Consumer Financial Protection Bureau head Mick Mulvaney said Tuesday that he is examining a political appointee's authorship of controversial blog posts on race and hate crimes in 2004.

Eric Blankenstein, a policy director overseeing the bureau’s main office for fair lending advocacy and education, is under scrutiny after the posts came to light. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the Senate Banking Committee’s top Democrat, has already called for Blankenstein’s firing.

In a staff-wide email obtained by the Washington Examiner, Mulvaney, in his capacity as acting director of the CFPB, wrote that he was giving the situation “considerable attention.”

“I hope everyone understands that this is a unique circumstance from a management perspective and that this matter needs to be handled with the utmost professionalism,” wrote Mulvaney.

He also stood by his decision to reorganize the bureau’s Office of Fair Lending under the division Blankenstein oversees, and tied bureau staff complaints about the posts to that decision.

"[T]he merits of the changes at Fair Lending remain the same today as they did when I announced the reorganization several months ago,” Mulvaney wrote staff. “I will not be undoing the changes. I recognize this is not the result that some of you may have wanted.”

Blankenstein himself has already apologized to bureau staff for the posts.

“I recognize that many of you had a visceral, negative reaction to reading what I wrote in some of my old blog posts,” he wrote in an internal email. “I did too.”