D.C. Is a Swamp, ‘Washington Post’ Story Confirms

Jamie Gorelick is a Democratic super-lawyer and former Clinton Justice Department official who made millions of dollars underwriting subprime mortgages at Fannie Mae before leaving the taxpayer-backed mortgage securities firm in 2003. Now she is a partner at WilmerHale, where lawyers charge up to $1,250 an hour and her corner office provides, according to the Washington Post, a "breathtaking" view of the capital. A graduate of Harvard (magna cum laude) and Harvard Law School (cum laude), the 67-year-old Gorelick is a credentialed member of the Washington establishment, of the cognitive elite, even, some might say, of the Deep State.

Or at least she was until recently. Gorelick, the Post reports, has made a very bad boo-boo. Among the clients paying her exorbitant fees, you see, are Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. And for this crime, the Post continues, her liberal friends have cast Gorelick out and formed a "No Jamies Club."

No one raised a fuss when this paragon of virtue repped BP, the Clinton Foundation, and the student loan industry. But the Trumps are just—so—icky. Democratic consultant Hilary Rosen, for example, posted a Tweet suggesting Gorelick is "complicit" in whatever nasty things the Trump family stands accused of doing this morning. A former Clinton speechwriter tells the Post, "Representing Jared and Ivanka is a case of pushing the ethical envelope." Other "longtime friends of Gorelick contacted for this article," the Post goes on, "offered complimentary comments about her on the record, and then, after asking if they could make other remarks without attribution, bashed their colleagues to smithereens."

And maybe the supposedly professional and upstanding and righteous liberals who populate Washington should take a chill pill? These are, after all, the same well schooled, affluent, smooth-talking men and women who erupt in outrage at the slightest suggestion that a lawyer might decline to represent an unsavory client. What does it say about them that Javanka's attorney is held to a different standard than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's?

Back in 2010, remember, when now-congresswoman Liz Cheney asked why the Obama Justice Department was hiring lawyers who had defended al Qaeda, this same legal and journalistic community was incensed. "This is exactly what Joe McCarthy did," a "human rights expert" for the Center for American Progress told the American Prospect. "The attacks from lowlifes like Cheney and National Review‘s Andrew McCarthy have been even more vile than their typical nonsense," wrote a blogger for the Washington Monthly. "The American tradition of zealous representation of unpopular clients is at least as old as John Adams's representation of the British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre," wrote a group of former Bush administration officials, many of whom went on to oppose Donald Trump.

In 2014, when the Washington Free Beacon obtained audio of Hillary Clinton bragging and laughing about exploiting technicalities to defend successfully an accused child rapist, liberals denounced the Free Beacon report for suggesting a non-public attorney has any choice in the clients she takes on. How dare we impugn the sanctity of the legal profession, was the gist. Didn't we realize, these critics said, that a lawyer can defend, is encouraged to defend, is immune to criticism for defending even the most loathsome subhuman piece of criminal scum?

Left unmentioned was the proviso stating that these rules apply only to terrorists, rapists, and Democrats.

Not everyone is jumping to conclusions. In his piece on Gorelick, Marc Fisher of The Washington Post is quick to remind his readers that, "ethically, Gorelick has every right to represent Kushner and his wife." You don't say. Let us pause, though, to reflect on the bizarre cultural conditions that make such a "to be sure" paragraph necessary.

The Office of Government Ethics notwithstanding, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump stand accused of no crime other than familial relation to a man large sections of the public hate with a visceral and sometimes violent passion. Kushner's business practices and clumsy attempts to establish a backchannel to the Kremlin prior to his father-in-law's inauguration may have been conflicted and amateurish and ill conceived. But, as of this writing, no one has said that these activities were illegal—and they certainly do not rise to the level of violent crime or international conspiracy to murder American civilians. Any moral universe in which representing the president's daughter and her husband is more problematic than defending Gitmo detainees or laughing off a child rapist is a warped one, indeed.

But that is precisely the sort of universe we inhabit here in the swamp. As I read my paper I often find it difficult to know whom I am annoyed by more. There are the liberals attacking Gorelick for representing the Kushners even as they, the hypocrites, take money from liberal bogeymen on Wall Street and in the oil industry and in authoritarian foreign governments. There is Gorelick herself, who as she bills top dollar has assured Politico and the Post that she also "has kept Kushner and his wife informed as she continues to handle matters that push back against the Trump administration," such as representing an immigrants-right group pro bono, challenging President Trump's crackdown on sanctuary cities, and hosting "family and friends who came to Washington earlier this year to march against the new president." Don't go after me, Gorelick is saying, I'm just paying the bills. Maybe she can build a new guesthouse with Kushner's money.

