McCain aide Davis’ Firm on Freddie Mac payroll through last month
Despite McCain’s assurances Davis’s connections had been severed 3 years ago.
One of the giant mortgage companies at the heart of the credit crisis paid $15,000 a month from the end of 2005 through last month to a firm owned by Senator John McCain’s campaign manager, according to two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement.
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Mr. Davis’s firm received the payments from the company, Freddie Mac, until it was taken over by the government this month along with Fannie Mae, the other big mortgage lender whose deteriorating finances helped precipitate the cascading problems on Wall Street, the two people said.
Naturally, John McStraighttalk was on top of this situation, just as he was clued in to the economy last week when he declared it “fundamentally sound.”:
From 2000 to the end of 2005, Mr. Davis received nearly $2 million as president of the coalition, the Homeownership Alliance, which the companies created to help them oppose new regulations and protect their status as federally chartered companies with implicit government backing. That status let them borrow cheaply, helping to fuel rapid growth but also their increased purchases of the risky mortgage securities that proved to be their downfall. . . . On Sunday, in an interview with CNBC and The Times, Mr. McCain responded to a question about that tie between Mr. Davis and the two mortgage companies by saying that he “has had nothing to do with it since, and I’ll be glad to have his record examined by anybody who wants to look at it.”
Nothing other than the firm Davis owns receiving $15,000 a month until the mortgage giant went under, when no one else working there apparently had any contact with it.
McCain camp’s response: snivel and whine about the press, without addressing the facts. Vintage Bush administration, 2005. Right Blogostan’s response: continue to act as the GOP’s witless echo chamber.
