Posted on 12/07/2008 11:36:18 AM PST by engrpat
WASHINGTON – When the Washington Nationals played their first-ever baseball game in the nation's capital in April 2005, two congressmen who oversaw mortgage giant Freddie Mac had choice seats — courtesy of the very company they were supposed to be keeping an eye on.
Efforts to tighten government regulation were gaining support on Capitol Hill, and Freddie Mac was fighting back. The baseball tickets for home opener were means of influence.
According to confidential company documents obtained by The Associated Press, Reps. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, and Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa., spent the evening in hard-to-obtain seats near the Nationals dugout with Freddie Mac executive Hollis McLoughlin and four of Freddie Mac's in-house lobbyists.
Kanjorski declined comment through a spokeswoman. Ney ultimately served a federal prison term after pleading guilty to trading political favors for a golf trip to Scotland, other gifts and campaign donations in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.
The Nationals tickets were bargains for Freddie Mac, part of a well-orchestrated, multimillion-dollar campaign to preserve its largely regulatory-free environment, with particular pressure exerted on Republicans who controlled Congress at the time.
Internal Freddie Mac budget records show $11.7 million was paid to 52 outside lobbyists and consultants in 2006. Power brokers such as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich were recruited with six-figure contracts.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
There are people talking about putting him in as head of the RNC and even running him for president in 2012. But this is just one more example of his awful judgment.
This crap has got to stop! Do these people think we’re stupid? (Rhetorical question.)
The most guilty party, the head of the committee, Barney Frank was sodomizing a top Fannie Mae official for months. For some reason that’s not mentioned in there.
Good old newt you can always trust him to be were the money is!! Hows things going with Exxon Newt. POS!!!
You do actually know what you just posted could get you sued don't you!!!
I was going to ask if anyone has figured out what side he is on but you may have nailed it.
I have always thought that newt’s incompetency, and the for sell to the highest bidder attitude was the driving force behind the republican losing leadership. That and the old fart could not keep his hands off of the hired help.!
Fannie Mae executive Herb Moses and Barney Frank lived together, genius. http://www.newsmax.com/insider_report/Barney_Frank_Fannie_Mae_/2008/10/12/139808.html
bump
I always wondered if and when the mainstream media would expose the “truth” about what happened to keep these two companies from being investigated and properly policed.
Now I have my answer. The truth will never be reported by them, and the story came out when they had it spun to implicate only Republicans. Only one Democrat mentioned by name.
Media bias is like watching a car wreck. You know you shouldn’t, but you can’t turn away. It’s truly sickening to read.
I wonder if the media will survive outside of bankruptcy long enough to poison the rest of America. We can only hope not.
Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa... declined comment through a spokeswoman.
How?Maybe try to do a search next time before you post. It has been common knowledge.
The Mediascum would not make any trouble for Barney Frank unless he were found in bed with a dead boy.... no make that multiple dead boys..... then the Mediascum might care, but I wouldn't bet on it.
There are many media sources on the Barney Frank/Herb Moses relationship, so Frank would have to start suing a lot of media people and look forward to the “discovery” of depositions, documents etc. That won’t happen.
http://www.businessandmedia.org/articles/2008/20080924145932.aspx
Frank was and remains a stalwart defender of Fannie Mae, which is now under FBI investigation along with its sister organization Freddie Mac, American International Group Inc. (NYSE:AIG) and Lehman Brothers (NYSE:LEH) – all recently participants in government bailouts. But Frank has derailed efforts to regulate the institution, as well as denying it posed any financial risk. Frank’s office has been unresponsive to efforts by the Business & Media Institute to comment on these potential conflicts of interest.
While the relationship reportedly ended 10 years ago, Frank was serving on the House Banking Committee the entire 10 years they were together. The committee is the primary House body which along with the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) has jurisdiction over the government-sponsored enterprises.