Then there is the media that gleefully cheers on this organic vegan food fight while playing its own double-dealing game. Note how clever Fisher is, finding a way to shoehorn duplicitous, not-for-public-consumption jibes into his piece while congratulating himself as the upholder of probity: "Those people will not be quoted in this article, by name or anonymously, as one tiny bulwark against outright awfulness." Except you kind of did quote them, by mentioning in the first place these craven and cynical "longtime friends of Gorelick" who say one thing on the record and another thing off the record. How many longtime friends can she have? And why mention them at all, but to position yourself as the opponent of "awfulness"?

The Trumps, the lawyers, the lobbyists, the press—they deserve each other. Mark Leibovich's book about the swamp was called This Town. I have an idea for a sequel. Working title: These People.

Mistress of Disaster: Jamie Gorelick

By C. Edmund Wright September 19, 2008
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2008/09/mistress_of_disaster_jamie_gor.html

Ken Lay and Jack Abramoff must be green with envy over the all the mischief that has been accomplished by Jamie Gorelick, with scarcely any demonization in the press.

Imagine playing a central role in the biggest national defense disaster in 50 years. Imagine playing a central role in one of the biggest economic disasters in your country’s history. Imagine doing both as an un-elected official. Imagine getting filthy rich in the process, and even being allowed to sit self-righteously on a commission appointed to get to the bottom of the first disaster, which of course did not get to the bottom of that disaster or anything else for that matter.

Imagine ending, ruining or at least causing signficant quality deterioration in the lives of millions of people, most of whom will never know your name. Imagine counting your millions of dollars while people who tried to stop you from causing all this mayhem were getting blamed for most of the ills you actually contributed to.

Well, as un-imagineable as this is, there is one American who doesn’t have to imagine it. One Jamie Gorelick is this American. And without pretending that she caused the loss of countless thousands of lives and countless billions of dollars of wealth by herself, she certainly did push some of the early domino’s in catastrophic chain events that are a major factors in life in America today.

This is not a bad millineums’s work, when you think about it. Gorelick, an appointee of Bill Clinton, is the one who constructed the wall of separation that kept the CIA and the FBI from comparing notes and therefore invading the privacy of nice young men like, say, Muhammed Atta and Zacarius Moussaoui. While countless problems were uncovered in our intelligence operations in the wake of 9-11, no single factor comes close to in importance to Jamie Gorelick’s wall.

In fact, it was Gorelick’s wall, perhaps more than any other single factor, that induces some people to blame Clinton himself for 9-11 since he appointed her and she acted consistent with his philosophy of “crime fighting.” She put the wall into place as Deputy Attorney General in 1995.

And for good measure, she was appointed by Tom Daschle to serve on the “non partisan” 9-11 Commission. And we thought the fox in the henhouse was simply a metaphor. Of course, in a splendid example of “reaching across the aisle,” feckless Republican Slade Gorton of Washington did all he could to exonerate Gorelick in the commission. Thanks, Slade. God forbid the nation actually knows the truth.

But for Ms. Gorelick, one earth shaking catastrophe is just not enough. You might think that she caused enough carnage to us infidels on 9-11 as to qualify her for the 72 virgins upon her death. (this would also keep her consistent with several of Clinton’s philosophies).

Alas, that’s only part of her resume. Her fingerprints are all over the Fannie Mae-Freddie Mac mess, which is to say the mess that is central in the entire mortgage-housing crisis. Without so much as one scintilla of real estate or finance experience, she was appointed as Vice Chairman of Fannie Mae in 1997 and served in that role through 2003, which is when most of the systemic cancers that came home to roost today happened. She was instrumental in covering up problems with Fannie Mae while employed there and took multiple millions in bonuses as she helped construct this house of cards.

From Wikipedia:

One example of falsified financial transactions that helped the company meet earnings targets for 1998, a “manipulation” that triggered multimillion-dollar bonuses for top executives. On March 25, 2002, Business Week Gorelick is quoted as saying, “We believe we are managed safely. Fannie Mae is among the handful of top-quality institutions.” One year later, Government Regulators “accused Fannie Mae of improper accounting to the tune of $9 billion in unrecorded losses”

As we know, the financial damage done by the housing related problems in this country are still incalculable. Ms. Gorelick’s evil tab is still growing.

