Tech & Biz

Rahm Emanuel sat on Freddie Mac board during scandal

by Tina Kells | November 7, 2008 at 10:08 am

1365 views | 15 Recommendations | 1 comment

Barack Obama has been called a socialist by some, but if his appointee of choice, Rahm Emanuel, is any indication he has some pretty strong ties to corporate America.

Rahm Emanuel sat on the board of directors of Freddie Mac when the mortgage giant was behaving deceptively, something that was conspicuously missing from the New York times biography of the new White House Chief of Staff.

Freddie Mac's questionable practices and unscrupulous financial decisions greatly contributed to the mortgage meltdown in the US and contributed to the current global economic crisis.

The fact that Emanuel played any role, let alone one that is so important, in how Freddie Mac conducted its business makes him a curious choice for such a critical White House position.

Although not specifically named in any complaint against Freddie Mac, the board of directors has been singled out for doing nothing to stop the deceptive practices of Freddie Mac executives when the issue was first brought to their attention.

This is the man who will be White House Chief of Staff under Obama. Hopefully Rahm Emanuel will be more proactive in his role in Washington then he was at Freddie Mac.

President-elect Barack Obama's newly appointed chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, served on the board of directors of the federal mortgage firm Freddie Mac at a time when scandal was brewing at the troubled agency and the board failed to spot "red flags," according to government reports reviewed by ABCNews.com.

According to a complaint later filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Freddie Mac, known formally as the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, misreported profits by billions of dollars in order to deceive investors between the years 2000 and 2002.

Emanuel was not named in the SEC complaint but the entire board was later accused by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) of having "failed in its duty to follow up on matters brought to its attention."

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Sean Moffett (not verified)

at 11:34 on February 14th, 2009

Rahm Emanuel is a member of the nefarious Council on Foreign Relations and speaks the Hegelian Dialectic (" Don't let a crisis go to waste...."). Rahm is a Marxist and he doesn't hide it. Crisis out of Chaos... Crisis leads to opportunity... We are witnessing an economic coup-de-tat and a pre-existing economic solution ("theft") was already planned for the engineered and hyped up economic crisis.