Politics

Obama’s third chief of staff, like first two, got rich on Wall Street

Neil Munro White House Correspondent
Font Size:

All three of President Barack Obama’s chiefs of staff earned millions of dollars after passing through the revolving doors that lie between the Democratic Party and Wall Street.

Yet Obama is positioning himself as Wall Street’s foe in the 2012 election, aided by millions of dollars in political donations from Wall Street companies, including Goldman Sachs.

Rahm Emanuel and Bill Daley, and now Jacob Lew, are all career Democrats who have taken lucrative trips through those revolving doors, eliciting jeers from Republicans who say Obama is running an administration of crony capitalists.

Obama’s self-portrayal as defender of the common man was displayed Jan. 3, for example, when he used a campaign-style speech in the swing-state of Ohio to announce that he planned to install Richard Cordray as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

“Does anyone think the reason we got in such a financial mess [in 2007] was because of too much oversight? Of course not,” Obama said at a high school in a tony suburb of Cleveland. “Financial firms have armies of lobbyists in Washington looking out for their interests. … Every day that Richard waited to be confirmed was another day when millions of Americans are left unprotected.”

That language was mild compared to Obama’s claims in a Dec. 6 speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, where he railed against “the breathtaking greed of a few with irresponsibility all across the [financial] system.”

“It plunged our economy and the world into a crisis from which we’re still fighting. … It claimed the jobs and the homes and the basic security of millions of people — innocent, hardworking Americans who had met their responsibilities but were still left holding the bag,” he declared in a speech that aides said highlighted his re-election themes.

Obama’s first chief of staff was Emanuel, who was in the job from 2008 to 2010 after serving as a Democratic congressman from 2002 to 2006. Before his Capitol Hill tenure, he worked as a top aide to President Bill Clinton and parlayed his political contacts into a lucrative two and half years on Wall Street at Wasserstein Perella & Co.

On Wall Street, Emanuel earned $16.2 million as an investment banker — without any prior experience in business or finance.

When Emanuel quit to run for Chicago mayor, Obama hired Bill Daley as his chief of staff. Another long-time Democratic political figure, Daley had also worked as a top executive at JPMorgan Chase for four years. He joined the boards at Boeing, drug-maker Merck & Co. and Boston Properties, a commercial real-estate firm.

Daley’s departure, announced Jan. 9, prompted Obama to elevate Jacob Lew, another veteran of the revolving door who most recently helmed Obama’s budget office.

From 2006 to 2009, Lew worked at banking giant Citigroup, where he headed its Alternative Investments Unit and and made more than $1 million per year, plus a bonus of nearly another $1 million in 2009. In 2008 and 2009, Lew’s subdivisions made tens of millions of dollars in profits by investing in a fund that correctly bet real-estate prices would collapse. It lost billions of dollars through other complex transactions, however, according to a June 2010 article by a Huffington Post financial reporter.

Citigroup’s losses, however, were offset by a taxpayer rescue of the financial sector in 2008 and 2009. Since then, the financial industry’s profits have climbed to record levels.

Daley and Emanuel also played direct roles in the real estate bubble that was inflated from 1994 onwards by federal regulators seeking to steer Wall Street money into Democratic-dominated poor neighborhoods.

The process started under President Bill Clinton, but was redirected and accelerated by President George W. Bush, who wanted to bring Hispanic immigrants into the GOP. The resulting real estate boom — and bust — took down Wall Street in 2007, and helped elected Obama.

Daley played a role in the disaster because he was a board member of the government-backed mortgage giant, Federal National Mortgage Association, dubbed Fannie Mae. He served on that board from 1993 to 1997. That’s when the government-backed mortgage firm began to snap up mortgages from companies selling them to Americans, mostly minorities, who lacked the resources to repay the loans. In turn, Fannie Mae sold the increasingly toxic mortgages to Wall Street, and used its revenues to write yet more mortgages.

Emanuel was a board member of Fannie Mae’s twin, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Company — more commonly called Freddie Mac — from 2000 to 2001, when he ran for Congress.

Follow Neil on Twitter

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel