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Article snippet: The director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said on Wednesday that he would leave the federal agency this month, removing a major opponent to the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle business regulations and unfetter Wall Street. As the bureau’s first director, Richard Cordray, a Democrat appointed by President Barack Obama, has been an active watchdog whose role took on outsize significance in an increasingly partisan Washington. To many Republicans, he embodied the kind of overaggressive policing that they contend hamstrings businesses and quashes innovation. To Democrats, he was a champion of the public, fighting predatory companies and abusive practices that rip off ordinary people. Established six years ago as part of the Dodd-Frank Act, the agency has unusually broad power to combat abuses in a wide variety of financial products, including mortgages, credit cards, bank accounts and student loans. Mr. Cordray, 58, pursued that mission with zeal. Under his leadership, the bureau extracted nearly $12 billion in refunds and canceled debts for 29 million consumers. It cracked down on abusive debt collectors, strengthened protections for mortgage borrowers and created a complaints system that helped hundreds of thousands of people resolve disputes with financial companies. Just hours after Mr. Cordray told his staff of his planned departure, the agency sued a debt collector that it said had broken state usury laws by charging illegally high i... Link to the full article to read more