Kamala Harris played hardball with banks. It meant billions for homeowners.

Kamala Harris had been California’s attorney general for about eight weeks when she gathered with her peers in front of a coffee station at the Fairmont Hotel in Washington, D.C. Attorneys general from across the country were closing in on a multibillion dollar mortgage settlement with major banks, whose risky lending practices leading up to the Great Recession spurred an unprecedented crisis that by early 2011 was still costing Americans their homes.

But Harris couldn’t believe her fellow attorneys general were ready to make a deal. The banks’ offer seemed paltry considering the damage people suffered, especially in California, which had one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country. It also would give banks some immunity from future lawsuits.

Some of the negotiators were concerned Harris might bail and risk killing the settlement. She skipped an afternoon session and headed to the Justice Department to drill down on what investigators were finding and push the Obama administration to do more.

“I don’t know that anyone can answer our questions,” two of Harris’s top aides recalled her saying after those meetings in March 2011. “We’re going to have to answer our own questions.”

Unsatisfied with what she was hearing - from the administration, other attorneys general and the banking sector - Harris walked away from those initial multistate talks six months later. There were no guarantees that move would pay off. But by early 2012, she struck a historic $18 billion agreement for California, far more than what had been on the table. Harris now describes the saga on the campaign trail as a key example of how she has delivered for middle-class families.

The deal was far from perfect: Thousands of Californians still lost their homes, in some cases opting for sales in which they lost home equity but avoided foreclosure. Advocacy groups were frustrated by the lack of data showing whether relief went to poorer communities and people of color. The settlement didn’t satisfy widespread ire at the banking system, and in the years that followed, enforcement wasn’t always smooth. Harris also wasn’t the only attorney general struggling with how much to push for, and when to decide enough was enough.

When she ran for the U.S. Senate in 2016, Harris’s Democratic opponent Loretta Sanchez accused her of exaggerating her influence in the settlement talks and faulted Harris at a news conference for not bringing “one single prosecution against any major bank executive.”

The Trump campaign also has suggested that Harris has overstated the amount of relief the deal yielded for California homeowners. In a statement, Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Harris “lied about her work on the mortgage settlement.”

“She failed Californians and has failed Americans, as evidenced by unaffordable inflation, a porous border and weakness on the world stage,” Leavitt said.

But in interviews, two dozen former aides, attorneys general, banking experts and Obama administration officials underscored that Harris’s role as a tough negotiator set her apart. Her allies look back on the episode as an example of her ability to make gutsy decisions - withstanding pressure from colleagues trying to get her to fall in line and going toe to toe with banking executives who said her demands were unfair. Supporters say she was fueled by the desire to bring what she saw as “justice” to Californians on the brink of losing their homes, including many who found her at public events to beg for help.

“She got more involved in wanting to understand the remedies, and what those looked like, than any of the other AGs,” said Shaun Donovan, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Obama and one of his administration’s chief negotiators. “She pushed us hard.”

Harris was emboldened to walk away from the initial deal, said her former political adviser Brian Brokaw, because she felt the facts were on her side - putting her in a position of strength.

“It was a gamble,” Brokaw said. “She doesn’t take unnecessary risks or uncalculated risks - and she is big on cost-benefit analysis and a risk assessment. For her, this was a very calculated legal and political risk.”

Building her case

Back in California after that initial March 2011 meeting with the attorneys general, Harris began assembling a mortgage fraud strike force that launched in April. She divided it into three teams to look at different dimensions of the crisis.

One would investigate the players who were drawing up mortgages their clients couldn’t afford. A second took a deeper look at loan servicers and other businesses preying on borrowers in distress, knowing that the federal government wouldn’t prosecute such cases because they weren’t big enough. Finally, another team looked into securitization: how mortgages were being sold to investors - taking loans, wrapping them together and selling them as securities.

The strike force grew to 100 people. Harris brought on data scientists to tally specific breakdowns of how many homeowners had entered “the funnel” - the point when they were more than 90 days delinquent; how many received notices that they were facing foreclosure; and how many foreclosures had been completed. She would press her staff for updates on those figures weekly, sometimes daily.

There were intense time pressures - both for people facing foreclosure and for top Obama administration officials, who wanted a deal cinched as they barreled toward his reelection campaign. Other attorneys general and the banks were also trying to wrap up talks. But Harris wanted time to gather enough data to bolster her position.