But it doesn’t stop there. She managed to be on the wrong side of the Duke LaCrosse case, working for Duke University to protect that school from it’s damaging knee jerk reactions to the spectacularly unbelievable charges filed by a stripper. (excuse me, exotic dancer). So, even on a smaller scale, she continues to make money while working to ruin the lives of innocent Americans in defense of liberal dogma. At the Department of Defense, when she served as legal counsel there in 1993, she drafted the “Don’t ask /don’t tell” policy.

From what can be gleaned, it all comes from being well connected. She was educated (is that what they call it?) at Harvard undergrad and Harvard Law. From there, she kept getting appointed to positions above her experience level where she could flex her liberal muscles, add a resume item, and move upward.

Sound familiar?

The Washington Lawyer Who, Like a Bad Penny, Always Turns Up

by JIM GERAGHTY June 16, 2017
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/448702/washington-lawyer-who-bad-penny-always-turns

Gorelick. She’s like the Forrest Gump of American misfortune in the past three decades; she keeps showing up right before or right after things go terribly, terribly wrong. Start at the Department of Justice in the mid-1990s. In 1993, Mary Lawton, counsel for intelligence policy and head of the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, passed away, leaving a large gap in the decision-making at DOJ; Lawton and her staff set the standards for sharing information between the intelligence community and law enforcement. Janet Reno put Gorelick in charge of settling the ensuring dispute and putting together new rules.

Gorelick’s memo suggested written regulations, which were formally adopted in the 1995 Procedures. According to Gorelick, her procedures “exceeded the requirements of FISA and then-existing federal case law” in regulating information sharing. The 1995 Procedures turned the “primary purpose” standard into written Justice Department policy and ultimately had the effect of limiting the coordination between intelligence and criminal officials who wanted to avoid the appearance that a foreign intelligence investigation was becoming a criminal investigation. By their own terms, the 1995 Procedures did not totally ban the sharing of information between criminal and intelligence officials; they simply heavily regulated that communication. However, the procedures for passing information “over the wall”—the slang phrase for transferring information between intelligence and criminal officials— were often so burdensome or complicated that officials simply chose not to share information. You may recall Gorelick serving on the 9/11 Commission, and a particularly dramatic moment as then-Attorney General John Ashcroft tore into the “snarled web of requirements, restrictions and regulations … prevented decisive action by our men and women in the field.”

Referring to the 1995 document that firmly established the scope of the metaphorical wall, Ashcroft testified, “full disclosure compels me to inform you that the author of this memorandum is a member of the commission.”

Gorelick and her allies contended that was scapegoating, but she eventually chose to recuse herself from the panel’s discussion of her own decisions. She did contend publicly that “the wall” had existed before her memo. But if it’s unfair to say she created the wall, she enhanced the foundation and height and it’s indisputable that she set the standard that was in place in the years leading up to 9/11.

From DOJ, Gorelick went on to become Vice Chairman of Fannie Mae, and stayed there six years. She was paid $26 million, but there were some significant problems during those years. Fannie Mae employees falsified signatures on accounting transactions that helped the company meet earnings targets for 1998, a “manipulation” that triggered multimillion-dollar bonuses for top executives, a federal regulator said yesterday… In 1998, Gorelick was paid a $779,625 bonus. By 2006, federal regulators concluded “financial results at Fannie Mae, the nation’s largest buyer of mortgages, were ‘illusions deliberately and systematically’ created by its top executives in an $11 billion accounting scandal.” By 2000, she announced that Fannie Mae would be expanding into the exciting new lending and investment realm of Community Reinvestment Act loans, declaring, “We want your CRA loans because they help us meet our housing goals. From 2001-2007, Fannie and Freddie bought roughly half of all CRA home loans, most carrying subprime features.

The taxpayer bailout for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac added up to $187 billion. Some would give Gorelick grief for representing Duke University in the infamous lacrosse player case or BP oil company after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, but this is pretty much what a super-lawyer does. Controversial, publicly-vilified institutions with deep pockets are the clients who need (and can afford!) the services of a lawyer like her the most. No, what’s more ironic and potentially bothersome is that Gorelick is pretty much the living embodiment of everything that Donald Trump went to Washington to oppose, remove, and fix. And now… she’s on the team, metaphorically.

Former Clinton Official Paid $26 Million by Fannie Mae Before Taxpayer Bailout Now on Obama Shortlist to Run FBI

By Chris Neefus | March 23, 2011
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/former-clinton-official-paid-26-million-fannie-mae-taxpayer-bailout-now-obama-shortlist

Jamie Gorelick, a former Clinton administration official who reportedly has made the Obama administration’s short list to become the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), was paid more than $26 million in total compensation as a top executive at Fannie Mae—before taxpayers had to bail out the mortgage giant.

