One part of Frank Rich's latest sand-blasting of Obama's Wall Street problem caught my eye as potentially explosive. It involves the attempt by the Iowa Attorney General to create a national settlement with Bank of America in the multi-pronged mortgage scandal.
Rich says near the middle of his piece (my emphasis throughout):
Even now, on the heels of Bank of America’s reluctant $8.5 billion settlement with investors who held its mortgage-backed securities, the Obama administration may be handing it and its peers new get-out-of-jail-free cards. With the Department of Justice’s blessing, the Iowa attorney general, Tom Miller, is pushing the 49 other states to sign on to a national financial settlement ending their investigations of the biggest mortgage lenders. What some call a settlement others may find a cover-up. Time reported in April that the lawyer negotiating with Miller for Moynihan’s Bank of America just happened to be a contributor to his 2010 Iowa reelection campaign. If the deal is struck, any truly aggressive state attorneys general, like Eric Schneiderman of New York, will be shut down before they can dig into the full and still mostly uninvestigated daisy chain of get-rich-quick rackets practiced by banks as they repackaged junk mortgages into junk securities.Here's a little of the Time article linked above:
Bank of America Lawyer, Consultant Gave Foreclosure Probe Chief $15,000There's more in that piece.
Iowa’s Democratic Attorney General Tom Miller is known for taking on big business. ... Most recently, Miller took the lead on the investigation by all 50 state attorneys general into the “robo-signing” foreclosure scandal, where several big banks allegedly approved taking away people’s homes without adequately verifying the facts in court, as required by law in some states.
Last fall, just after he made the announcement that he would look into the foreclosure mess, contributions to Miller’s campaign coffers for November’s election soared, thanks in large part to out-of-state lawyers who make a living representing big banks, a new report from the National Institute for Money in State Politics finds. “Nearly half of the money Miller raised in 2010,” NIMSP reports, “was donated after the October 13 announcement that he would be coordinating the 50-state attorneys general investigation.”
Two thoughts: Miller looks like a guy with eyes on a bigger prize. And if chunks like the $15,000 mentioned in the headline are the bait, fish like Miller are way too easily caught. Me, I'd start the bidding closer to twenty.
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