Dodd's Campaign Money Shift Raises Questions
Law Firm Has Ethics Panel ConnectionsKevin Rennie
NOW YOU KNOW
October 26, 2008
Sen. Christopher Dodd's bewildering odyssey of entitlement, evasions and deceptions continued last week. He shed more credibility as he staggered through new excuses for concealing from the public documents related to his cut-rate mortgages of nearly $800,000 from subprime giant Countrywide Financial.
On Wednesday, Dodd announced he wants to wait until the Senate Ethics Committee completes its investigation of his mortgage deals. There's no Senate rule requiring Dodd to remain silent during the investigation. There's no legitimate reason for Dodd to withhold from the public the array of documents, e-mails and letters from the mortgage swag bag Countrywide gave him.
A Senate investigation isn't like a Countrywide mortgage: It's expensive to prove there's nothing there.
Dodd has caught a lucky break, as senators often do. The Federal Elections Commission allows Dodd to use campaign funds from the Friends of Chris Dodd re-election committee to pay his legal and other expenses incurred in the ethics investigation.
The law doesn't allow Dodd to use his presidential campaign cash surplus to pay for his ethics investigation defense, but in September he moved $440,110 from the presidential committee to the Senate committee.
Dodd's presidential campaign used the law firm Perkins Coie to persuade the FEC to let Dodd transfer his presidential campaign surplus into his Senate campaign committee. That September transfer came in handy because Dodd's Senate campaign committee paid Perkins Coie nearly $60,000 in August and September. The presidential campaign's biggest outstanding bill is the $135,631.03 it owes Perkins Coie.
The law firm to which Dodd's Senate campaign committee is paying thousands has, in the past, handled big Senate ethics and FEC cases for Democrats. But, reverting again to silence, Dodd refuses to say whether or not his campaign committee's recent payments to that law firm relate to his ethics case or some unrelated electoral issue.
Perkins Coie represented the thug Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., in the Senate ethics investigation into his notion of senatorial privilege that did not include paying for valuable items. Torricelli eventually abandoned his 2002 re-election campaign. Perkins Coie represented Senate Ethics Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., in a complaint before the FEC. It's another stroke of fortune for Dodd that his law firm has worked for the head of the committee investigating him.
Dodd's presidential campaign, however, is $5,000 lighter than it had hoped. On Sept. 21, it returned a $5,000 contribution to his generous friends at Countrywide's political action committee. Now we know the date that the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee recognized a crisis in finance had arrived. Dodd made the ultimate political sacrifice: He returned a hefty campaign contribution to a generous benefactor.
We'll spend billions to repair the wreckage caused just by Countrywide's rapacious lending practices, but the mortgage menace's political committee has an extra $5,000 to spread around thanks to Dodd. Both Dodd's presidential and Senate campaign committees have been funded to a large extent by the financial industry his committee oversees. So they may also be funding his defense in the ethics investigation of his sweetheart deals with the biggest player in the business, the one that detonated an economic catastrophe that continues spread around the world.
In their distress, the humbled financial wizards of Wall Street should spare a moment to revel in their smartest investment paying off in their darkest hours. They contributed the money that Dodd may be using to pay for his defense, and he supported putting taxpayers on the hook for $700 billion for them.
Dodd proclaimed on the night the Senate passed the $700 billion bailout that it was what our Founders and forefathers would have wanted him and his colleagues to do. Because $700 billion in bailouts wasn't enough, Dodd had to denigrate our heritage, too. The handouts to the banks are expensive, but the insult came at Dodd's favorite price: free.
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