Wall Street Bashers Owed True Look At Crisis Roots

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Investors Business Daily:

Look who's egging on the anti-Wall Street rabble: It's Phil Angelides, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission chairman who provided them and their supporters the official version of the false narrative that "greedy" bankers caused the crisis.

"Good for those young people," Angelides said. "Do I cheer on the fact that they're elevating the issue to center stage? Absolutely."

If unemployed protesters got a raw deal, it's from politicians like Angelides, not bankers.

The Democrat activist and former California state treasurer ran a dirty investigation. He put big-time trial lawyers in key slots where they could gun for the same banks their firms are suing.

He fixed it so trial lawyers who donated to his political campaigns could leverage banks for class-action settlements for state pension funds that invested in bad subprime securities that politicians like Angelides pushed them into investing in the run-up to the crisis.

In January, Angelides released the panel's tainted findings exonerating federal and state officials like himself, while framing Wall Street executives. Now he's under investigation.

The House Oversight Committee is preparing a report detailing as many as nine ethics violations by Angelides and his staff. That alone should cast doubt on his final report, cited by the White House and press corps stenographers as the final authority on the crisis.

Even worse is his biased conduct. Protecting Democrats involved in the crisis was his first order of business.

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From the opening gavel, Angelides, a Pelosi crony appointed by the former speaker, declared ex-Countrywide Financial CEO Angelo Mozilo "off limits" in the investigation. He failed to call to testify the subprime lender who was the largest source for private mortgage-backed security tranches used to create CDOs for nine of the 10 largest CDO underwriters on Wall Street. Why?

Mozilo was not only a big Democrat donor, but employed Pelosi's son as a Countrywide broker and sales manager.

And if Mozilo were allowed to testify, the public might learn the inconvenient truth that HUD pressured him to originate nearly $800 billion in toxic loans (later sold to Fannie and Freddie) to meet "fair lending" pledges he signed under HUD's little-known Best Practices Initiative "to help wipe out discriminatory practices in mortgage lending." This, of course, would have undercut the commission's "predatory lending" story line.

Angelides, former chair of the California Democratic Party (a position omitted from his commission bio), also failed to grill under the klieg lights — as he did Wall Street bankers — former HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo and Fannie CEO Franklin Raines, who together plunged Fannie into the subprime market.