bank OneWest and successfully turned it around, but in the process foreclosed on thousands of irate homeowners while also drawing criticism for exploiting corporate welfare. Those foreclosures represent ready ammunition for Trump critics eager to paint his Cabinet choices as heartless Wall Streeters.

IndyMac flew high during the housing boom, specializing in “Alt-A” loans issued to borrowers with decent credit but income that was hard to document. The loans were considered safe as long as housing values kept rising, since in a default, IndyMac would inherit real estate worth more than when it had issued the loan. But when housing values started to crater, IndyMac endured a spectacular crash, including an old-fashioned run on deposits. When it filed for bankruptcy on August 1, 2008, IndyMac was one of the biggest bank failures of all time.

With the whole financial system teetering on the edge of collapse, the FDIC, which took over IndyMac, struggled to find a buyer. Mnuchin, who was operating a hedge fund at the time, thought he saw an opportunity. He assembled a group of investors who bought IndyMac for $1.55 billion in early 2009. To facilitate the deal, the FDIC agreed to a “shared loss agreement” under which the agency’s deposit-insurance fund would bear the cost of bad IndyMac loans above a certain threshold, to assure the new buyers they weren’t investing in a bottomless sinkhole.

Like most banks during the housing bust, the newly named lender, OneWest, began to foreclose on borrowers who couldn’t make their mortgage payments as the housing crisis intensified and a brutal recession left millions unemployed. Protesters began to target OneWest in particular for what they said were callous decisions regarding homeowners in distress. On one day in 2011, protestors briefly overwhelmed security guards at OneWest’s Pasadena headquarters and occupied the lobby. On another occasion they showed up outside Mnuchin’s Bel Air mansion, demanding help for one woman who lost her home after her brother’s death left her struggling to pay her mortgage.