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| Economy | |
| Jamie Gorelick's new challenge: Backing BP | |
| 2010-06-17 | |
| Looks like the Jamie Gorelick, Mistress of Disaster curse is about to strike again. When BP executives filed into the West Wing on Wednesday morning to meet with President Barack Obama, they were joined by at least one familiar Washington hand: former Clinton administration Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, who signed on earlier this month to represent BP in congressional inquiries linked to the massive oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
And her role is not very different from the one played by another prominent Democrat, former White House counsel Greg Craig, who is now representing Goldman Sachs -- which until the oil spill was Washington's favorite corporate pariah. "Speaking generally, the reliance on high-powered insiders results in corporations escaping penalties that are not as severe as they would otherwise face. The familiarity of the former prosecutor with the system enables them to think creatively about tricks to end up with resolutions that seem much more significant than they actually are," said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen. Still, Gorelick could easily have been on the other side of the table as one of the Obama administration's key players. Her role in the Clinton administration and her later service as a member of the 9/11 Commission made her a logical choice for deputy attorney general. But Gorelick has had her own share of controversies, which are widely believed to be why she is representing high-profile clients rather than working for Obama. After leaving the Justice Department, Gorelick served for six years as vice chairwoman of Fannie Mae and got caught up in the mortgage agency's accounting controversy. In 2005, two years after Gorelick left Fannie Mae, a federal investigation into the public-private mortgage company found that accountants had falsified signatures to erase $9 billion in losses from the books. Eliminating those losses resulted in Gorelick and four other Fannie Mae executives taking away six- and seven-figure bonuses in 1998. The federal investigation found that Gorelick was paid more than $25 million during her time at Fannie, and the huge compensation received by Fannie Mae executives later became a major issue in Congress. | |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #3 Nicely done overlay 3dc. Does the darker layer from London to Norwich represent the subsurface globs? Analysts comments? |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2010-06-17 19:20 |
| #2 Oil spill overlaying the map of the UK |
| Posted by: 3dc 2010-06-17 18:04 |
| #1 The Typhoid Mary of government finds yet another way to bring doom and disaster to real Americans. |
| Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2010-06-17 17:39 |