Obama is using Fannie Mae’s former chief lobbyist to prep for the debate.
…as Barack Obama hunkers down in Tampa, Fla., for debate prep this week, he is being coached by—wait for it—a Fannie Mae executive who headed the company’s legal shop and worked closely with its stable of lobbyists.
Tom Donilon, a Washington lawyer, held several senior positions in the Clinton State Department, and the Obama campaign points to that expertise in bringing him on board as an unpaid adviser to help prep Obama for Friday’s foreign policy debate with McCain.
Donilon, who contributed $4,600 to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in March 2007 (and gave the maximum $2,300 to Obama for the general election in July), has a long resume in Democratic politics. He headed the Clinton-Gore transition effort and Clinton’s 1992 debate prep. He also served as an aide to Sen. Joe Biden in his failed 1988 presidential bid.
More recently, he served as Fannie Mae’s executive vice president for law and policy from 1999 until 2005, giving him control of Fannie Mae’s legal, regulatory and public policy activities and government and industry relations.
Donilon was one of several executives to leave at a time when the company faced pressure to improve its accounting practices, and he was mentioned numerous times in a scathing report two years ago on Fannie’s accounting misdeeds, when the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight accused the company of manipulating results to maximize bonuses. The report didn’t criticize Donilon but said that lobbyists under his direction had pushed for a government investigation of Ofheo in 2004 in order to undermine the regulator’s credibility in challenging Fannie’s accounting.
Tom Donilon is another ultimate Washington insider. And he presided over Fannie’s lobbying and legal shops at the time they were doing their worst. After OFHEOs report was released they tried to get the director of OFHEO investigated and then fired.
Donilon is also a key architect of the DNC rules that Obama played so well to steal the nomination from Hillary Clinton.
So, if Obama hangs at Ole Miss, he will look SO BAD, while McCain is trying to save the economy. rockmom on September 25, 2008
He will have his infomercial. Will he also get to pick his audience?
