The Dodd Mess

Comes Chris Dodd to Hardball to explain how the February 11 language was put into the bill:



So, number one, Chris Dodd knew the language was going in during the House-Senate conference. His staff wrote it in.

Number two, it was at the insistence of Treasury who would otherwise have had the entire section taken out.

Number three, it was a senior administration official telling The New York Times on deep background that Dodd put the language in, while leaving out the Treasury's part in the matter. For what it's worth, Greenwald thinks it was Rahm.

Very depressing stuff to look through here. One of the few bright spots in this:



Still looks more and sounds more like a president than Bush ever did.

Greenwald on Dodd Smear: Obama's Fingerprints

Glen Greenwald has pulled together the best presentation of this yet, and it's clear that the language exempting bonuses before February 11, 2009 in the stimulus legislation was put in at the behest of the Obama administration.

And the smear against Dodd is also coming from the White House:

Yet now, the Obama administration is feeding reporters the accusation that it was Dodd who was responsible for the exemptions that protected already-vested bonuses. The Times article from Saturday that started the Dodd scandal thus contains this outrageously misleading claim:

The administration official said the Treasury Department did its own legal analysis and concluded that those contracts could not be broken. The official noted that even a provision recently pushed through Congress by Senator Christopher J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, had an exemption for such bonus agreements already in place.

And yet another New York Times article from today ("Fingers Are Pointed Across Washington Over Bonuses") -- this one by David Herszenhorn -- contains this White-House-mimicking, misleading passage:

But Mr. Reid mostly ducked a question about whether Democrats had missed an opportunity to prevent the bonuses because of a clause in the economic stimulus bill, part of an amendment by Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, that imposed limits on executive compensation and bonuses but made an exception for pre-existing employment contracts.

That was the exact provision that Geithner and Summers demanded and that Dodd opposed. And even after Dodd finally gave in to Treasury's demands, he continued to support an amendment from Ron Wyden and Olympia Snowe to impose fines on bailout-receiving companies which paid executive bonuses (which was stripped from the bill at the last minute). But now that Treasury officials are desperate to heap the blame on others for what they did, they're running to gullible, mindless journalists and feeding them the storyline that it was Dodd who was responsible for these provisions. And today, during his White House Press Conference, Robert Gibbs advanced this dishonest attack by repeatedly describing the offending provisions as the "the Dodd compensation requirements."

How in Hades did these "administration officials" think they could get away with it? This is going to be the first real mess that the Obama White House has gotten themselves into, full fledged. Stupid politics, stupid internicene war, stupid all around.

Fox News Smears Chris Dodd -- Did NOT Grandfather AIG Bonuses

There has been a lot of fury expended over the past few days about the bonuses AIG executives in the derelict Financial Products division received, and rightfully so. However, Fox Business has published what it considers a scandalous story. According to them, Chris Dodd inserted language into the stimulus package bill that protected these bonuses.

While the Senate was constructing the $787 billion stimulus last month, Dodd added an executive-compensation restriction to the bill. That amendment provides an “exception for contractually obligated bonuses agreed on before Feb. 11, 2009” -- which exempts the very AIG bonuses Dodd and others are now seeking to tax.

Of course, this is going all over the conservative blogosphere.

Yet funnily enough, the actual text of Dodd's amendment concerning executive compensation doesn't have this February 11th exception in the text. In other words, the Fox Business smear merchants didn't bother to do any basic research. They knew Dodd had submitted this section through amendment, and there the language is now, so Dodd must have put it in there, right?

Well, no. Actually Dodd's amendment was to another amendment to the main bill, Amendment 98. Amendment 98 was a substitute amendment, so called because it wipes out the language of the bill or amendment it is "amending" and substitutes its own. Dodd's amendment to #98 did pass, but the original amendment was withdrawn later on.

The final bill passed by the Senate on February 10 was the text of another substitute amendment (#570) submitted by Republican senator Susan Collins of Maine. It did have the language of Dodd's Amendment 354, but the grandfather clause currently giving Dodd-haters the vapors is still not in there.

That language was not inserted until the House-Senate conference to reconcile differences between the bills. This was the next day, February 11, 2009, and funnily enough, that was the date used to grandfather these bonuses in. And since Dodd was not one of the conferees working out these details, it remains to be seen just how he was supposed to have inserted this language.

The actual conferees were, from the House: Obey, Rangel, Waxman, Lewis (CA), and Camp -- and from the Senate: Inouye, Baucus, Reid, Cochran, Grassley. Of these, four are Republicans -- Grassley, Cochran, Lewis, and Camp.

There is no indication whatsoever that Chris Dodd had anything to do with this clause. Consider this right wing lie debunked.