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Replies to post #297701 on Fannie Mae-No Politics (FNMA)
In May 2009, Congress created the 10-member Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, or F.C.I.C., to examine the causes of the financial crisis. Led by Phil Angelides, a former state treasurer of California, it was empowered to get to the bottom of what had happened and why. The F.C.I.C. invited Mr. Bowen to an interview after an investigator read his Sarbanes-Oxley complaint.
Mr. Bowen says the F.C.I.C. wanted him to delete his concern that Citi may have materially misrepresented its certifications of internal controls, which require corporate officers to certify the accuracy of their financial statements under Sarbanes-Oxley.
Remove the names of people at Citi, he says he was told. Take out his post-Rubin denouement, his conversations with the bank’s internal lawyers and the fact that Citigroup’s outside attorneys at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP were conducting an investigation of his charges.
Mr. Kardell also said he thought the F.C.I.C. was “catching some serious, serious heat this morning.”
“Who are they catching heat from?” Mr. Bowen asked, according to a transcript of the call provided by Mr. Bowen.
“Umm, Citi,” Mr. Kardell replied, adding, “It’s just a complete all battle stations with Citi about you testifying.” He then dropped the bombshell that Brad S. Karp, managing partner of the law firm Paul, Weiss, had “gotten involved” and that “our guys” on the F.C.I.C. staff, “who are still extremely pro Dick Bowen — although I think there’s pressure to yank Dick Bowen — our guys want to see something plain vanilla pretty fast.” A stunned Mr. Bowen told Mr. Kardell, “So much for an independent Congressional commission.”
But after a night of prayer, Mr. Bowen acquiesced. He cut the offending passages and his testimony by eight pages. “It’s better to get something on record than nothing,” he decided. He also figured that when he testified on April 7, he’d be able to provide more detail. But that morning, he had breakfast with Mr. Kardell, who told him that Mr. Bondi had said that he was not to respond to the commissioners’ questions about his departure from Citigroup. If the commissioners asked him, for instance, what happened after he e-mailed Mr. Rubin, he was to be silent, and claim “employment issues” as justification. When one commissioner, Peter J. Wallison, asked what had happened, Mr. Angelides cut him off.
Mr. Karp, while conceding that he regularly spoke with Mr. Bondi about Citigroup matters before the F.C.I.C., vehemently denies trying to pressure Mr. Bondi about Mr. Bowen’s testimony. “Paul, Weiss, representing Citi, did not ‘pressure’ the F.C.I.C.,” he wrote me. “We represented and defended Citi. And I am certain that the F.C.I.C. would confirm that.”
Mr. Bondi, now a partner at the law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, which counts Citigroup among its clients, also rejected the idea that he had been unduly influenced to ask Mr. Bowen to change his testimony. “The F.C.I.C. staff team that investigated issues related to the financial crisis, and Citi in particular, acted impartially and with the highest integrity at each step of the investigation,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Any allegation that information relevant to the Citi investigation was suppressed is untrue.”
Mr. Angelides told me that he had no knowledge of Mr. Bowen’s being censored, but that he was aware that the commission’s staff would generally work with witnesses to focus their testimony “on the most salient facts.” The final report, he said, gave prominence to Mr. Bowen’s most substantial charges, including the e-mail to Mr. Rubin. But, he conceded, the Wall Street banks “and their phalanx of attorneys were putting enormous pressure” on the commission “every day of every week with every witness” in an effort “to discredit people who were testifying against their interests.”
AI