Gorelick, who left the Clinton Justice Department in 1997 to work for Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines, was paid $26,466,834 in salary, bonuses, performance pay and stock options from 1998 to 2003, according to the Report of the Special Examination of Fannie Mae (2006), conducted by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight.

Gorelick served as vice chairman of the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) when the government-sponsored enterprise was bundling subprime loans into securitized financial instruments. Prior to that, she served as deputy attorney general in the Clinton Justice Department under then-Attorney General Janet Reno from 1994 to 1997.

Raines had served as Clinton’s budget director before assuming the top post at Fannie Mae.

In 2001, Gorelick announced that Fannie was buying subprime loans encouraged by the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and bundling them as securitized financial instruments. Securities made from bundles of guaranteed mortgages were to contribute to the banking crisis later in the decade.

“Fannie Mae will buy CRA loans from lenders’ portfolios; we’ll package them into securities; we’ll purchase CRA mortgages at the point of origination; and we’ll create customized CRA-targeted securities,” she said in 2001. “This expanded approach has improved liquidity in the secondary market for CRA product, and has helped our lenders leverage even more CRA lending. Lenders now have the flexibility to use their own, customized loan products.”

In remarks before the American Bankers Association on Oct. 30, 2000, Gorelick explicitly how the procress would work and what Fannie Mae would do to make it feasible for banks to lend to low-income applicants.

“We will take CRA loans off your hands—we will buy them from your portfolios, or package them into securities—so you have fresh cash to make more CRA loans,” she said. “Some people have assumed we don’t buy tough loans. Let me correct that misimpression right now. We want your CRA loans because they help us meet our housing goals.”

By 2008, securities containing subprime loans were causing problems for financial institutions that had them on their balance sheets. Ultimately the federal government bailed out banks with the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Fannie and Freddie were taken under direct conservatorship by the federal government when Congress passed the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008. In exchange for injecting $100 billion of liquidity into each government-sponsored enterprise, the government took an ownership stake of 79 percent in each, leaving the taxpayer with an unknown liability dependent upon future performance.

Gorelick left Fannie Mae in 2003.

Gorelick was named in a story in the Wall Street Journal as someone being considered for nomination as the next FBI director.

In a 1995 Justice Department memo, written when she was deputy attorney general, Kagan prescribed a policy for limiting the flow of information between intelligence gatherers and criminal investigators within the Justice Department.

In the memo, “Instructions on Separation of Certain Foreign Counterintelligence and Criminal Investigations,” Gorelick set out guidelines for concurrent investigations into the 1993 World Trade Center bombing by both criminal investigators and intelligence officers within the Department of Justice.

Rules stemming from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), under which the intelligence community was operating as part of its investigation, stipulates that information may only be gathered by way of surveillance for the primary purpose of intelligence, not to contribute to a criminal case under which defendants have more constitutional protections.

FBI Director Robert Mueller waits to testify on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 22, 2010, before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee hearing to examine nine years after 9/11, focusing on confronting the terrorist threat to the homeland. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
Gorelick sought to make clear in her memo that investigators of both stripes were adhering to FISA precedent and not misappropriating the authority to undermine the rights of any defendant.

“These procedures, which go beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that FISA is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation,” Gorelick wrote.

Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft later testified before the 9/11 Commission that Gorelick’s “wall” was a “structural cause” in the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 being allowed to occur.

In his prepared testimony, he said, “In 1995 the Justice Department, imposing a series of restrictions on the FBI that went beyond what the law required. … The single greatest structural cause for September 11 was the wall that segregated criminal investigators and intelligence agents. Government erected this wall. Government buttressed this wall. And before September 11, government was blinded by this wall.”

After Ashcroft’s commission testimony, Gorelick published a commentary in The Washington Post saying that his accusations were false, and that the “wall” predated her tenure by decades.

“I did not invent the ‘wall,’ which is not a wall but a set of procedures implementing a 1978 statute (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA) and federal court decisions interpreting it,” she wrote.

Gorelick made no mention in the commentary of her statement in the 1995 memo that she was going “beyond what [was] legally required” in her prescriptions for handling the cases related to the 1993 bombings.

However, in the months leading up to 9/11, Ashscroft’s Justice Department also did not dismantle the rules or challenge the more general culture in the department that information should be partitioned.