He has served on the committee since becoming a congressman in 1981 and became the ranking Democrat on the committee in 2003. He became chairman of the committee, now called the House Financial Services Committee, in 2007.
Moses was the assistant director for product initiatives at Fannie Mae and had been at the forefront of relaxing lending restrictions at the company for rural customers, according to the Feb. 23, 1998, issue of National Mortgage News (NMN).
“Herb Moses, who helped develop many of Fannie Mae’s affordable housing and home improvement lending programs, has left the mortgage industry,” Darryl Hicks wrote for NMN. “Mr. Moses - whose last day was Feb. 13 - spent the past seven years at Fannie Mae, most recently as director of housing initiatives. Over the course of time, he played an instrumental role in developing the company’s Title One and 203(k) home improvement lending programs.”
Hicks explained in his story how Moses orchestrated a collaborative effort between Fannie Mae and the Department of Agriculture.
“The Dartmouth grad also played a crucial role in brokering a relationship between Fannie Mae and the Department of Agriculture,” Hicks wrote. “This led to the creation of Fannie Mae’s rural housing program where the secondary marketing agency agreed to purchase small farm loans insured through the department.”
While Moses served at Fannie Mae and was Frank’s partner, Frank was actively working to support GSEs, according to several news outlets.
New York Times Omits Freddie Mac from Emanuel’s Resume
Front page business profile doesn’t mention two-year stint with troubled government sponsored enterprise.
By Matt Philbin
Business & Media Institute
12/4/2008 2:33:08 PM
Is it immature to say, “We told you so?”
The Business & Media Institute on Nov. 6 noted the media’s tendency to grant incoming White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel a free pass on his history with the taxpayer-rescued government sponsored enterprise (GSE) Freddie Mac. The New York Times continued the trend in a front page business profile of Emanuel Dec. 4.
Emanuel served on the GSE’s board of directors between 2000 and 2001 – a period during which the organization was mired in political contribution and accounting scandals. But you wouldn’t know that from reading the Times’ profile.
The article, “In Banking, Top Obama Aide Made Money and Connections,” examined Emanuel’s banking career after leaving the Clinton White House in late 1998. Author Michael Luo wrote, “The period before he was elected to a House seat from Illinois is a little-known episode of Mr. Emanuel’s biography.” And an important part of it seems destined to stay little-known.
Heavily sourced and researched, the nearly 1,700-word Times piece mentioned 12 separate companies and 16 individuals that figured in Emanuel’s career over the three years in question. But Luo didn’t find space for a single mention of Emanuel’s involvement with Freddie Mac during the same time period.
Emanuel “went on to make more than $18 million in just two-and-a-half years, turning many of his contacts in his substantial political Rolodex into paying clients and directing his negotiating prowess and trademark intensity to mergers and acquisitions,” Luo wrote. Presumably, that “prowess and trademark intensity” is what earned him more than $260,000 in “director’s fees” from Freddie Mac in 2000 – 2001, as the Chicago Sun-Times reported on Jan. 3, 2002.
Some other numbers are missing from the Times article. Luo discussed at length Emanuel’s “strong ties with an industry now at the heart of the economic crisis,” his ongoing relationships with financial executives, and the more than $1.5 million they’ve contributed to his congressional campaigns, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP). But the Times didn’t mention another number available from the CRP: the $51,750 Freddie Mac and sister organization Fannie Mae have given Emanuel.
Commendably, Luo looked into the possibility that all those contacts and all that cash from the financial service sector might have clouded Emanuel’s judgment while voting on issues of consequence to the industry, though he found “no evidence” of that.
But while entertaining questions of money, ethics and conflicts of interest, Luo should have noted that Freddie Mac paid a $3.8 million fine for illegal political contributions made during the years Emanuel served on its board. And that when Emanuel arrived in Congress, he served on the subcommittee charged with oversight of his former employer, Freddie Mac
The true story is memorialized in a Christmas YouTube sing-along
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbZnLxdCWkA
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