At some of her public appearances, she was swarmed by desperate Californians who showed up with weathered Post-it notes, bags of loan papers and brown accordion files asking for help. Her office began holding meetings in the most affected communities to gather information on the tactics banks were using with individual homeowners. She spent time in devastated areas like Stockton and Fresno to try to assess how much relief would reach those communities.

“Community organizations and advocates on the ground were critical to pushing her, and asking her to hold out” for a more generous settlement, said Paulina Gonzalez-Brito, now chief executive of the economic justice group Rise Economy. “And she listened.”

Brian Nelson, then Harris’s chief counsel, said his office received hundreds of letters and documents from homeowners struggling to negotiate with their banks. Nelson, who served as the Treasury Department’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence until joining the campaign in July, said Harris directed staff to make the intake process more efficient so the team could respond faster. While the AG’s office wasn’t permitted to take on individual cases, it ramped up a constituent service team to connect Californians with certified counselors and community groups who could help.

Donovan was used to getting Saturday morning calls from Harris, along with questions from her team dissecting wonky details about how relief from a settlement might be disbursed. She quizzed colleagues like Eric Schneiderman, then the New York attorney general, on how many people were underwater in his state. When Schneiderman said he didn’t know the answer on one phone call, an aide recounted, Harris told him to call her back when he knew, then hung up.

In an interview, Schneiderman said he didn’t remember that specific call. But he said the gist sounded familiar.

“I have no doubt she asked that,” Schneiderman said. “Her point was, my people were hurting, I’ve got all of these people hurting. I need relief now.” (Schneiderman later resigned over multiple physical abuse claims).

Harris wasn’t the only one pressing for a more aggressive deal while trying to get results fast. Schneiderman had been raising objections for months and withdrew from the talks before Harris. Meanwhile, Harris drew support from a small group of ideologically aligned colleagues including Beau Biden of Delaware, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Lisa Madigan of Illinois and Martha Coakley of Massachusetts. Cortez Masto, now a U.S. senator, said the group used to joke with Beau Biden (who died in 2015) that he was part of their “sisterhood,” a term she said Harris coined. There was a sense that pushing for more for California could help other states get a more substantial payout, too.

“She could have walked away completely and done her own thing,” Cortez Masto said. “She had the resources in her office to prosecute those banks on her own. Nevada - I’m so small. Delaware - so small … She could have done it on her own.”

As Harris tried to build her case, former colleagues said, she felt the big banks weren’t taking her seriously - hardening her stance. Meetings with staff and top negotiators were tense, according to those on both sides of the negotiations. Someone in the meeting suggested that settling for the smaller deal would help Harris politically.

“This is a law enforcement action,” she snapped back, according to an aide who was in the room and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Riding in a cab afterward, an aide told Harris she should consider taking the deal. Litigation would take years and might not succeed; at least a settlement would bring in something.

Harris pushed back, asking how many people were going to lose their homes. “There’s so many people hanging on by their fingernails right now. What are they supposed to do?,” Harris asked the aide. They both realized that many families were going to lose their homes no matter what kind of deal they struck, so they ought to push for as much as possible.

In September, she pulled out of the deal.

In a letter to two of the chief negotiators - Thomas Perrelli at the Justice Department and Tom Miller, the Iowa attorney general - Harris wrote that over 11 months of settlement talks, another 560,000 California homes had fallen into foreclosure. Eight of the nation’s 10 hardest-hit cities were in her state. More than 2 million homeowners were underwater on their mortgages.

“This is not the deal California homeowners have been waiting for,” she wrote.

Friends immediately called, concerned that she had gone too far and was creating political adversaries who could doom her future career. Other attorneys general warned that without a settlement, homeowners might get nothing. California Gov. Jerry Brown told Harris, according to two people with knowledge of the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private talk: “I hope you know what you are doing.”

‘I gave it right back’

The financial system had imploded well before Harris was elected attorney general. Some banks failed; others were bailed out by the government or forced into mergers. Public anger zeroed in on the banks and their executives, especially since people were still losing their homes and jobs after the worst of the Great Recession.

