RICK AND FREDDIE….John McCain says his campaign manager, Rick Davis, hasn’t worked for Freddie Mac for several years. However, according to “two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement,” that’s not true. In fact, his lobbying firm been receiving $15,000 from Freddie every month since 2005:
Mr. Davis’s firm received the payments from the company, Freddie Mac, until it was taken over by the government this month along with Fannie Mae, the other big mortgage lender whose deteriorating finances helped precipitate the cascading problems on Wall Street, the people said.
They said they did not recall Mr. Davis’s doing much substantive work for the company in return for the money, other than speak to a political action committee of high-ranking employees in October 2006 on the approaching midterm Congressional elections. They said Mr. Davis’s firm, Davis & Manafort, had been kept on the payroll because of Mr. Davis’s close ties to Mr. McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, who by 2006 was widely expected to run again for the White House….No one at Davis & Manafort other than Mr. Davis was involved in efforts on Freddie Mac’s behalf, the people familiar with the arrangement said.
You know, I’m basically willing to concede that Fannie and Freddie were bipartisan clusterfucks and just call it even as far as the campaigns are concerned. But only if they fess up to their sins and stop regaling us with ridiculous lies about their relationships. Rick Davis either needs to tell us what his firm was doing for its $15,000 a month or else he needs to provide a plausible explanation for why his firm continued to receive that sum for doing nothing. Come on, folks.
