Lawyers hired by mortgage finance giant Freddie Mac are quietly investigating the firm’s own $2 million lobbying campaign, The Associated Press has learned. The lobbying effort helped quash proposed new regulations on the company before the housing market collapsed.
It was not immediately clear how much Freddie Mac is spending to investigate its own conduct or whether it is spending any federal bailout money on the internal probe. The firm was placed under U.S. government control due to its massive investment losses.
……The internal investigation is happening even as the Obama administration provides $200 billion more in government assistance to Freddie Mac and its larger sister company, Fannie Mae. The two government-sponsored enterprises are the largest providers of home mortgages in America…..
The inquiry inside Freddie Mac follows stories by the AP about the company secretly hiring Republican consulting firm DCI Group of Washington to stop a proposal in the Senate in 2005 sponsored by Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. The legislation would have forced Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to sell hundreds of billions of dollars worth of assets from their portfolios of mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. At the time, the portfolios were highly lucrative but their value plunged when the housing market collapsed.
The DCI Group did not file lobbying reports describing the work it was performing. At the time, Freddie Mac executives who knew about the initiative referred to it among themselves as “the stealth lobbying campaign,” according to people familiar with the matter. DCI Group spokesman Geoffrey M. Basye says the firm practiced the highest ethical standards and coordinated with Freddie Mac’s lawyers to ensure uncompromising compliance with all applicable federal and state laws and regulations.
What is really boils down to:
……An accounting of the work done for the $2 million in payments to the DCI Group. It targeted 17 Republican senators in 13 states working to defeat Hagel’s regulatory legislation by convincing prominent constituents and financial contributors the bill would hurt the housing boom. The measure was never brought to a vote and died.
http://townhall.com/news/politics-elections/2009/02/23/freddie_mac_investigates_self_over_lobby_campaign
Obviously, the ‘stealth lobbying’ did not work, and the Freddie Mac/Fannie Mae mortgage debacle collapsed anyway.
There needs to be an investigation of Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, and all of the other parties in the Dem regime who had a hand in creating this train wreck to begin with.