Harris set up a war room in her office. Blurry-eyed data analysts pored over their computers for weeks building a county-by-county breakdown of how many homes were at risk of foreclosure and how many were potentially eligible for relief. During the 2012 NFC championship game between the San Francisco 49ers and New York Giants, Harris - a huge football fan - catered Mexican takeout from her favorite spot. She conferred with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder about the negotiations during halftime so as not to miss a minute of the game.

Of the many heated meetings, Harris’s memoir recounts one particularly testy call with Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, who still runs the bank.

Everyone close to the negotiations knew any deal would need Dimon on board; losing him would be devastating. But Harris was direct, writing that she was tired of feeling caged- in by attorneys and other middlemen. She asked her assistant to get Dimon on the phone, and within a minute, she heard him yelling on the other end that she was trying to steal from his shareholders. (JPMorgan Chase declined to comment.)

“I gave it right back,” Harris wrote. “Your shareholders? Your shareholders? My shareholders are the homeowners of California.”

That was a turning point after so much confrontation. The two talked details; one aide said Harris raised concerns about lenders creating mortgages people couldn’t afford, and pointed out that those loans were also being sold to investors.

Within weeks, a final deal for California was on the table: three of the largest mortgage companies - Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo - were obligated to pay up to $18 billion in mortgage assistance. The deal also had a narrower focus than the broader settlement: Only help that cut what homeowners owed on their loans could be counted by the three banks. The banks were also incentivized to get money out in the hardest-hit counties, and within the first year.

Now it was a matter of finishing the job. Donovan, the HUD secretary, recalled riding with Obama in the presidential limousine when he asked the president to call Harris for a final commitment that would seal the deal. In the heat of Obama’s reelection campaign, administration officials were frustrated by how long the talks with the banks had dragged on. Obama had been tracking the negotiations closely and had a close friendship with Harris, but her push to get more money for California had often clashed with the administration’s tactics and desire to close an agreement.

There was also lingering tension since Harris had secured her own monitor, separate from the national watchdog, which no other state had. Plus, she locked in promises to spend a specific portion of the settlement in California. The concern was that dozens of other attorneys general might demand the same, jeopardizing the process all over again.

“If every state AG asked for the same thing, the settlement couldn’t work,” said Donovan, now chief executive and president of the national housing nonprofit Enterprise Community Partners. “It would have been enormously complex, and ultimately unworkable.”

But Harris insisted on an independent monitor for California to track aid as it went out - an idea the banks adamantly opposed.

She called Elizabeth Warren, who was building the nascent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Warren floated names by Katie Porter, then a law professor at University of California at Irvine, now a Democratic member of Congress. Porter immediately realized she might want to take on the work herself, she told The Post.

Harris and Porter first spoke before the final settlement to discuss the contours of the role - and Harris made it clear that she wanted a “watchdog” who would ensure the banks fulfilled their commitments.

The banks had rejected the idea of an independent monitor for California, Porter said. But after striking the deal, Harris put out an announcement naming Porter to the job without giving them a heads-up, Porter recalled.

Working with the banks to ensure compliance, Porter made some unusual demands. When Bank of America told her that people were not responding to letters telling them they were eligible for relief, Porter insisted they rewrite the letters in a more understandable way on higher-quality paper, and make them double-sided in English and Spanish. She also asked the banks to put the seal of the independent monitor’s office on the envelope so people would realize its contents might help them and actually open it.

“The settlement wasn’t perfect,” Porter said. “But [Harris] made it so much better, both in how she negotiated it and that she saw the project all the way through.”

In the end, the banks delivered more than they promised, according to one of Porter’s reports from September 2013. Total relief ended up about $20 billion. Roughly half that amount went to first- and second-mortgage principal reduction for some 84,100 families. The other half went to short sales, where banks took losses on houses worth less than their mortgages. That meant plenty of people lost their houses, but it was still their best financial option.

More than a decade later, Harris still uses the settlement to introduce herself to many voters unfamiliar with her record. During her speech at the Democratic National Convention in late August, Harris cited her work for homeowners as an example of how she spent her career as a prosecutor fighting for the American people.

“As attorney general of California, I took on the big banks, delivered $20 billion for middle-class families who faced foreclosure and helped pass a homeowner bill of rights, one of the first of its kind in the nation,” she said.