Bad Day To Be John McCain (testimony, hell, attending, America)

[doppelgänger]

Perfect storm of bad news: McCain connected to a story that potentially implicates sex AND dredging up his very, very embarrassing involvement with the "Keating Five" and protecting those who bilked hundreds of thousands of citizens out of their life savings.

Let's see if this story has legs:

McCain's Ties To Lobbyist Worried Aides

On top of that bad news, he tried to do something rather dishonest at taxpayers expense by taking out a loan for his campaign using his ability to obtain general election federal matching funds as collateral in the event his campaign sputtered. Now the chairman of the Federal Elections Commission says McCain cannot withdraw from public campaign financing unless this loan issue can be resolved, which means he'd be capped at about $54 million dollars total spending for his campaign.

And now it's apparent why McCain was especially motivated to try to get Obama to use public financing for the general election: McCain may be stuck using public financing because he pledged that public financing as collateral for a loan to appease the bank if his campaign sputtered (as it looked like it would late last year when he took out the loan).

McCain Loan Raises FEC Questions

Federal Election Commission Chairman David Mason, in a letter to McCain this week, said the all-but-certain Republican nominee needs to assure the commission that he did not use the promise of public money to help secure a $4 million line of credit he obtained in November.
McCain's lawyer, Trevor Potter, said Wednesday evening that McCain has withdrawn from the system and that the FEC can't stop him. Potter said the campaign did not encumber the public funds in any way.
McCain, a longtime advocate of stricter limits on money in politics, was one of the few leading presidential candidates to seek FEC certification for public money during the primaries. The FEC determined that he was entitled to at least $5.8 million. But McCain did not obtain the money, and he notified the FEC earlier this month that he would bypass the system, freeing him from its spending limits.
But just as McCain was beginning to turn his attention to a likely Democratic opponent, Mason, a Republican appointee to the commission, essentially said, "Not so fast."
By accepting the public money, McCain would be limited to spending about $54 million for the primaries, a ceiling his campaign is near. That would significantly hinder his ability to finance his campaign between now and the Republican National Convention in September.

At issue is the fine print in the loan agreement between McCain and Fidelity Bank & Trust. McCain secured the loan using his list of contributors, his promise to use that list to raise money to pay off the loan and by taking out a life insurance policy.
But the agreement also said that if McCain were to withdraw from the public financing system before the end of 2007 and then were to lose the New Hampshire primary by more than 10 percentage points, he would have had to reapply to the FEC for public matching funds and provide the bank additional collateral for the loan.
In his letter to McCain, Mason said the commission would allow a candidate to withdraw from the public finance system as long as he had not received any public funds and had not pledged the certification of such funds "as security for private financing."

Mason, the Chairman of the FEC, is a Republican appointee by the way. Of course, none of this may matter ultimately, because the FEC is toothless right now, needing a quorum still to enforce anything. But it's bad form on McCain's part.

Still, it's a bad time to have this story breaking the same time as his lobbyist scandals reappear to haunt McCain . . .

[angellous_evangellous]

Go HUCK

[doppelgänger]

Who was Charles Keating?

Charles Keating - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(there's even a connection to Mother Theresa)

Details on McCain's involvement in the Keating Five:

The Keating Five

McCain calls the Keating scandal "my asterisk." Over the years, his opponents have failed to turn it into a period.
It all started in March 1987. Charles H Keating Jr., the flamboyant developer and anti-porn crusader, needed help. The government was poised to seize Lincoln Savings and Loan, a freewheeling subsidiary of Keating's American Continental Corp. . . .


When he arrived, Keating presented McCain with a laundry list of demands for the regulators. McCain told Keating that he would attend the meeting and find out whether Keating was getting treated fairly but that was all . . .



After the meeting, McCain was done with Keating.
"Again, I was troubled by the appearance of the meeting," McCain said later. "I stated I didn't want any special favors from them. I only wanted them (Lincoln Savings) to be fairly treated."


Black doesn't completely buy that argument. If McCain was concerned about Keating asking him to do things that were improper, why go to either meeting at all?


Black said McCain probably went because Keating was close to being the political godfather of Arizona and McCain still had plenty of ambition.
"Keating was incredibly powerful," Black said. "And incredibly useful."
Together, the five [Senators who had attended the meetings] had accepted more than $300,000 in contributions from Keating, and their critics added a new term to the American lexicon: "The Keating Five."
The Keating Five became synonymous for the kind of political influence that money can buy. As the S&L failure deepened, the sheer magnitude of the losses hit the press. Billions of dollars had been squandered. The five senators were linked as the gang who shilled for an S&L bandit . . .


But McCain made a critical error.


He had adopted the blanket defense that Keating was a constituent and that he had every right to ask his senators for help. In attending the meetings, McCain said, he simply wanted to make sure that Keating was treated like any other constituent.


Keating was no ordinary constituent to McCain.


On Oct. 8, 1989, The Arizona Republic revealed that McCain's wife and her father had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators.


The paper also reported that the McCains, sometimes accompanied by their daughter and baby-sitter, had made at least nine trips at Keating's expense, sometimes aboard the American Continental jet. Three of the trips were made during vacations to Keating's opulent Bahamas retreat at Cat Cay.


McCain also did not pay Keating for some of the trips until years after they were taken, after he learned that Keating was in trouble over Lincoln. Total cost: $13,433 . . .



McCain also had to explain his trips with Keating and why he didn't pay Keating back right away.


On that score, McCain admitted he had fouled up. He said he should have reimbursed Keating immediately, not waited several years. His staff said it was an oversight, but it looked bad, McCain jetting around with Keating, then going to bat for him with the federal regulators.



"I was in a hell of a mess," McCain later would write . . .

Among the Keating Five, McCain took the most direct contributions from Keating. But the [ Senate Ethics Committee ] investigation found that he was the least culpable, along with Glenn. McCain attended the meetings but did nothing afterward to stop Lincoln's death spiral . . .


McCain owns up to his mistake this way:

"I was judged eventually, after three years, of using, quote, poor judgment, and I agree with that assessment."

[doppelgänger]

Ruh-oh, Raggy.

The FEC story gets worse. Since there is no quorum on the FEC, the commissioner of the FEC says he can't even accept John McCain's attempt to withdraw his certification for public financing.

http://www.fec.gov/press/press2008/FECtoMcCain.PDF

So he needs the quorum to withdraw his certification for public financing, but if there's a quorum, it might further rule that he can't because he pledged the funds as collateral to get his loan late last year.

[nutshell]

Maybe Romney suspended too soon.

Doesn't affect the result of McCain getting the GOP nod, but it provides great fodder for the Dems.

[doppelgänger]

Originally Posted by nutshell

Maybe Romney suspended too soon.

He did. Political Radar: Romney Camp Laments

Had he not put himself in competition with Huck for social conservatives and instead run on his record as governor of Massachusetts, he'd be on his way to the nomination.

[doppelgänger]

McCain's "straight talk express" goes a little further off the tracks today, as his own sworn testimony from a dep