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A watchdog group filed complaints with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and the Senate Ethics Committee Wednesday against Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) over a discounted mortgage he received from Northern Trust. Judicial Watch, a conservative legal watchdog group, filed the report after The Washington Post reported that Obama received a discount on a mortgage for a Chicago home valued at $1.65 million. The complaints said the Illinois senator received a loan at the interest rate of 5.625 percent, which Judicial Watch says is lower than the standard rate of between 5.93 and 6 percent indicated by surveys....

WASHINGTON: Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama received a discounted home loan in 2005, along similar lines to that received by a former adviser to his campaign who was forced to resign after it became public, The Washington Post revealed yesterday. Former Fannie Mae chief executive James Johnson resigned abruptly as head of Senator Obama's vice-presidential search committee last month after The Wall Street Journal reported he had received favourable terms for a jumbo home loan with help from the CEO of Countrywide Financial - a major actor in the sub-prime mortgage mess. Senator Obama had previously spoken out against Countrywide's...

As reported by WaPo the Obama campaign claimed that the discounted rate on his $1.3 million mortgage was due to a competitive offer made by another lending institution. A campaign spokesman went further by claiming that Obama had no prior ties to the Chicago based Northern Trust. Apparently the Obama campaign has once again forgotten those “pesky”...

Shortly after joining the U.S. Senate and while enjoying a surge in income, Barack Obama bought a $1.65 million restored Georgian mansion in an upscale Chicago neighborhood. To finance the purchase, he secured a $1.32 million loan from Northern Trust in Illinois. This Story The freshman Democratic senator received a discount. He locked in an interest rate of 5.625 percent on the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, below the average for such loans at the time in Chicago. The loan was unusually large, known in banker lingo as a "super super jumbo." Obama paid no origination fee or discount points, as some...

Sweetheart mortgage loans to Senators are much in the news of late, with calls for increased scrutiny of the solons' dealings with their mortgage lenders. In this spirit, I took a look at some of the publicly available information on Senator and Mrs. Obama's mortgage, obtained in 2005 when they purchased their mansion in Chicago's upscale Hyde Park district. The Obamas purchased their home with the help of his friend Tony Rezko, recently convicted of a felony. His wife Rita purchased the adjoining lot, the former side yard of the mansion, to seal the deal. According to the mortgage documents...

Here's the bottom line on Barack Obama's sweet mortgage deal: He got a lower rate because he was rich, not because he's a senator. The Washington Post reported today that Obama got a lower-than-market rate on his $1.3 million home loan from Northern Trust in Chicago in 2005. This contradicts what Obama's office told Politico last week for a survey of all 100 senators' mortgages. Answering the Politico inquiry of whether the senator received any special terms, Obama's campaign answered "no." Obama received a 5.625 percent interest rate on his loan, which was below Northern Trust's going rate at the...

Obama received $71,000 in campaign cash in 2004 from a lender in Illinois, who then in February 2005 gave him a below-market mortgage rate personally saving him nearly $4,000.00 per year. Perhaps just a whiff of corruption from the Chicago Kid?