Where are the Investigations? / Jamie Gorelick Strikes Again

The private sector can be demonized and investigated. Enron and Worldcomm, we can investigate. Jeff Skilling, Bernie Ebbers, Ken Lay were sentenced to prison (and rightly so).

BUT FannieMae / FreddieMac, which is run by the U.S. government, and have donated heavily to Democrat politicians, well…

National Post (CA): David Frum on the demise of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by Marni Soupcoff and David Frum

The two institutions have long been run not by bankers but by retired political figures, predominantly Democrats. From 1991 to 1998, Fannie Mae was headed by James Johnson, a longtime aide to former Democratic vice president Walter Mondale. Johnson’s successor, Franklin Raines, had served as budget director to Bill Clinton. Jamie Gorelick, vice chair of Fannie Mae from 1998 to 2003, served as deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration.

Remember Jamie Gorelick? The last time we heard of Gorelick, she was unwittingly facilitating the tragedy of 9/11 with her involvement in separating the FBI and CIA in their roles in investigating terrorism.

In 1995, Jamie Gorelick wrote a memo in which the Justice Department reinforced and heightened “the wall” inhibiting communication between the criminal investigation and intelligence officers investigating terrorists. The idea of “the wall” originally followed the enactment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. The deputy attorney general’s memo raised the wall higher than the law required. The wall impeded our law enforcement and intelligence agents from sharing vital information that might have led them to the hijackers before the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Knowing this, one might wonder how Jamie Gorelick could fairly serve on the [9/11] Commission. The answer was simple: her memo was classified. Few people knew that Jamie Gorelick had actually caused information not to be shared between intelligence and law enforcement agents.

– John Ashcroft, former Attorney General, Never Again, p. 236-237.

So Gorelick facilitated the attack of the World Trade Centers, the Pentagon and possibly the White House (or the Capital) and the murder 3,000 innocent Americans.

John Ashcroft testified at the sham 9/11 Commission in April 2004, at one point making reference to Gorelick’s presence on the Commission:

When the CIA finally told the FBI that al-Midhar and al-Hazmi were in the country in late August, agents in New York searched for the suspects. But because of the wall, FBI Headquarters refused to allow criminal investigators who knew the most about the most recent al Qaeda attack to join the hunt for the suspected terrorists.

At that time, a frustrated FBI investigator wrote Headquarters, quote, “Whatever has happened to this — someday someone will die — and wall or not — the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain ‘problems’. Let’s hope the National Security Law Unit will stand behind their decision then, especially since the biggest threat to us, UBL, is getting the most protection.”

FBI Headquarters responded, quote: “We are all frustrated with this issue . . . These are the rules. NSLU does not make them up.”

But somebody did make these rules. Someone built this wall.

The basic architecture for the wall in the 1995 Guidelines was contained in a classified memorandum entitled “Instructions on Separation of Certain Foreign Counterintelligence and Criminal Investigations.” The memorandum ordered FBI Director Louis Freeh and others, quote: “We believe that it is prudent to establish a set of instructions that will more clearly separate the counterintelligence investigation from the more limited, but continued, criminal investigations. These procedures, which go beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that FISA is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation.”

This memorandum established a wall separating the criminal and intelligence investigations following the 1993 World Trade Center attack, the largest international terrorism attack on American soil prior to September 11. Although you understand the debilitating impact of the wall, I cannot imagine that the Commission knew about this memorandum, so I have declassified it for you and the public to review. Full disclosure compels me to inform you that its author is a member of this Commission.

Was Gorelick thrown out of town? No! Was she investigated? No! Gorelick was promoted to a position in which she had zero experience.

“[Gorelick] had no previous training nor experience in finance, Gorelick was appointed Vice Chairman of FNMA [Fannie Mae] from 1997 to 2003. She served alongside former Clinton Administration official Franklin Raines, and earned over 26 million during her six years there.”

Later, Gorelick was promoted to the 9/11 Commission, the very Stalinist show trial put together to investigate the events of 9/11. “Conflict of interest” anyone?

If Jamie Gorelick were a Republican, you can be sure our colleagues in the Fourth Estate would be leading the chorus of complaint that the Commission’s objectivity has been fatally compromised by a member who was also one of the key personalities behind the failed antiterror policy that the Commission has under scrutiny.

And to complete this disaster, Gorelick was on the wrong side of things again this year when she was hired in the Duke Lacrosse rape case. Did Gorelick defend the young men who were falsely accused of rape by a wackjob stripper? Oh nooo. She defended Duke University!

Frum and Soupcoff continue:

These figures have paid themselves impressive private-sector salaries. Johnson earned US$21-million in just his last year at Fannie Mae. Raines earned US$90-million for five years’ work at Fannie Mae. Gorelick got US$26-million.

Yet the companies never had to meet the discipline of the private marketplace. They paid no taxes, and they had access to a line of credit at the Treasury department. More ominously for today’s crisis: They were not required to provide anything like the level of information about their internal operations expected of a privately owned company.

This non-transparency allowed Fannie Mae to engage in serious accounting fraud, overstating its earnings by more than US$6-billion over the Raines years — overstatements that incidentally justified the company’s lavish compensation packages.

[Emphasis added]
Jim Johnson, by the way, was a close advisor to Barack Obama:

Jim Johnson, a senior advisor for the Barack Obama campaign, has resigned from Obama’s Veep vetting team and can now join the not-so-distinguished Obama Campaign Bus Tire Track Club.

Seems Mr. Johnson was caught up in some very dirty politics regarding the recent loan mortgage crisis.

Johnson also “had been advising presidential candidate Barack Obama on the selection of a running mate. . .”

The American Spectator notes that Franklin Raines is still an advisor to Barack Obama.

Meanwhile, this media focuses on who Palin fired while an Alaska governor.

Will the media insist on the investigation of Johnson, Raines, and Gorelick? Will Congress, controlled by Democrats, lift a finger about the fall of these government run companies? Or does the law only apply to the private sector, to Enron and Worldcomm, Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and Bernie Ebbers?

Jamie Gorelick’s ties to Fannie Mae and What She’s Doing Now by Jim Lindgren

Filed under: The Government Engineered Mortgage Crisis , 1995 memo, 9/11 commission, Bill Clinton, CIA, Duke University, Fannie Mae, FBI, FNMA, Franklin Raines, Freddie Mac, James Johnson, Jamie Gorelick, lacrosse, wall, World Trade Center attacks