Webloggin » Tom Scott vs Christopher Dodd

Update: Looks like the Sevenload video has been removed. I updated with a YouTube version.

Radio Station Killed Pre-Election Interview With Senator Over Mortgage Scandal

Senator Chris Dodd was confronted by WELI radio host Tom Scott on October 28th over charges that Dodd received a sweetheart mortgage from Countrywide Financial in exchange for political favors. In the interview Scott challenged Dodd to release his signed mortgage application and the HUD statement to dispel charges that he received special treatment. Dodd does a tap dance, clearly sounds like he has something to hide. Finally Scott asserted that Dodd committed mortgage fraud.

Rather than air the interview Scott’s bosses at Clearchannel Communications killed it altogether. Just another example of journalistic malfeasance being committed by the mainstream media. Scott quit his job over the decision.

Magically, now that the election is over and it is safe once again to blame Democrats for their role in the collapse of worldwide financial markets, the interview has been released.

I hadn’t heard of the story of the radio station drama until this morning. It was actually covered last week by the New Haven Independent.

Tom Scott conducted the interview. WELI killed it. Now you can hear it.

Scott, one of Connecticut’s leading conservative voices of the past three decades, was the last local on-air voice at WELI-AM, once a fully-staffed Greater New Haven news station turned into a right-wing talk radio syndication outlet by owner Clear Channel Communications.

Scott hosted a weekday 5 to 7 p.m. drive-time talk show until Oct. 29. That was the day he taped a combative interview with U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut (pictured with Mutual Housing chief Seila Mosquera during a recent tour of New Haven’s Fair Haven neighborhood).

The interview focused on two controversies that have dogged Dodd recently: He received personal “VIP” loans from Countrywide Financial, a predatory lender he was supposed to be regulating as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. And he helped craft a $700 billion Wall Street bailout bill designed to spur new small-business and homeowner lending — but which turns out to be designed instead to enable banks to buy other banks.

National Review Online detailed Dodd’s role in the little quid pro quo scheme that appears to have been going on involving the mortgage industry, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Note that this in July, long before the two giants collapsed:

The U.S. Senate is about to enact a massive subsidy for Countrywide Financial less than a week after revelations that the company’s “Friends of Angelo” sweetheart-loan program included two U.S. senators. It seems unthinkable, but it’s true. What’s worse? One of the two senators sponsored the bill.

The principal author of the Dodd-Shelby housing-bailout bill is Sen. Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat who chairs the Senate Banking Committee, which has jurisdiction over the mortgage market. Last week, Portfolio magazine revealed that Dodd was one of two U.S. senators who benefited from a program under which Countrywide Financial gave loans at favorable terms to the influential and the powerful. The other senator was Kent Conrad, a Democrat from North Dakota.

The allegations against Conrad are damning enough. Though he denies having known he received preferential treatment, Conrad admitted to a Wall Street Journal reporter that he called Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo to ask for a loan on the advice of former Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson, another beneficiary of the program. (Johnson resigned from Barack Obama’s running-mate vetting team after his involvement in the program was revealed.)

But as powerful as Conrad is, the allegations against Dodd are more disturbing because he wields so much power over Countrywide’s fortunes and because he has used that power to benefit Countrywide. According to Portfolio’s calculations, the preferential loan rates Dodd received on two mortgages could end up saving him $75,000. (Like Conrad, Dodd denies knowing that he received preferential treatment.)

The troubling nature of this arrangement becomes clear when one looks at the fine print of the Dodd-Shelby housing bill. Under the bill, mortgage lenders — of which Countrywide is the largest in the U.S. — would agree to renegotiate their most troubled home loans in exchange for a federal guarantee on those loans. If the borrowers who took out those troubled loans end up defaulting, the government would cover any losses the mortgage lenders incur.

Under the Dodd-Shelby bill, a fee collected from the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would fund this program. The House version of the bill would fund the program with tax dollars. Either way, the program would be “a government buyout of problem mortgages disguised as a refinancing plan,” as David C. John of the Heritage Foundation puts it in his analysis.

This stinks. Americans are suffering because of Democrats like Senator Dodd yet most people are too stupid to get worked up over it or give two shits.

Exit question: What happened to all that PMI that was bundled in with these mortgages that are now going south? Here is how the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco explains PMI:

PMI plays an important role in the mortgage industry by protecting a lender against loss if a borrower defaults on a loan and by enabling borrowers with less cash to have greater access to homeownership. With this type of insurance, it is possible for you to buy a home with as little as a 3 percent to 5 percent down payment. This means that you can buy a home sooner without waiting years to accumulate a large down payment.

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