Turns out that on Chris Dodd’s mortgage applications with Countrywide, someone has scrawled on both apps, “FOA” which is Friend of Angelo’s. Angelo, of course, is the former head of Countrywide (indicted, I think), who Dodd insists he never knew. Of course,when you’re chairman of the Senate Banking Committee there are no strangers in the banking world, just friends you haven’t met yet.
What might concern Dodd more, because it’s impossible to deny, is his “Presidential Campaign”, conducted to extract as much money as he could from those same banking friends. The word is out that voter focu groups in Connecticut keep revealing this excursion to Iowa, during which Dodd pulled his kids from school in D.C. and enrolled them in Iowan schools, is the biggest reason why voters don’t like the man. It might seem parochial – the guy lives in Washington, after all, so who cares if he shuffles off to the corn fields? but I suspect the issue resonates because it so clearly reveals Dodd for the egomaniacal opportunist that he is. Don’t dis the Nutmeg State, dummy – not if you want its votes. Rickard Blumenfeld must be licking his chops.
I’m sure the processors who wrote “FOA” on the apps and responded accordingly were simply following instructions from higher up the food chain. Clearly this kind of favoritism was so entrenched that nobody stopped to think that maybe, just maybe, they were laying an incriminating paper trail. It’s always amusing when people who have set aside any concern about right versus wrong lose their ability to see the little things that will trip them up in a big way.