Gorelick’s name appears on the shortlist along with counterintelligence experts such as former Bush Deputy Attorney General James Comey; former Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Wainstein; U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald; and D.C. Appeals Court Judge Merrick Garland, whom President Obama also reportedly considered for a Supreme Court appointment. She has lobbied on behalf of beleaguered British Petroleum (BP) in congressional inquiries and White House meetings.

Current FBI Director Robert Mueller’s 10-year term expires in September of this year.

The Clinton loyalist who helped make 9/11 happen digs in to Trump’s White House

Why is swamp queen Jamie Gorelick advising Jared Kushner?

By James Simpson March 26, 2017
http://canadafreepress.com/article/why-is-swamp-queen-jamie-gorelick-advising-jared-kushner

Recent headlines announced Ivanka Trump would obtain a coveted office in the West Wing of the White House. Breitbart reported on March 20 that, according to Ivanka’s “ethics advisor,” she “will not have an official title, but will get a West Wing office, government-issued communications devices and security clearance to access classified information.” That is curious enough on its own.

But the stunning part is the name of the ethics advisor. The same person also advises Ivanka’s husband, Jared Kushner, who does have a formal position as a senior White House advisor.

This new advisor’s name is Jamie Gorelick.

Gorelick is a hardcore Clinton fan. When FBI Director James Comey reopened the case of Hillary’s email servers last fall, it was Gorelick who led the effort to discredit him.
In the 1990s, she served as Deputy Attorney General under Bill Clinton — that’s the number two spot at the Department of Justice.

It was Gorelick who put up the infamous “wall” between law enforcement and the intelligence community that prevented information-sharing between the two sectors and may have cleared the way for the terrorists’ 9/11 planning to escape detection. According to veteran journalist Jack Cashill, an FBI agent said at the time: “Someday someone will die — and wall or not — the public will not understand why we were not more effective.”

Following that horrific day, Gorelick insinuated her way on to the 9-11 Commission, where she deftly channeled blame for the deadly attacks away from herself and Bill Clinton. As the Washington Times reported at the time:

The disclosure that Jamie Gorelick, a member of the September 11 commission, was personally responsible for instituting a key obstacle to cooperation between law enforcement and intelligence operations before the terrorist attacks raises disturbing questions about the integrity of the commission itself. Ms. Gorelick should not be cross-examining witnesses; instead, she should be required to testify about her own behavior under oath. Specifically, commission members need to ask her about a 1995 directive she wrote that made it more difficult for the FBI to locate two of the September 11 hijackers who had already entered the country by the summer of 2001.
News outlets seem to be hoping we’d forget who Gorelick is
Attorney General John Ashcroft told the commission “The single greatest structural cause for Sept. 11 was the wall… Full disclosure compels me to inform you that its author is a member of the commission.”

But Gorelick did not apologize for her role. Rather, she diverted blame to President Bush. The Times noted she was “among the most partisan and aggressive Democratic panel members in questioning the anti-terror efforts of the Bush administration.”

Ethics my eye!

News outlets seem to be hoping we’d forget who Gorelick is. The New York Times described her as “a longtime ethics lawyer in Washington.” Breitbart simply dubbed her “an attorney and ethics advisor.”

This is incredible.

She was the second-in-command at Clinton’s legendarily ethics-challenged Justice Department but no one seems to care.

At least Huffington Post was honest:

In 2015, Gorelick represented the Clinton Foundation, on whose board of directors Hillary Clinton served from 2013 to 2015, in its successful defense against a lawsuit brought by conservative activist Larry Klayman.
Continued below...
You can be sure Hillary and the entire Democrat leadership will be able to track, strategize against, and sabotage Trump policies
Gorelick served as vice chair of Fannie Mae, the giant mortgage lender, from 1998 to 2003, and received some $25.6 million in compensation, including bonuses. In 2006, DC-based Fannie Mae was fined $400 million for accounting manipulation tied to executives’ bonuses that occurred from 1998 to 2004.

All of this is important because President Trump promised to put Hillary Clinton in jail and uphold ethics in government.

Now one of her chief advocates, and one of the most unethical people in Washington, D.C., has the ear of Trump’s daughter and her husband, a top Trump advisor. To the extent Kushner and his wife have any sway over her father, you will see Gorelick’s poisonous “ethics” undermining everything he does.

To the extent that they trust her with White House confidences, you can be sure Hillary and the entire Democrat leadership will be able to track, strategize against, and sabotage Trump policies.

Why are so many of Trump’s top advisors turning out to be problematic?

Instead of draining the swamp, in cases like Gorelick’s, Trump is making those who dwell there more comfortable.

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