Controversy and Corruption Still Swirls Around Clinton Officials: Fannie Mae

The two persons most prominent in the collapse of Fannie Mae, are perennially corrupt and incompetent former Clinton officials Jamie Gorelick (pictured), and Franklin Raines.

At the top of the list we must place Franklin D. Raines, chairman and chief executive officer of Fannie Mae from 1998 to 2004. Raines, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Clinton, had previously worked at Fannie Mae as vice chairman. Before that, he worked on the Clinton transition team following the 1992 election. Before that, he was a general partner at Lazard Freres & Co. Raines, as the Wall Street Journal reported, was forced to leave Fannie Mae in 2004, when regulators discovered it had broken accounting rules "in an effort to conceal fluctuations in profit and hadn't maintained adequate risk controls." The New York Times reported two year ago that regulators "have said that of the $90 million paid to Mr. Raines from 1998 to 2003 at least $52 million—more than half—was tied to bonus targets that were reached by manipulating accounting." Raines agreed to a $24.7 million settlement with a federal regulator in exchange for charges being dropped, but he admitted no wrongdoing.

Next up is Jamie S. Gorelick, whose official résumé describes her as "one of the longest serving Deputy Attorneys General of the United States," a position she held during the Clinton administration. Although Gorelick had no background in finance, she joined Fannie Mae in 1997 as vice chair and departed in 2003. For her trouble, Gorelick collected a staggering $26.4 million in total compensation, including bonuses. Federal investigators (PDF) would later say that "Fannie Mae's management directed employees to manipulate accounting and earnings to trigger maximum bonuses for senior executives from 1998 to 2003." The New York Times would call the manipulations an "$11 billion accounting scandal." Gorelick, it should be noted, has never been charged with any wrongdoing. _Slate

Those are the two top names, the proximate although not ultimate causes of much of the turmoil sweeping Wall Street and Washington. If you read further in the above article, you should note the duplicitous sophistry of the author, in his attempt to involve others in the scandal who had no relationship to the corruption of the Clintons. But that is the media. Dishonest to a fault.

Jamie Gorelick was involved in other scandals--including creating the "wall of silence" between federal intelligence agencies which was still in place when the 9/11 terror attacks occurred in 2001, and was largely responsible for the intelligence breakdowns there. She is currently living a comfortable lifestyle, on extremely ill-gotten gains. No doubt both she and Raines are hoping for a cushy civil service job in the Obama administration.

Corruption was the name of the game under Clinton, and you can see it in action not just in the Enron and Fannie Mae scandals, but across the board in US society. George Stephanopoulos is a good example of mainstream corruption: posing as an objective news analyst, reporter, and anchor, while acting as a blatant political partisan both behind the scenes and on camera.

Unfortunately we will not be able to expect better from the Obama-Rezko-Daley administration. Corruption and Democratic Party politics are one and the same, sadly.