Pat Dollard

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Dodd Decides: No Story In Loan Deals

by Kevin Rennie – (Hartford Courant)

Sen. Christopher Dodd sounded like Dr. Seuss without the depth last week. “It is what it is,” declared Dodd, mistaking Hartford for Whoville, when he told The Courant’s Rick Green that he had no plans to release documents from his $800,000 in sweetheart mortgages from subprime titan Countrywide Financial.

“There is nothing to the story and I’m just not going to keep on repeating it,” pronounced Dodd, as he morphed into Yertle the Turtle. “‘You hush up your mouth!’ howled the mighty King Yertle. ‘You’ve no right to talk to the world’s highest turtle.’”

Dodd will serve the state green eggs and ham before he’ll honor his pledges to release the documents from deals that will save him tens of thousands of dollars over the terms of the loans. Nonsensical answers, however, won’t smother persistent, serious questions about Dodd’s abuse of his office.

Dodd has answered almost no questions about the details of his 2003 mortgages. The senator cast an unflattering light on himself when he couldn’t settle on a credible response in June to the simple question of whether he knew he was getting special mortgage deals as a “Friend of Angelo.” That’s the privileged category of borrowers that Countrywide co-founder Angelo Mozilo made sure received cut-rate loans with hefty traditional fees waived.

Dodd went from it’s outrageous to think he would profit from his office, to he didn’t know he got valuable special deals, to he thought everyone who refinanced with Countrywide got that kind of treatment. Those dizzying contradictions on the easy questions must have left Dodd cowering as he contemplated explaining documents that would show he knew what Countrywide was doing for him — each answer putting the lie to his past protestations.

That Countrywide employed lobbyists to influence Dodd and his colleagues while the lender lavished benefits on the senator may ensnare him in an ominous encounter with the Senate’s ethics committee. It would be harder for that body to whitewash a violation if the insidious mortgage details are known to a suspicious public.

The customs and expectations of Washington continue to bewilder us. Dodd exemplifies its worst rituals. For example, as the nation’s financial system crumbled earlier in the year, Dodd continued to accept tribute from Wall Street’s falling masters.

In the history of this epic, Dodd has guaranteed himself a permanent spot in the pantheon of the privileged oblivious. On June 9, Lehman Brothers, according to news reports, “the nation’s fourth-largest investment bank said wrong-way trading moves and risky mortgage-backed securities plunged it into a nearly $3 billion second-quarter loss.” Two days later, campaign finance reports indicate that Lehman Brothers’ PAC contributed $5,400 to attend a Washington campaign fundraiser for the aptly named “Friends of Chris Dodd.” By September, Lehman Brothers jolted the world by filing for bankruptcy.

For most us of, a company imploding and losing billions of dollars would concentrate our attention and leave no time for politics. The wreckage to hardworking people’s finances, however, are trifles compared to a wounded and angry senator’s drive to raise campaign cash. Even cut-rate mortgages don’t buy a pass when the chairman of the Senate banking committee goes on the hunt for contributions. Amid the turmoil of the spring, insolvent Countrywide’s new owner, Bank of America, sent a $5,000 contribution from its PAC for the June event.

Dodd’s campaign finance reports are available to the public, so he can’t use the shroud of surly distortions he wraps around his dubious mortgage documents to hide his fundraising. The senator, the reports tell us, in the midst of the meltdown, put the squeeze on the businesses that his committee oversees.

He has collected tens of thousands of dollars from companies and industries that have cast themselves or been dragged into the maelstrom. These are Dodd’s marks. His easy prey for early campaign cash in the crisis. They are Countrywide without the stonewalling and secrecy. Contributors may think a $700 billion taxpayer bailout of high finance shows they still know how to get a big return on an investment in Dodd. For the public, however, those finance reports tell a story of bloated entitlement, just like Dodd’s mortgages.